Process Engineering Renewal 2

1From “Autonomous” Research to Societal Solutions

[…] a complete work was not necessarily finished, and a finished work not necessarily complete. (Baudelaire, cited by Merleau-Ponty et al. 1993)

Researching is inventing the world; it is setting new rules of functioning for an ephemeral world. Not like the tyrants who also invent a new world for themselves, but impose it upon others. The researcher does not recreate the world, but rather unravels it to make it. They imagine one, then compare it with the real world to clarify it and not to exhaust it. Researching is an endless quest. The more we move forward and the less we know, the more we understand and the more we measure complexity. The more you empty the barrel, the less you reach the bottom. (Rose 2001)

No consumer today has even an approximate knowledge of the production technique of the goods he uses every day and most of the time he does not even know how they are made or by which industry they are produced. (Weber 1965)

Future factory designs and their footprints will likely favor modularization, with micro factories capable of mass customization using such technologies as 3D printing as well as digital manufacturing technologies. (Frost and Sullivan 2017)

In the modern factory, flexible manufacturing technologies facilitate the efficient transition from ideas to finished products. In addition, factories are increasingly communicating more closely with external organizations and receiving manufacturing instructions ...