Nerdisms = Manufacturing Technology Futurist Topics for 2014 V1.2

In addition to rolling topics from 2013, including the manufesto, Hyperloop and makers going pro, the

topics of interest for 2014 include:

- Newshoring expands national economies, but dampens global trade.

- A Leap in (the) Making- how emerging economies will leapfrog centralized manufacturing.

- Conflation of Hardware, Software and Materials

- 3d printing enables the ‘last mile’ of factory automation [additive augmentation]

- Designers in the Age of Algorithmic Design

- Applications for Quantum Computing will begin to emerge

I am currently working on expanded essays for selected topics and will share when complete. Feel free

to offer criticism and suggestions.

Back to the Future,

jordan

1. Newshoring expands national economies, but dampens global trade- Several articles from

strategic media in the last few months have been reporting on what we predicted last year: as more countries manufacture their own products and their GDP rises, the growth in global trade slows. Media reports on reshoring have myopically focused on the US; we aren’t the only ones experiencing a manufacturing renaissance. This will likely exacerbate tariffs and currency battles throughout the decade.

From CNN: “For much of the last thirty years there has been a steady trend in commerce: global

trade has expanded at about twice the pace of the global economy. For example, between 1988 and

2007, global trade grew on average by 6.2 percent a year according to the World Trade

Organization. During the same period, the world’s GDP was growing at nearly half that pace: 3.7

percent. But a strange thing has taken place in the last two years. Growth in global trade has

dropped dramatically, to even less than GDP growth”

From Bloomberg Businessweek: “In 2013, international trade has fallen behind the global

economy. "Advances in technology over the past five years have facilitated the rise of state

capitalism and made it easier for companies to stay in their borders."

2. A Leap in (the) Making – Just as emerging economies skipped the need for heavy communications infrastructure and went straight to mobile, and from rigid power grids to distributed generation, they will likewise leapfrog centralized manufacturing. Process industries will remain little changed as they are large-scale by nature and have significant power requirements. Discrete manufacturing, however, will be digitally driven and distributed much

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closer to the point of consumption. The digital supply chain from design model to simulation and additive augmented manufacturing will merge with raw material supply (3d printer ‘ink’) to produce personal products in a hyper-localized context. No need for massive factories, warehouses and containerport infrastructure, just a means to ship bulk products (resins, powders, etc.) efficiently. Markets that have historically relied on industrialized nations can now design and manufacture their own goods, for their own unique needs.

From IT World: "Chinese electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is building factories in

Indonesia, and upon hearing the news you might be tempted to think the company is simply

moving into labor markets where it can find cheaper employees. But in fact, the Indonesian

factories will specifically produce smartphones and computers for Indonesians; the country has

almost as many people as the United States, but smartphone penetration there remains low."

3. Conflation of Hardware, Software and Materials- As design, simulation and manufacturing

software advance in pace with new 3d printing hardware and materials, the lines become

increasingly blurred.

For example, in November 2013, Stratasys announced the release of a new “Digital ABS2” for

their polyjet line of Connex printers. This is an improved version of their original Digital ABS

material. What they did not explicitly state (and curiously missed by the 3dp press) was that the

new material came from a software update, a novel way for the print head to mix the existing

input materials.

This gets into some very interesting questions. If the software specifies a unique blend of

materials with entirely new properties, and instructs the machine to make it, is the IP in the

software, the materials, or the machine that compiles it? If we can program matter to compile

itself into new forms, is the ‘design’ the end product or the instruction set itself-- a virtual DNA?

4. 3d printing enabling the “last mile” of factory automation- In the next couple of years, we can

expect additive augmentation of mass production methods to increase factory automation and

product customization. To date, it has been challenging for robots to do final assembly,

especially in electronic devices; the parts are small and difficult to manipulate. Tiny screws and

electrical connectors are still largely put together by dexterous human hands. 3d printing will

enable us to reduce the number of parts in assemblies, and make components conducive to

robotic assembly. One need only look to Apple’s latest patent “Inkjet printer for printing on a

three-dimensional object and related apparatus and method” to see this trend emerging; put all

of the pieces together and print on top of them. Lego has since filed a similar patent.

