When one starts thinking in terms of information and computation, in terms of digitization, it is very natural to extend the practices of software and computing into other realms. Even something apparently at odds with anything "soft" as the world of matter.
"Matter is code". This is not just an intellectual joke. On the contrary, it is a point of view that has a profound influence on many aspects of life. Coding goes hand in hand with characteristic methods of design (rapid prototyping, co-design, etc.), and organization of production (open source, etc.). It sees the world as a complex web of relationships, evolving processes, dynamic objects, patterns of interaction, .... This is very different from looking at it as made of solid blocks that are solidly combined to get solid material products. (I'd dare to say that it is also a bit different from creating "intangible" media products too, but let's leave that for some other post). Consequently if you have this point of view, anything associated with matter should look and work very differently.
This excerpt from this post hints at how this frame of mind is affecting that traditional stronghold of industrial age thinking: fabrication.
3. The softwarization of stuff
What makes software development so easy these days is that you don't need to know anything about the hardware on which it will run. With manufacturing, designing and making were historically relatively tightly coupled: in order to design something that could be made you had to know a fair bit about how it would be made. With the new manufacturing technologies not only can more and more of this translation be implemented inside of design tools, but like software it is also becoming easier to share and modify/integrate components. This means that it becomes much easier for development to become iterative (just like software).
We could comment some aspects of this text (such as some blatant oversimplifications). It is enough for now to link it with a lot of fabrication initiatives worldwide that share a "family resemblance" with it and between themselves: 100k Garages, Fabbersmarket, CloudFab, Fablab....
Wired's issue on "Atoms are bits: The Next Industrial Revolution" paints an inminent "fabrication spring" where garages will pop up here and there as personal fabrication and innovation hubs. It salutes these new possibilities, maybe a bit too over-optimistically, as the Second Coming of the same garage revolution that spawned Silicon Valley, personal computing and the internet (remember the mythical garages of Hewlett and Packard, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Google, etc.?).
The new initiatives in fabrication share similar views on how to approach fabrication. Under this wiew fabrication is seen in a slightly different way, compared to industrial age thinking.
1. Materials: are something you can code and even let evolve, instead of passive elements.
2. Processes: are centered on iterative design instead of batch, uniform and one-shot design.
3. Structure: starts from a set of evolving relationship networks, in a more complex way than typical producer-supplier networks.
4. Organization: many behaviours can support the network-centered structure but they demand some degree of openness which may include some free contribution, exchange and collaboration on a different scale to previous modes of organization. Peer to peer modes of production and sharing may be seen as a limit or as a goal, something that still needs some research.
5. Management: are present industrial management practices useful for all these? Just think for example how to manage distribution when production can be done at the buyer's place (or almost).
6. Values: either if you take all this as a movement of individualistic networked freelance microcapitalists or if you think of it as new cooperative approach to commons production, definitely the constellation of values shared by the people involved is very different from the one of current industrialist tycoons and industrial workers.
It will be interesting to see how the new developments clash with traditional ways to look at fabrication.
Trouble ahead for sure.
These changes make me think on the present economic crisis and the destruction of many jobs related to fabrication. And when I say "destruction" I mean present and future destruction. Many present types of (material) fabrication jobs, are gone for ever. Problem is that also whole ways of fabricating , fabrication practices, knowledge and values are bound to follow the same path in the near future. Because they are deeply rooted in the way of thinking and doing of "stuff", the world of fabrication associated to solid entities.
No only that. Efforts oriented towards "recovery of jobs" and "promotion of employment skills" are devised from the mindset of "solid stuff fabrication". So, I see little value in many well-intentioned plans that are popping up here and there to take care of hundreds of thousands of jobless people.
Wouldn't it be advisable to devise employment training plans in terms of new realities, mindsets, and abilities?.
I am really worried when I see current plans to foster employment (at least in Spain) for those who have been made jobless because of "the crisis". Probably there is more to explain their situation than just "a" crisis. It seems as there has been a whole change trend of which most people in charge has been unaware of or, simply couldn't see because they were brought up in a traditional, non-digital, industrial mindset. Even their attempts to devise training programs for "jobs related to information" worry me!.
Digitization seems a more fundamental process than a "crisis" to explain what is happening. Or to add up to the financial and economic crisis.
What bothers me is to see how most "crisis countermeasures" and "job recovery plans" for the industrial "stuff" sector (at least here in Spain) deal with the new skills associated with digitization in a very superficial way. If you were a professionally successful mechanic but the Seat plant where you work is closing, would a crash course in office computing improve your prospects of getting a job in the future or would it be better for you to start learning about metal 3d printing, open hardware and networked fabrication?.
By the way has someone started to think on how to promote training in new jobs related to the "softwarization" of biological matter?.
Recent Comments