Reinventing Manufacturing

INSIGHT
The Future of Making Things
Lawrence Lee, Tolga Kurtoglu, and Janos Veres, PARC, a Xerox company
Breakthrough innovations seemingly burst into existence
without warning. But on closer examination, we
can see that they often occur when a new technology
satisfies a fundamental human desire, such as creation,
connection, or personalization, in an entirely new way.
Blogs and Twitter enabled individuals to communicate
with mass audiences. Instagram connected people
across time and space through pictures. Amazon and
eBay helped long-tail buyers and sellers find each
other. We are seeing similar revolutions in healthcare,
education, and transportation, enabled by mobile and
social technologies that transform passive consumers
into active participants.
Now digital technologies are making their impact
in manufacturing, placing us at the dawn of a new
era of consumer participation in how things are
made. Early examples include the rise of production
marketplaces and new crowdfunding models that not
only provide seed funding but also allow designers to
test demand ahead of investment. We have also seen
the emergence of manufacturing services companies
and incubators that simplify the complexities of
offshore manufacturing.
Coming soon are dramatic advances in the
democratization of technologies involved in creation
and production. The next generation of design
tools will allow consumers to create completely new
products, not just customize them. The future of
product development will be in the form of ad-hoc
value networks that come together on a project-byproject
basis, similar to how films are financed and
produced in Hollywood. Driving these transformations
will be advances in the underlying infrastructure of
the digital manufacturing ecosystem, such as process
modeling, expertise identification, risk analysis, “APIs”
that connect contract manufacturers in virtualized
supply chains, and radically simpler design tools that
do not require expertise in 3D modeling.
Design
New tools for
design verification
and process
planning
Make
New digital
manufacturing
technologies and
processes
Connect
New methods for
connecting people and
manufacturing,
virtualizing value
networks
PARC is investing in this vision of The Future of Making
Things at the intersection of three areas: Make, Design,
and Connect.
In the area of Make, it has been working to combine
printed electronics capability with 3D printing to create
functional objects with embedded sensors and computational
components. Expanding additive manufacturing
beyond shapes and colors is an exciting challenge,
opening up on-demand fabrication of complex products.
New types of raw materials, such as electronic
materials and nanomaterials are needed, coupled with
process technologies that allow us to manipulate them
and deposit them accurately. One research direction
involves printing with silicon chiplets, thus providing
highly sophisticated building blocks for printing. Additive
manufacturing—which is still seen today mainly as
a prototyping technology—will engage us as creators
of personalized products in terms of both form factor
and functionality.