Manufacturing Economy: From Past Decades to Digital Revolution

People are always surrounded by physical goods which mainly consist of a manufacturing economy that over the past decades has been altered and transformed in all ways but one. The manufacturing economy has never been opened to all unlike the web due to the high production cost of materials, equipment, and expertise on a large scale, making it be the provenance of trained professionals and big organizations. As time progressed and decades passed, the digital revolution altered everything and made them be limited to screens such as phones, televisions, and laptops. The physical objects are now seen as designs which can always be shared as files online. The new industrial revolution is challenging the old assumptions as work has been made easier, which saves on time, energy, finance, and resources. When anyone has a good design or invention, they can always upload the relevant files to a service to have the product manufactured, in either large or small batches, or create it themselves with the increasingly powerful fabrication tools in the digital desktop such as 3-D printers. The would-be inventors and entrepreneurs are no longer pleading to large companies to create and run their ideas as they can be self-employed.

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As depicted in the document, the digital industry often establishes a cultural and economic shift, which is a fascination with the new invented digital prototyping tools as well as they wish to extend the online phenomenon into the impact of the real world. Through technological advancements, the biggest organizations in the world of engineering and professional product design are always shifting their aim and focus on the merging maker market. For instance, the digital industrial giants like 3D, PTC, and Autodesk systems have released free software design for both kids and amateurs along with the service bureaus to allow them to upload their inventories and designs and have them in laser-cut or 3-D printed. Moreover, through the new industrial revolution, there are the makers who are using digital tools to design onscreen and increasingly outputting their results to the desktop fabrication machines. Through their inventions, they instinctively share their ideas online as they are the web generation. They bring the collaboration and culture of the web to the making process through merging to create something on a scale people have never seen from their DIYs.

The main aim of producing physical products is always to sell them, but the business can never succeed if one lacks the right connection and target market. The web teaches inventors and entrepreneurs the power of network effects such that when people and ideas are connected, they grow. Thus, the maker movement is always said to generate transformative characteristics where people are always using the digital tools of the desktop to invent and create new designs for new products and prototype them. Moreover, for the inventions to be successful, a cultural norm must be created to share the designs and to collaborate with others online. There is also the use of design file standards which allows anyone to send their designs to any commercial manufacturing organizations or services to be produced in any number which radically foreshortens the route from idea or invention to entrepreneurship, just like the web does in software, content, and information. Thus, with the current digital world, the expertise of any physical manufacturing industry is always replicated in software algorithms.

Work Cited

Krippendorff, Klaus. The semantic turn: A new foundation for design. crc Press, 2005.