Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

– Robert Frost

PREMISE

We are all part of a continuum – in genealogy, time, space, and history. We are but a stepping-stone in the ever-evolving intellectual science of design and engineering. The past two decades have been about discovering new ways to create, invent, and to work together on the web. We called it the era of Digital Transformations where brick-and-mortar institutions were transmogrified to be on-line and always connected.The quest for reality ends up with making real things. Digital natives are starting to hunger for life beyond the screen – the ability to be able to utilize digital to create products and solutions that are tactile and usable.  We are now on the cusp of the next era of design and engineering where we are moving into the ‘internet of things’ where the physical world and the digital world will meld into one. The next two decades will be applying those lessons of digital transformations to the real world. The way we imagine and create new products, services and businesses is changing – Web3 and the Metaverse are defining the new virtual. Innovation strategies and business designs are all changing because breakthroughs in science and technology come faster and faster, and because of global networking and collaboration. Now there is a greater need for diverse points of view and for working in times of uncertainty and crisis.

Industry and Services 5.0 is being defined as the next era of industrialization where we will see a fusion of physical, digital, and biological technologies wherein robotics and human-centricity will form a mélange to effectively automate operations. This will result in a new level of cooperation between humans and machines, where machines are able to learn, evolve and become more autonomous. We need to be open to these new perspectives. There is an increase in demand for more personalized products and experiences. The traditional manufacturing process is not able to meet this demand. The new trend is toward mass customization. 3D printing, for example, allows us to produce customized products in smaller quantities and at a lower cost. We can now produce products that are unique to each customer. We can also now produce products that are not possible to produce using traditional manufacturing processes. This is just one example of how Industry and Services 5.0 will impact manufacturing.

In this rapidly changing landscape, we must learn to be comfortable with discomfort, to be agile in our thinking and to embrace change.

• We need to be lifelong learners, to be able to adapt and to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.
• We need to think about things differently and to challenge the status quo.
• We need to be comfortable with ambiguity and with not knowing the answer.
• We need to be able to work in uncertain and complex environments.
• We need to be able to work across disciplines and to be able to collaborate effectively.
• We need to be able to communicate clearly and to be able to tell our stories.
• We need to be able to lead and to be able to follow.
• We need to be able to be both critical and creative thinkers.
• We need to be able to embrace difference and to be open to new perspectives.
• We need to be able to be vulnerable and to be resilient.
• We need to be able to be compassionate and to be empathetic.
• We need to be able to adapt and account for change.
• We need to be able to be human.

This next era is about to begin – a new era where we will redefine how we design and engineer systems, products, and organizations. We are on the cusp of a new Industrial Revolution where we will use data and technology to design and engineer a better future.

THE ELEMENTS OF CIRCUMSTANCES

Why, Who, What, Where, When and How enable the elucidations of questions to probe into the reason, value drivers, variabilities, capability gaps, best-practices, cadence and return-on-investment, and its circularity. These “Elements of Circumstance” are often used in journalism (news style), research, and police investigations. They constitute a formula for getting the complete story on a subject whereby  a report can only be considered complete if it answers in a factual manner, not using only “yes” or “no”, all the questions that can be started with an interrogative word. These circumstances were also popular as a guide for taking confession, for obvious reasons.

Sometimes known as Dimensional Analysis albeit not in the Engineering sense, these elements (the 5Ws and 1H) provide a practical model that can be used to particularize, explain, or predict any given set of circumstances for the articulation of a solution utilizing Subjective, Qualitative, Substantive, Spatial, Quantitative and Temporal dimensions. We utilize concepts of Design Thinking to surface the answers to these questions in a collaborative synthesis approach for solving problems. Design thinking is a powerful process of problem solving that begins with understanding unmet customer needs. From that insight emerges a process for innovation that encompasses concept development, applied creativity, prototyping, and experimentation. Design thinking is the practice of creating things, solving problems, making decisions, devising strategies, and learning using human design talents. It draws on the culture, techniques and principles that have evolved around design disciplines such as urban design, architecture, product design, visual design, and software design. When design thinking approaches are applied to business, the success rate for innovation improves substantially.

HOW MATTERS!

In a recent Forbes article titled How Matters More Than Ever:

Behavior has become a powerful source of excellence and competitive advantage. In the past, bosses could get away with telling subordinates, “Just get it done—I don’t care how.”

