The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

Chapter 7

Manufacturing

Here You Go; Make This

At the end of the day, it’s all about manufacturing. No matter how brilliantly conceived your design is, no matter how cool it looks in a computer-aided design (CAD) program, if you can’t make it on quality, on time, and within budget, it’s just taking up space on a server.

So how will the revolution in product design and development play out on the factory floor? Will open engineering add momentum to the march toward outsourcing and offshoring, pushing even more manufacturing activity to China? Or will it draw product development and manufacturing closer together? Will it be the catalyst to a manufacturing renaissance in the rich world? And will it tilt the playing field toward agile upstarts and away from giant corporations?

All these outcomes and more are possible as new design tools and a newly empowered engineering culture converge with rapid innovations in factory automation. Right now, the deck of cards is being reshuffled. And when the next hands are dealt, odds are that everything we take for granted about the advantages of scale and location in manufacturing will be reordered. That is not to say we can predict any outcome with certainty because, as in poker, it’s not the hand that you’re dealt; it’s how you play your cards.

Or as my friend, manufacturing guru Nick Pinkston puts it (see the feature that follows), the changes now under way do not decisively push manufacturing in any specific direction. Instead, they put it ...