Louis Komzsik
The MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation
Los Angeles, CA 90041, U.S.A.

In the late 1980s someone in the CAD software arena coined the phrase in the main title. A decade passed by and the appealing idea is still not realized. Is it ever going to be or is there an inherent fallacy in the idea? The following is the author’s position on the subject, admittedly biased by a structural engineering background.
The term is usually interpreted as the following: with the advancement in automatic mesh generators the designer does not necessarily need to know about the mesh when using a finite element analysis software for analysis. Specifically, the engineer would:
• not need to understand the finite element method,
• not require the knowledge of the analysis software
• be able to work directly on geometry basis