The more progressive ones would implore their people to think outside the box, which in their minds was a compliment. According to us, it’s an insult. If you trusted your people, you wouldn’t put them in a box in the first place. In our radically interconnected world, leaders need to flip the switch and replace task-based jobs (which are about what people must do) with values-based missions.

In short, it’s about how we should get things done: Of course, how we do what we do has always mattered. But today, how we behave, consume, build trust in our relationships, and relate to others matters more than ever and in ways it never has before.

We have a slightly different take on the how. In today’s world how is about getting things done. It is also about accounting for the new norms – be it emergent technology, or disruptions due to the pandemic, economic or political considerations. It is not just about efficiency, but also building a new basis for our innovations, interactions, and interventions by building ecosystems that are robust and scalable. It is thus not enough to just connect the dots between systems to enable process automation, but a holistic view of all the interacting elements need to be understood for optimization, harmonization and/or disruption, and for the basis for adapting to constantly changing circumstances.

We also look at behavior from the lens of the customer. What attracts them to a product and eventually compels them to buy and be an advocate? What type of data and analysis is needed understand their needs and expectations, and what type of user experiences are needed? What would help from a customer enablement and loyalty perspective?

Imagining the future requires intense planning. In today’s world we need to link and intertwine multiple systems, make them interoperable, aggregate data, and provide pertinent information at the right time and the right place with flexibility and ease of use. Future-proofing designs for such endeavors entails creating dynamic blueprints that move beyond current 2D and simplistic 3D animations, to constructs that morph – dynamically change, evolve, and articulate with the conditions and the environment, and are embedded with intelligence that will learn, consider, and evolve. Talking a page from the Gestalt philosophy: The whole is bigger/different than the sum of its parts, and we need to move beyond the reductionist philosophy of current systems engineering to enable products and solutions of tomorrow.

Historically Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and of late the Digital Methodology Framework (DMF) have been used to address Engineering issues and manage processes but lack the flexibility and the user experience capabilities that are needed for good collaboration. INCOSE defines MBSE as “the formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases.” It is used to support the requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation associated with the development of complex systems. DFM is MBSE in a digital-modeling environment that provides advantages that document-based systems engineering cannot provide by integrating simulation tools with process activities for rapid engineering design, but still does not account for real time interactions that are needed for custom manufacturing for example.

OUR PERSPECTIVE

Our approach at Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) of making in the new will be called Adaptive Engineering and here is our first treatise on it. Our series of related articles on Everything Connected sets the stage for such transformational recipes using emerging technologies and other technological artifacts to render them in a dynamic and immersive environment.

BORN NOT BUILT

More than a century ago, Henry Ford installed the first simple moving assembly line in a Model T plant, and the world of automobile manufacturing was forever transformed. Just as the assembly line opened new doors for a then-nascent industry, the rise of additive manufacturing creates new opportunities at every phase of the automotive manufacturing life cycle – from functional prototyping to mid- and high-volume production to aftermarket and spare parts. And many of those opportunities relate to production speed and part complexity – or a combination of the two.

Traditional manufacturing methods are built and are subtractive in nature. They are based on forming a desired shape for a block or by defining casts/dies for specific geometries. They cannot account for complex shapes and internal geometries and economics dictate that the cost of changing a product is 10 times more than the cost of designing it.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) on the other hand can account for complexities in geometries because of its ability to create geometries and designs that cannot be created using conventional subtractive manufacturing methods. It has emerged as a powerful tool in recent years and is opening up entire new industries. With AM, designers can create new types of components that were never possible before. A recent survey of 1,900 3D companies found that 52% are using 3D printing to manufacture products, not just prototypes, according to Sculpteo, a 3D-printing subsidiary of German chemical giant BASF. Top uses for 3D printing are making complex shapes and “mass customization,” the ability to manufacture products that are digitally fine-tuned for individuals.

Born not built is our philosophy for the next iteration of engineering to account for our progression with Industry 4.0 and beyond. One of the things that we are seeing is a move towards additive manufacturing and 3D printing, as well as all kinds of new technologies that enable us to build more complex things faster and cheaper. With additive manufacturing, we have the ability to build things that were never possible before. We can build more complex shapes. We can build things that are lighter weight that have better performance and we can do it much faster. The goal is to move away from conventional methods of manufacturing to a new paradigm that allows for more complexity and customization. We call this Custom Manufactory, and this will be detailed in our subsequent posts.

