15Jul Engineering 2.0

One of major benefits of working with computers and internet-based technologies are the massive communities behind them. Such communities offer feedback on ideas, technical help, and tutoring. In addition, standards begin to arise on their own because developers want to be able to integrate with other existing services to ease transition to and from their software. To allow other developers to embrace a new standard, an author of the standard usually releases it free-to-use, creates simple documentation, and provides support usually in the form of a open forum.

However, from my observations, the physical engineering world seems to completely lack such concepts as a whole. Almost every device you can buy has parts that are completely non-interchangeable with one-another. About the only thing that is standard is the screw type that the product gets put together with. Why can’t products be made with interchangeable plug-n-play modules? If the radio brakes in one stereo, why can’t I just pull out the ‘radio receiver module’ and replace it with another?

You can sorta do that by un-soldering several circuit board parts, look at the model numbers (if they have one), and hope that some foreign warehouse has them for sale for consumers. It makes it even more difficult because there are hundreds of thousands variations on parts and warehouses can’t inventory that many effectively… as opposed to carrying components that encapsulate functionality that devices share in common. This is just one example of engineering evolving.

What would Engineering 2.0 look like? Perhaps, if someone had an idea to build their own radio, they could:

• Create a blueprint of the radio case using a web application
• Upload the blueprint to a company that can cost-effectively make custom cases
• Order a radio and power ‘module’
• Order device buttons that are easily mountable to custom cases
• Radio module has a ‘USB’-esk port for the button interface to plug into

In a weekend, someone who knows little about the engineering world could literally build their own home device that fits their exact needs. Maybe this is all far-fetched, but I am convinced that traditional everyday engineering as we know it will change based on the need for a new level of global standardization and maintenance tasks that are client friendly.

Newsweek offers an interesting article that touches on the issue as well:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/55776

Author: Jonathan Dunlap Jonathan is a veteran software architect, author of IsoHill, humanitarian, and has worked with Bigpoint Inc, CrowdStar, ePrize, and Microsoft.

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