The End of Cyberspace

Manufacturing 2.0

One of the distinctive features of Web 2.0, I've felt, is an understanding that humans are very good at certain things, computers are really good at different things, and groups of people are good at yet other things; and that creating systems that combine individual, machine, and collective intelligence will be powerful-- more powerful than, for example, software that tries to mimic human capabilities.

Today, while reading Bill Leslie's brilliant article, "Blue Collar Science,"* on Western Electric's efforts to commercialize the transistor and integrated circuit-- a category of work that, he argues, is just as important in the history of R&D as the more famous and detached style of research that we normally think of as "R&D"-- I came across this 1964 quote by Eugene Anderson, a Bell Labs researcher:

[H]ighly complex assembly machines... are always expensive and are extremely specialized. A change in design or technology can turn a beautiful machine into a boat anchor overnight. We tend to forget that while labor costs are high, so is the cost of capital. We are finding that simple tools coupled with the sensing, judging and tactile abilities of people are often more desirable than complex machinery. It is very difficult to make a machine that has the eyeball sensory abilities or is as smart as even a scatterbrained 18-year old... at least for the same cost and flexibility.

A similar kind of relationship between human and machine, which recognizes that symbiotic systems can sometimes do better work, more cheaply, than ones that try to cut humans out of the loop.

* Stuart W. Leslie, "Blue collar science: Bringing the transistor to life in the Lehigh Valley," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Science 32:1 (2001), 71-113.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, manufacturing, social software, Web 2.0

Another virtual/manufacturing scenario

A friend points me to Sven Johnson's blog post/essay "Smiley Face Saavy," which touches on some of the same ideas-- in particular about highly responsive manufacturing made possible by flexible, fast-moving manufacturing and supply chains-- I write about in my latest Samsung piece.

Technorati Tags: design, digital culture, digital-physical, end of cyberspace, manufacturing

Manufacturing and the end of cyberspace

I have an essay on rapid prototyping, personal fabrication, and the future of manufacturing in the latest issue of Samsung DigitAll Magazine. Here's the opening:

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. 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.

Technorati Tags: design, manufacturing, pervasive computing, ubicomp, Web 2.0

Fabrication and architecture

Yet another data-point on the relationship between fabrication technologies, design, and education. It's weird how you sometimes see clusters of things.

Fabrication: The Fifth Ecology of Los Angeles

For [architect] Jason Payne of gnuform, Los Angeles provided an opportunity, as he says, “to strain through materiality” the more abstract formal experimentation his office had been pursuing in New York....

Los Angeles’s unique culture of fabrication that make it one of the most exciting places to practice in the world today. Drawing on the expertise of fabricators working with Los Angeles-based aerospace, automotive, and entertainment industries, these and other area architects are beginning to materialize designs that until recently were trapped inside their computers. What seems especially appealing is the willingness of Los Angeles fabricators to take on jobs that require extraordinary flexibility in schedule, budget and specifications of final product.

This looseness and embrace of collaboration has fostered a design culture in which fabrication has become an increasingly important engine of design innovation. Architects design by making, by fabricating, which enables them to quickly learn from successes and failures, building the design intelligence required of more refined and robust designs.

I suspect that many of the substantive objections to having computers in the classroom can be boiled down to issues involving bringing a then-disruptive cyberspace into the classroom-- and that we can begin to see how, for some disciplines at least, we could design our way past those problems.

Technorati Tags: architecture, California, city, end of cyberspace, prototyping

3D models from Second Life

This connects back to something I posted recently on rapid prototyping and education: Gizmodo reports on a new service that lets you create models of objects you create in Second Life:

Those amongst you who spend all your waking time on Second Life: rejoice! Simon Spartalian and Mike Beradino of Recursive Instruments are launching a milling service for SL users on June 1, so you can have actual physical representations of your avatar, builds or favorite SL objects made out of anything from foam to wax to stainless steel, up to 9”x5”x5”.

As 3pointd writes,

Part of the goal of the project is to bridge the virtual and the real “by developing a cultural authority in the virtual that till now has been reserved for the physical,” Spartialian says. The service will allow residents to create physical objects that can take on personal importance or perhaps even come to have financial weight around the edges of SL’s in-world markets.

The Recursive Instruments blog has lots of geeky goodness.

[hat tip to Jason]

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, games, manufacturing, printing, prototyping

Rapid prototyping, bits, atoms, and education

I've been reading up on rapid prototyping technologies, and came across an interesting argument: that the use of 3-D printers, which allow students to make quick physical copies of things they've designed on computers, is making engineering cool, and helping kids develop spatial skills.

Timothy Jump, a teacher at Benilde-St. Margaret's High School, a private college preparatory school in St. Louis, Missouri... [says], "Until 3D printing came along, we were unable to show young people the beauty of the engineering process, taking an initial idea all the way to completion, until late in their educational experience.... 3D printing stimulates a student's mechanical-spatial awareness in ways that textbooks cannot."

Don Jalbert, a CAD/CAM mechanical design instructor at the Lewiston Regional Technical Center in Lewiston, Maine, says 3D printers can help young people realize they have a knack for engineering. "When I taught CAD 10 years ago, the concepts were wholly theoretical because the students could not touch or feel the objects they created. Now with the 3D printer, students can do much more than draw a part. They can evaluate it, refine it, assess how it fits in a larger assembly, and hand it to people. The 3D printer is a great recruiting tool for getting students excited about engineering."

When you think about it, massive multiplayer games are essentially fun-ride versions of CAD and CAAD systems: part of the appeal of Second Life is that you can build all kinds of interesting virtual stuff, from bodies to buildings. It may be that, in the long run, the phenomenon of video games eroding kids' mechanical or spatial skills will be replaced with a pattern in which they translate the design and engineering skills they learn in virtual worlds into the physical world, through the mediation of 3D printing technology. Just a thought.

There's no getting away from atoms.

Technorati Tags: design, education, end of cyberspace, prototyping