This indicates the advent of application specific additive machines. We are accustomed to the all-purpose 3d printer, but the first industrial revolution taught us that some tasks are best accomplished with specialization. Apple’s conductive ink printer for mobile devices, add±sub machines for turbine blade repair and whatever Xerox Parc have up their sleeves are the proverbial canaries.

Another exciting trend is the entry of incumbent industrial equipment manufacturers, who

understand reliability and repeatability, into the 3dp space with machines that combine additive

and traditional processes. Arburg, an injection molding company, developed a multi-axis

machine that extrudes standard low-cost granulates then sprays molten micro-droplets to

produce high quality parts. Mitsubishi/Matsuura, DMG Mori/Sauer and Hamuel (with support

from our own Delcam) have developed metal hybrid systems that enable the near net shape to

be printed while areas with precision requirements can be selectively machined. Cincinnati has

partnered with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build a large scale polymer additive system.

Such augmentation provides a boost for traditional manufacturing. For example, throughput

rates on injection molding (a process used for mass manufacturing most plastic enclosures) can

be increased by up to 30% by 3d printing the molds with complex conformal cooling channels

that allow the mold to rapidly shed heat. Such geometries are not possible with casting and

machining- we can only drill straight holes.

5. Designers in the Age of Algorithmic Design- Traditional careers in the ‘professional’ fields of

design (architecture, product, et. al) have been in decline. There are 20% fewer jobs in

architecture than there were pre-recession, and they ain’t coming back. But manufacturing and

design engineering are making a big rebound as the newshoring trend ramps up in North

America and around the world. This creates an opportunity for design students with unique

skills and creativity to take the 3d printed helm and lead the New Industrial Revolution.

Using game changing technology such as 3d printing and computational methods to do what we

did before, albeit faster and easier, is an inevitable but frustrating occurrence. It’s like tweeting

your fax number. The most exciting applications do not involve engineers using traditional CAD

tools to sketch a 2D outline, extrude it and add features, or hobbyists sculpting free-form

surfaces in mobile apps (that seem to always end up as lamps). All of this can be considered

explicit design- where a human sits down and intentionally creates a shape. Processes that fully

leverage the geometric freedom of additive manufacturing- let’s call it algorithmic design- are

more prominent with architects and digital designers than classically trained engineers filled

with a vocabulary of bosses and draft angles. It’s more about designing the problem and

teaching the computer to solve it rather than designing the product itself. For over a decade,

architecture and industrial design schools have been filled with 3d printed prototypes of

algorithmically generated forms, evolved and optimized through millions of permutations in

machines before they ever saw the light of day. If this creative talent and unique ability to

synthesize problems into algorithmic understanding could be channeled to manufacturers in

more traditional engineering disciplines then both sides will experience an explosion of

innovation.

6. Applications for Quantum Computing will begin to emerge (implementation is a different

story)- Heralded to bring exponential computing capacity as Moore’s law approaches its

inevitable physical and economic limits, quantum computing faces enormous challenges.

Beyond the creation of practical and reliable hardware, the number of computer scientists who

can write useful quantum algorithms can probably be counted on a few binary hands.

Nevertheless, steps have been taken to introduce developers to the inherent paradoxes of bits

that are 1 and 0 simultaneously, a.k.a qubits. Google released a plugin for the popular children’s

game Minecraft, called Q-craft, that introduces quantum behavior into the building blocks of its

metaverse. The hope is that by exposing the world’s next generation developers to the

classically minded antilogic of Heisenberg’s world, they will better leverage its immense

capability. Isn’t an n-dimensional solution space eerily similar to a probabilistic electron cloud?

From Re/Code: (quantum computing) opens up new possibilities for exploring complex scenarios

with lots of variables and less than perfect data, like simulating NASA missions to Mars or Google’s

efforts in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“We can have more open-ended questions,” said Jordan Brandt, technology futurist at Autodesk.

“It also allows us to suspend our disbelief longer when asking questions, because it can hold

multiple states simultaneously.”