Manufacturing (from Latin manu factura, “making by hand”) is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or sale. The term may refer to a vast range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale.

Wikipedia

Notice manu as in manual - this definition is in need of an upgrade since so much of what we call manufacturing doesn’t require human hands touching materials. One could argue that that has been true for a century, that we’re actually at Manufacturing 7.0 but I’ll stick with current terminology. Manufacturing 2.0 is a transition phase that will bring dematerialization to the forefront. reBang’s excellent Next Generation of Product Development Tools series is loaded with videos that illustrate how this is happening.

  The word “sampling” is probably most often associated with music, but it’s not at all limited to that application. Physical models are sometimes sculpted and their shape digitally sampled, or a previously existing reference might be digitized and used as a scaffold for building a new, virtual model. Or something entirely unrelated can be sampled and turned into a virtual 3D model. Once digitized, there’s not much that can’t be done with digitally sampled information.
reBang: Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 6

This kind of sampling is at the heart of Manufacturing 2.0 and represents a key aspect of Rhythmeering. When Manufacturing 3.0 arrives on the wings of robotics and nanotechnology, man-made items will be works of art and hobby - there won’t be many of today’s manufacturing jobs here or overseas. Sampling and mashups will be important elements of the new industrial base. The government needs to start informing the people and preparing for this future now.

Related Links:

Institute For The Future:  Manufacturing 2.0
Industry Week: Manufacturing 2.0

Rhythmeering: Assessing the State of Rapid Manufacturing

Because everything we’re doing is open source, you are free to make it perfect yourself. You want to change something? Go right ahead. And when you do, we’re hoping you share your improvement with everyone else so we all benefit. It’s why we call our work community electronics instead of simply consumer electronics. We, Bug Labs, don’t own the keys to your satisfaction, you do. And this, in our humble opinion, is how it should be.

Bug Blogger: Worth a Thousand Words

via Futurismic and TechCrunch

In those early days of my career, hardware design was a real man’s game. We designed big boxes with loud fans that roared as if boasting of its impressiveness. Then came ASICs where all of sudden your innovation was miniaturized into something only an inch across. Today, chips are disappearing altogether and the real design work is in IP— making chips and systems are simply manufacturing steps.

The focus of an engineer today is either in creating IP, or assembling others IP into dream fulfilling subsystems. The power and influence of the engineer simply keeps expanding, being able to create larger and larger works from the work of others.

Design & Resuse 

This site should be helpful to people creating solutions requiring devices that interact with the internet.

• IDaSS - Interactive Design and Simulation System
• JOP - Java Optimized Processor
• Hardware Objects

… virtualization technologies should be pushed down further into the iron and sold in volume. In short, there should be some way to make these technologies a low-cost part of the system, … it should be made in an on-demand fashion, activated with a key for a nominal fee, complete with physical-to-virtual conversion tools and virtual-to-physical tools to undo the virtualization if customers decide to do that, too.

The Unix Guardian: Virtualization belongs in the system, not in the software

The effect of free, hardware based virtualization which is automatically there would make for very interesting x86 servers. Even more so with a few on-board, fully virtualized, multi-fabric I/O channels. Kind a baby mainframe.

Maybe it’s a crazy idea. Maybe its a vision of the future of computing.

Is this a crazy idea?

Now, in the aftermath of the VMWare IPO, we’re seeing it unfold.

“With virtualization, where you can run any operating system on top, it seems a lot more logical that it would be effectively a layer sitting on top of a server,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “Why wouldn’t it be supplied with the server?”

XenSource announced XenExpress OEM Edition last week, and market leader VMware this week is announcing VMware ESX Server 3i at its VMworld conference. The products run from flash memory built into a server instead of being installed on the hard drive.

The embedded versions aren’t just a fantasy. VMware has partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance. “We expect them to begin integrating ESX Server 3i into their servers later this year or early next,” a VMware representative said.

The move has strategic importance in these relatively early days of virtualization, elevating the profile of virtualization specialists’ products. Getting a foot in the door could help the virtualization specialists get a foot in the doors of customers who might be interested in higher-level products to manage the increasingly sophisticated computing infrastructure that can be built atop virtual machines.

Virtualization has been around for decades, but its inclusion in mainstream computers with x86 chips is bringing it out of the shadows. And the money is following.

Virtualization: A feature of the hardware, not the OS? | CNET News.com

There are a number of trends interrelated to this many of which are growing exponentially. Kansas has left the building.

The new technique suggests that the nanotechnology factories of the future might not operate so differently from existing manufacturing plants.

“If you can take prototyping and nanomanufacturing to a level that leverages what engineers know how to do, then you are ahead of the game,” Clark said. “Most engineers with conventional training don’t think about nanoscale manipulation. But if you want to leverage a workforce that’s already in place, how do you set up the future of manufacturing in a language that engineers already use to communicate? That’s what we’re focused on doing here.”

Duke News: Automation of Nanotech Manufacturing May Be Ahead

This should prove to be very helpful because there’s no getting around the strange and often counter-intuitive aspects of the nanoscale realm where thermal and quantum fluctuations make moving molecules from place to place like walking in a hurricane. Similar to the proven patterns used in software virtual machines, the Duke researchers are abstracting out the unfamiliar/counter-intuitive and substituting the more familiar. This is yet another sign of dematerialization and virtualization so I expect it will bear fruit.

At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup with have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon). One source in the Design News article put the widespread use of direct digital manufacturing 20 years out but by then nanotechnology will have already started having a significant impact. Desktop manufacturing is being driven by exponentially growing factors it’s just always hard to see it in the early stages. I think Ray Kurzweil has it exactly right

Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.

Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns

“We have the view that we have to become a software company,”

Cisco CEO John Chambers at the Networkers Conference via PC World

AT&T Industrial Ecology

Forbes Investopedia

Dematerialization and Virtualization

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Consumption