Doctors look up medications in the Physicians' Desk Reference; engineers find conversion formulas in the Bosch Automotive Handbook.
On one hand there will be more demand for cheaper and simpler 3-D printers capable of quickly turning out concept models, which are likely to sit on the desks of engineers and designers.
Voxel8, the startup behind the first multi-material 3D electronics printer, has raised $12 million to bring its printers to the desks of engineers and designers everywhere.
Besides environmental indicators of the build, I've seen other variations on maintaining quality — such as passing around a My Little Pony and placing it shamefully on the desk of the engineer who broke the build, such as the geeks do at Say Media.
If he wanted answers to these kinds of app performance questions, he said he'd "walk up to my lead engineer's desk," but the engineer would just "shrug and say there's no way to reproduce the issue".
Its easiness of use and the versatility of its applications make this tool a valuable addition to the biological engineer bench desk.
In all, the XPS One 27 is a fine all-in-one computer with enough power to justify a spot on even an engineer's desk — too bad Dell didn't have the design know-how to make an original casing though.
And a couple of very crowded desks over, a hardware engineer showed how DataWind's electronic components are designed to snap into standard Chinese tablet cases.
In traditional help desk service centres, service engineers provide a world-wide customer support service through the use of long-distance telephone calls.
And tinkering at the mixing desk is his collaborator and engineer "Big" Dean Hurley – who is, in fact, relatively small.
