What’s Next in the World of Making
Does changing how you make things change the way you live?
The answer is “yes,” according to Made in the Future, an experimental project I collaborated on with some colleagues at IDEO Boston. The Made in the Future website recently launched and it explores how today’s innovations in maker technology might affect designers and society at large five to ten years from now.
To get inspired about what making something by hand means to people, we constructed toy airplanes with kids, cooked alongside chefs, built motorbikes with weekend gear heads, and hung out with gifted researchers at the MIT Media Lab. We looked at cutting-edge innovations in designing, manufacturing and distributing, and asked: where’s it all heading next? It was all incredibly inspiring and we learned a lot.
On the website, we break down what we learned into five themes, each illustrated with provocative product concepts. For example, a device called MatterTone addresses the desire for meaningful customization by creating 3-D recordings of ephemeral conversations. Master’s Archive, a combination camera/laser projector, enables augmented reality woodworking education in real time and speaks to the possibilities of tech-enabled learning and mastery. These are only a few of the types of tools we might create, how those things will change the way we act and learn, and how these technologies will ultimately shape our future.
Many of the advances in manufacturing and communication we enjoy today—not to mention a number of careers like “designer” and “engineer”—trace their roots back to the Industrial Revolution and early 20-century. Some of these seismic shifts took hundreds of years to play out. Imagine what will happen if, in the blink of a decade, mass manufacturing and mass media become massively personalized, variable, and collaborative?
If my predictions are accurate, creative skills will be in ever-greater demand even though access to tools will be significantly democratized, and creative confidence will be a necessary mindset for doing business. It also means we’ll longer be slavishly consuming goods, but collaborating with the most sophisticated, large-scale manufacturers to create the exact things we need when and where we need them.
If all this sounds worrisome, take heart, there’s one thing I know won’t change. Yesterday, today, or tomorrow: the act of making makes us human.
How will you participate in the maker society of tomorrow?
Exporter | Blockchain | NIT
10 年That's absolutely true..
CEO & Director, Training $olutions International. email me at: [email protected]
10 年The next world is made by us. So if you plan a change and make it appear ahead of you, you will take it as a change to move towards future. We do practice this at our org which can be viewed at www.trainingsolutions.in. We believe in real world $olutions that will decide our future
PhD/Inventor/Engineer
10 年I wrote about my definitions of the 'maker revolution' in my post about it as a design movement. I think that it is just another part of the change in approaches to design and manufacturing along with 'frugal innovation'. - https://pigeonsblue.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/a-very-brief-guide-to-design-movements-makersfrugal-innovation/
Director at Our Business
10 年Human existence relies on change, be it the nature we live in , the air we breathe, the water we drink everything undergoes change...the greatest irony is we live in the change trying to figure our the changer or how it is changing and before we figure it out we are changed into another form...
Serial innovator at your service :)
10 年Having the public vote on whether a product goes into production could be the next wave of change in the face of innovation. We know we see very peculiar articles in the store and wonder how the heck nobody stopped them from making it to the shelf. There are people that buy things just to try them , and that can in turn make the creators think they actually have something. Eyelashes for cars for instance... If mother of invention actually is indeed what is necessary, than we as humans have not come a long way . We've gone backwards. 3Dprinters will make it easier for people to make silly things for a quick buck. But a public vote could allow those funds to go to something much more usefull... So, if we question where we are headed, perhaps we need to look only at the ocean with its islands of garbage. Innovation should be rewarding . Not damaging . It's not the innovator , but the ones who allow it to move forward. Want not .....