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Yes, you read that right. The IPC Designers Council is now known as IPC Design. Many of you have heard secondhand stories about what this change will entail, so I asked IPC to shed some light on this subject. I recently spoke with IPC’s Teresa Rowe and Patrick Crawford about what’s changing, what’s not, and IPC’s plans to provide improved infrastructure for PCB design content and curriculum.
Andy Shaughnessy: Teresa, why and how is the IPC Designers Council (DC) changing?
Teresa Rowe: It has been about 15 years since IPC took a look at the design community at large. During that time, a lot has changed in the industry. It was time to look at where our pockets of designers were and how IPC’s design products were being used in the industry and addressing the design programs, overall. It is changing in a way that will address the community at large.
Shaughnessy: And what will the new program name be?
Patrick Crawford: It will be called IPC Design. We’re going to be mixing the power of IPC and the design community.
Rowe: It embraces standards development, education, the foundation piece of it, designer community leadership, etc. It brings the design community together in one place to move forward.
Crawford: The core of the new program will be to empower and benefit more PCB designers, as I think it always has been. We want to bring more of IPC’s resources to bear on the design community in the sense that we have a vast member network and a vast digital infrastructure that can track committees, create groups, and allow them to disseminate knowledge online. We have a large body of expertise in our IPC education and certification department. The point is that we have many parts of IPC that could be better channeled into the design community.
Looking at this, we love the idea of having these regional groups as the IPC DC—a forum by which designers can communicate and disseminate knowledge. What we want to do is take that idea and build a stronger scaffold around it so it can be better supported by IPC. And to answer how the IPC DC infrastructure will change, it won’t really. We’re going to call them Design Chapters to better align with the nomenclature of IPC, but they are still going to have the same executive structure within those smaller groups, such as president, vice president, etc.
To read this entire interview, which appeared in the January 2020 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.
