Future manufacturing will be shaped by the consumer's desire for individually-tailored products that can be created quickly and on the spot, a futurist told an audience of engineers at this week's Medical Design & Manufacturing West Show.
"The future of manufacturing is local," said Thomas Frey, senior futurist for the DaVinci Institute. "It's hyper-individualized. It's hyper-customizable, with built-in electronics connected to the Web."
By 2030, the marketplace will be heavily influenced by the rise of 3D printing, Frey said. He cited the growing ability of manufacturers to create clothing, housing, food, shoes, and even pharmaceuticals using 3D printers. The capabilities for such systems are in the works today, he said, as researchers develop printers that can make products from plastics, ceramics, concrete, metals, and biological structures.
"You'll get your body scanned and a 3D printer will print your clothes," he told the audience. "Some day in the future, if you get tired of your house, you could grind it up and reprint it." He added that the first 3D-printed house is expected to be completed as soon as 2014.
Food producers will make similarly profound changes, Frey said. Today's easily damaged apples will be replaced by "perfect apples" from 3D printers using biological materials. The same will hold true for many other types of food. "Think of the printer that can first print the soup can, and then print the soup that goes inside it," he said.
Virtually all of the those new products will also be endowed with intelligence, Frey said, adding that by 2020, 50 billion "things" are expected to be connected to the so-called "Internet of Things."
The rise of such new manufacturing techniques will also have a dramatic effect on the workforce, Frey explained. Whereas today's 30-year-old worker has typically had 11 jobs during his or her lifetime, 30-year-olds in 2030 will have worked on 200 to 300 "projects." Such projects will be much shorter in duration than today's jobs, and will be set up around industries such as nano-tech, bio-tech, photonics, and gaming. Frey compared that work phenomenon to today's movie industry, where actors, producers, directors, and camera crews move from movie to movie, and then from production company to production company. He described such practices as more "organic" than today's corporate hiring practices.
For employees, the result could be a trend toward so-called "co-working spaces," where "people looking for that next temporary gig" will gather in offices that will provide more social contact than home setups. He compared that to the current trend toward remote employees working at public coffee houses. The co-working spaces, however, would be quieter and better suited to computerized work than today's coffee houses.
Frey added that the inevitable move toward automation needn't concern workers. He said that for every job eliminated by the Internet, 2.6 new jobs will be created.
The bottom line is that manufacturers must be flexible, ready to customize, and prepared to move to market faster. "If your next project is not aligned with the problems, needs, and desires of the future, the future is going to kill it."
We won't see any true "trends" in 3D printing until the gilt wears off. Everyone is too enamored with the process right now. It's skewing the coverage and what's being called "trend".
Professional investors, in the form of venture capitalists, do indeed listen to futurists. At least, they do here in Silicon Valley. That doesn't mean they follow them to the letter. But they do pay attention and take what they say into account, because some futurists have a handle on some trends. If you've ever listened to some venture capitalists talk about their investments, you'd think some of them were futurists.
Some of these techniques are being used right now. There's no reason they're likely to be any less structurally sound than an aircraft wing component built with 3D/AM techniques.
It's easy to make fun of futurists. They often get things wrong. But I agree with Cabe: there are many technologies that have taken markets and industries by surprise. Not only the cell phone itself, but the technologies developed for it, or adapted to that platform, that have then influenced lots of other industries. The cell phone camera is a good example: the huge volumes have influence faster development of CMOS image sensors and driven performance up and prices down. This has, in turn, affected the entire machine vision industry.
The flaw in Frey's thinking, at least for me, is the divide especially as a manufacturing goal of high volume, low cost products versus offerings that are hyper-individualized and hyper-customizable. There is definitely a need for the latter but that step adds intervening intelligence, time and expense. Not sure that will pave the way for a new era in manufacturing except in low quantity items where the value of the customization is high.
@Dave: Yes, I agree with you. There is a huge value in having the vast product knowledge of an experienced worker. Unfortunately, many of the executive decision makers do not have a complete appreciation of this and do not have this perception. As a result, many experienced workers have been sent out the door (along with their unique product knowledge that they carry).
I do think that a natural limit will occur, but am concerned that the pendulum will swing too far before it settles back to the correct balance.
@Greg: It's true that there is a trend towards shorter-term employment, but I think it has natural limits, which we are rapidly approaching. Where I work, there are a lot of guys who have worked for the company for 30 or even 40 years. There is a huge value in having such a vast repository of product knowlege. On the other hand, since most of these employees have never worked for any other company, they may lack the perspective that someone who has changed jobs every 2.5 years would have.
It's important to have a balance of experienced long-term employees, along with fresh-faced youngsters with new ideas, and folks who have moved around who can provide an outside perspective.
If all of your employees are temporary contractors, you're going to have to re-invent the wheel many times, because there will be no continuity in your organization. This will be enormously ineffecient.
There is a natural equilibrium, somewhere between guaranteed lifetime employment and craigslist's "gigs" section. Hopefully, we'll find it.
The burrito printer is pretty neat. I took some reservation in the article about the 3d printed apple. It would be creepy to have a robot produce something that you can only get from a plant.
One trend in the article I did agree with was the description of more 'jobs or projects' during one's lifetime. After graduating from college, my father worked at 3 different companies before retiring. As stated in the article, workers in my generation can expect to work for many more companies than this. I expect my kid's generation to work for even a higher number of different companies in their lifetime if this trend continues.
From my perspective, at this point it appears that many companies view people as knowledge resources that can be activated or deactivated as needed. Therefore, as time goes on, we can expect more people to look at themselves as 'contractors' rather than 'employees' (more people will be forced to develop their own incorporated identity and will not only have to perform the work, but also have to now brand and market themselves more as they move from job to job).
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