Hello Product Design and Development Division (PD3) Members!
It has been a busy and exciting start to the year. Our flagship event, ANTEC, was held in March where our board was instrumental in helping organize the Mike Sepe Symposium. This symposium highlighted the practical, applied use for the typical material and testing knowledge often presented at ANTEC. Our Past-Chair, Al McGovern, was one of the presenters and organizers of the event. During the symposium each of the speakers took their area of expertise and highlighted how incorporating their data helped companies save money in designing more robust parts. Helping to organize this symposium was a great way to follow through on our goal of bringing our members content that helps them better design sustainable plastic products. If you are interested in seeing the type of content that was shared, I encourage you to watch a small video clip of two of the presentations here. You will also see another example of content at ANTEC through our technical article. The article highlights how you can use multi-point, long-term data to make better material selection decisions for your next application. If you find this type of discussion and content interesting, I encourage you to consider attending ANTEC next year, where it will be held in Pittsburgh, PA.
This year also brought well-earned recognition to some of our amazing board members:
- Glenn Beall, one of our founding members, became PD3’s very first Emeritus Member! Special thanks to Mark Wolverton for designing a beautiful trophy to commemorate Glenn’s decades of guidance and leadership.
- Al McGovern received the Honored Service Member (HSM) award at ANTEC, recognizing his long-standing contributions to PD3 and the SPE Foundation.
These honors are a testament to the incredible talent and dedication within our division—and the amazing peers you can collaborate with as a PD3 member.
After ANTEC, PD3 finalized the merger with the Failure Analysis and Prevention Technical Interest Group (FAPTIG). FAPTIG approached PD3 as a potential partner because of the joint mission of helping the broader community design plastic parts and assemblies that resist failure.
They saw how we were taking an active role in distributing our technical content and felt they could better serve their membership through the merger. There will be no major changes to PD3 with the merger, but we will gain valuable additional content that we can share with our design community. Todd Menna, previous FAPTIG chair, will be joining our board to help with the transition and highlight how we can utilize their core content to further enrich our community. If you just want to keep up on the latest events, make sure to follow us on LinkedIN and on our website.
Finally, this will be my last Chair message to you in our newsletter. In July, Mark MacLean-Blevins will take on the role of Chair. Mark, a product designer himself, has been a long-time board member of PD3, and will continue to help us bring content that is relevant to today’s design community. I’ll be excited to support Mark as I take on the Past-Chair role. As Past-Chair, I’ll be putting more effort into our Design for… webinar series and other technical content. It has been a great pleasure serving as the Chair, and I’m excited to see what we will do next.
Thanks again, and I look forward to our next conversation!
Erik Foltz