The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

INTRODUCTIONTHE DIGITAL REVOLUTION GETS PHYSICAL

Over the past 30 years, anything and everything that needs no physical form has been reduced to bits. Music, photographs, newspapers, plane tickets, and money have all gone digital. Soon, with driverless cars on the horizon, even taxi drivers may be transformed from flesh into software.

By comparison, change in things that must remain physical has been almost glacial: How we design and make stuff today—hardware, manufactured goods—is not radically different from what it was in 1980. And sadly, in the so-called post–industrial age, making things has been downright uncool. Intangibles such as software and finance have been where it’s at.

But that’s about to change—and very quickly.

Powerful forces are converging to drive a second great wave of the digital revolution. Where the first wave was about shedding physical form, the second wave exponentially amplifies our ability to create physical form, in any shape or size to any end we can imagine. In the process, it radically reorders all our notions about making things: who designs and who builds; how fast, where, and at what scale; and how is it marketed?

It’s not simply a matter of making new things we never dreamed of. This revolution comes with the opportunity to refashion thousands of everyday objects, making them smarter, greener, and connected with the surrounding environment. And now is precisely the time to do that as technological viability converges with surging demand for ...