A society in transition
In our already hyperconnected world heralded by the internet and globalisation, a digital fabric is slowly inter-weaving into our daily life as computer-based virtual systems integrate into our physical world. A new world is in the offing, one where everything is interconnected.
Most of today’s technologies are designed to seamlessly communicate among themselves using sophisticated protocols or a middleman language. Therefore, systems become more transparent with shared information, fewer errors, while for the consumer it translates to better products and services. This streamlined data collection and processing allow for an elevated user experience through an end-user level of customisation.
In this new way forward, not only will there be a fundamental shift in how we consume, but also how creators design, validate and manufacture. The old world industrial production involved cumbersome assembly lines, relied on cheap labour, was only feasible through mass production, lead to stupendous wastage and common oblivion to the ecological cost of production. The general aim was to produce high volumes of small variety to keep costs down.
The new industrial shift is towards “smart factories”. Industry 4.0, cited to be the next industrial revolution will revolve around agile manufacturing that runs on complex automation, incredible speed, much higher efficiency, and to be material & product agnostic. As technology progresses, market barriers lower, as a result more creators can operate at smaller scales to meet the customised requirements of the new age customer.
This is also the age of convergence — the Internet of Things, 3D printing, Digital Fabrication and increasingly complex Computer Aided Simulations are all coming together to unlock design & manufacturing possibilities we couldn’t have imagined before. Beyond that, computers can now also aid us to evaluate the environmental impacts of design across a product’s life cycle — the effects of materials, manufacturing, assembly, transportation, product use, and eventual disposal.
One might ask that automation and computerisation has been around for almost half a century, so how are these advancements a paradigm shift? Digital control systems were created around forty years ago for the purpose of connecting tens of thousands of sensors to a single point of control, that is when we started the journey toward the Industrial Internet of Things. But only at the turn of the century were systems evolved enough for softwares and applications to make use of all the data collected by those tens of thousands of sensors and actuators.
Industry 4.0 is as much a technological evolution as it is a socio-economic revolution. It is the ultimate synthesis of fifty years of computing advancement, the penetration of the internet, and ever connected hardware running sophisticated softwares at the service of a generation that is more aware of the delicate ecological balance we are facing as a species.
We, as natives of still “developing” countries might be delighted about the prospects of this oncoming age. Our industries are only still downloading the 3rd big upgrade, what if we skipped that step altogether and leaped straight onto the Industry 4.0 train? Well, we can and we probably will. Despite all this optimism, there are reasons to be concerned too. The foremost being the skills gap. Our educational institutions need to partner with the movement and allow for newer ways to expose their students to the latest these technologies have to offer, and provide access to all the open-source material and possible collaborations that this movement enables. The other bottleneck is plain old human cognition. Technologies are coming to market much faster than the rate at which we re-adjust our design and engineering workflows to accommodate for them.
The population of our world is increasing and it is paramount that this transition of our society is conscious. We are undeniably and inextricably interdependent on each other and the planet, and banking on smart technology to optimise the management and fair sharing of resources is the logical way to go. For it is time to move beyond the individual to the collective, it is where the future lies.
