IIT Institute of Design - the blog

Factories of the future

Institute for the Future's Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes for DigitAll Magazine,

The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Some other meat-quotes:

• "Georgia Tech dean William Rouse argues that industrial engineers will design supply chains and entire enterprises, not just factories. "
• "Rapid prototyping is now morphing into rapid manufacturing.... Experts predict that machines that fabricate electronics and displays along mechanical structures will be available by decade’s end."
• "Rapid manufacturing will let companies produce new goods more rapidly, and ethnography will bring them fresher and more detailed knowledge of what consumers want; but translating that knowledge into products is still a challenge.... Problem-solving tools such as TRIZ offer ways to balance conflicting needs, by analyzing problems in ways that reveal hidden continuities between them."
• "[D]esigners and scientists across a range of fields are discovering that biomimicry—reverse-engineering natural materials and processes—has a lot to offer. Nature’s designs constantly balance competing demands."
• "The combined effects of cascades of information and pressure for constant innovation will turn the factory floor from a space populated only by machine-tenders, into a space in which production and innovation happen simultaneously. The factory will follow a transformation similar to the recording studio.... As Brian Eno put it, the studio became an instrument, a space for creation and experimentation as well as production."
• "But where will these workers come from? The unexpected but most likely answer is [massively multiplayer] online games.... a generation of kids is becoming intimately familiar with design and manufacturing-skills that can move straight from the living room to the factory floor."
• "Countries that compete on the basis of labor costs and nonexistent regulations may find that the game has changed. In a world in which factories print or grow their products and pollute far less, and need workers who are imaginative enough to redesign products on the fly, cheap wages and lax environmental regulations won’t be attractive. They won’t even be incentives. Countries with more expensive but better-educated workforces, with well-developed consumer and gaming cultures, will be much more attractive."

Sounds like someone's talking about Korea....

Web Science

Computer scientists, led by James Handler of U. Maryland, and Tim Berners-Lee among others, are creating the "Tetherless World Research Constellation" at Rensselaer Poly. It will focus on increasing access to information at any time     and place without the need for a “tether” to a specific     computer or device, and aims to create a new formal discipline of "Web science".

One step closer to the Diamond Age

A group of researchers has announced the formation of a global collaboratory for the design of the first tabletop-sized nanotech factory.

I'd say we're less than ten years away from users being able to design and manufacture almost any product in the comfort of their living room, doing to product design what desktop publishing did to communication design.

Some other stuff you need to know

A couple of years ago Michael Bierut republished a list of the Top Then Things They Never Taught Me In Design School. Maybe ID teaches us some of these things, but it's a good list to think about and remember -- even if you're not a designer. For those too busy to click on a link, here is the Cliff's Notes version:

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
4. Don’t over-think a problem.
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
6. Don’t forget your goal.
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
9. It all comes down to output.
10. The rest of the world counts.

Haptics within reach

From New Scientist: "Gadgets that stimulate our sense of touch, known as haptic devices, were once too expensive for most people to afford. Now the cost is coming down, and more revolutionary haptic contraptions are just over the horizon."

Speed reading 10x

Wired News reports that "Researchers at Columbia University are combining the processing power of the human brain with computer vision to develop a novel device that will allow people to search through images ten times faster than they can on their own."

The Emotion Machine

MIT Technology Review interviews artificial intelligence luminary Marvin Minsky about his new book, The Emotion Machine, and designing machines that are capable of common-sense decisions and emotional thought.

Doing sustainability one better

Uber-architect and designer William McDonough is terrificly compelling on the issues of sustainbility and designing a decent world for future generations, in this video of his speech at the 2000 Bioneers conference.

A unified field theory of creativity

Daniel Pink writes for the current issue of Wired about University of Chicago economist David Galenson's excellent work on the nature of creative genius:

[Genius] comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

Daniel Pink writes for the current issue of Wired about University of Chicago economist David Galenson's excellent work on the nature of creative genius:

[Genius] comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.