Design for Industry 4.0: Can designers restore the balance in the ecosystems?
On 4 October, Professor Jo Geraedts, now Emiritus Professor of Mechatronic Design, retired from the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. With his experience at TU Delft, and in the field with Océ before that, Professor Geraedts is exceptionally well positioned to look at our changing future in his farewell speech.
“We live in an exciting time. As the technological ecosystem grows exponentially, the material production of goods and services continues to increase worldwide. Meanwhile environmental and biological ecosystems increasingly exhibit weak spots. We reached an ecological footprint of 1.75 worldwide. This means that we actually need 1,75 Earths to accommodate our needs with our current usage and means of production. The result is that the balance between what humanity demands and what the earth can give is increasingly disturbed.
Looking back on my career in product development, and from that same research discipline, I want to give my vision on the above developments and possibilities to achieve a new balance.
Product design has been the foundation of our faculty. We started with the goal "to design products that consumers love to use and which can be made cheaply by mass production." Because products are being repaired, reused or re-produced far too little, I believe we must adapt the product design method. By adding a number of preconditions for the architecture of the product such as the total product life cycle, decentralized production, minimal material and energy flows, reuse and impact on the ecological footprint, for instance. A current technological example which could aid these methods is multi-material 3D printing, which has the promise to build materials on a meso-scale with built-in functionality so that less and fewer types of material are needed.
Through the development of an integral digitization of all design, production processes, maintenance and use, production is changing to an Industry 4.0. An important step is the creation of the digital twin during the design of a product. This digital twin predicts and controls how the product should be made by digitally controlled machines and robots. During production, the digital twins receive all information from production machines, quality controls, etc. Subsequently the product will record how and when it has been used and maintained. This opens up the possibility of having the collected data of the product analysed in the digital twin application during repair, reuse or re-production to give advice e.g. on what part needs to be cleaned or replaced.
What will the new role of product designers be? How does the learning process change our academic skills? These are important questions for which we need to find answers. Because in the end even a digital product is supposed to be held and used. Finally, entering Industry 4.0 can give us the possibility to move from ‘mass production’ to ‘personalized production on demand’. I believe our faculty can, and should, focus on SMEs to stimulate decentralized production.”
You can watch the entire farewell speech of Professor Jo Geraedts here.