However, the emergence of this new technology has imposed new challenges on the engineer, particularly with regard to the behavior of the materials used in manufacturing additively manufactured parts where both the part and the material are composed simultaneously. The biggest challenges for additive manufacturing, are consistency from one manufacturing run to another, the amount of post-processing required before printed items can be used, and the cost of the raw materials the printers use, the survey found. 3D printers won new attention during the coronavirus pandemic, when companies and households found them useful to produce personal protective equipment like face shields.

PHYSMATICS, AXIOMATIC DESIGN AND THE PARLANTE COMPOSABLE FRAMEWORK

Vector calculus was developed from quaternion analysis near the end of the 19th century. Div, Grad, Curl and all that – a book on vector calculus that very simply defined the concepts of Vector Calculus motivated by an easy way to calculate electric field. Vector calculus, or vector analysis, is concerned with differentiation and integration of vector fields, primarily in 3-dimensional Euclidean space  It is used extensively in physics and engineering, especially in the description of electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, and fluid flow.

In a similar vein, we define the new concept Adaptive Engineering, an iterative process of analysis and synthesis in concurrence with design for robustness and manufacturability where we posit that How Matters! Delivering Innovation for us at Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) is not just about checking the box for Product Development but also following thru the entire lifecycle of the product – up-stream, mid-stream and down-stream to connect all the dots between the different systems and 3rd party services. This enables Design for Manufacturability considerations, appropriate procurement and supply-chain logistics, financial planning, and customer enablement via themed marketing, sell and support. We use AI/ML driven by Physmatics to appropriately drive and manage processes intelligently and efficiently via our Digital Twine blueprint process.

Adaptive Engineering will use the following tenets:

PARLANTE COMPOSABLE FRAMEWORK – Compositions for our future need to be coordinated, flexible and constantly aware of the surroundings – be it for proximity, personalization, privacy, security, cybersecurity threats or other incursions. Parlante Framework is our manifesto to base the “should conditions” of Axiomatic design, needs and requirements and frame our solution.

AXIOMATIC DESIGN – Axiomatic design is a systems design methodology using matrix methods to systematically analyze the transformation of customer needs into functional requirements, design parameters, and process variables. It steps through a domain driven methodology of stepping through the Critical or Conceptualizing Attributes (CAs), Functional Requirements (FRs), Design Parameters (DPs) and Process Variables (PVs) in a mathematical construct to optimize solutioning.

PHYSICS + MATHEMATICS = PHYSMATICS – Eric Lazlow describe this as the new link between physics and mathematics. This contrasts with “mathematical physics,” which historically deals with concrete applications of mathematics to physics. “Mathematical physics” casts mathematics in a subordinate role. In physmatics – the word and the field – the two are equal partners. “Physmatics” implies that the disciplines contribute equally and that the links are profound and inseparable – a concept called dual symmetry.

Whereas the Parlante Framework will define the needs for the composable architecture for building products, Axiomatic Design will concern itself with the How based on two axioms – Independence and Information, and Physmatics will utilize science and math to engineer the solution. A Domain Centric approach will be used to view Customer, Functional, Physical and Process domains to account for the complexities and decomposing the problem into manageable bits.

More details are in a comprehensive technical thesis on how we use this as the basis for engineering.

CONCLUSION

Amidst the skewed distribution and use of people, process and technology in today’s enterprises, Adaptive Engineering proposes a direction to shift this imbalance towards people by bringing them in as process boundaries, appropriate use of tools to reduce technical debt and using customer insight feedback loops to align with human-need, desires, and aspirations. This is appropriate as we progress thru our industrial revolutions from Industry 4.0 (smart manufacturing) to Industry and Services 5.0 (human centric solutions).

We see engineering becoming more about data analytics and less about traditional engineering disciplines. We are already starting to see this trend with the rise of data science and the increasing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in engineering. We believe that the future of engineering is about data-driven design and engineering. In the future, engineers will be able to use data to design and optimize products and systems in ways that were never before possible. The world of engineering is changing rapidly, and the traditional engineering disciplines are becoming less relevant. To be successful in the future, engineers need to be open to new approaches and technologies. They need to be able to use data to design and optimize products and systems in ways that were never before possible.

The smart leaders are those who have found new ways to elicit peak performance in a world where traditional forms of power are rapidly losing sway. It’s all about rethinking the strategic significance of behavior, moving it from defense to offense.

This is an interconnected, globally interdependent, volatile, constantly changing, and hopeful new world. The leaders, organizations, and individuals best equipped to navigate today’s new conditions consistently get one key idea right: it is no longer what we do that matters most. It is HOW we do it.

NITIN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist

nitin.uchil@numorpho.com