The connection between the ethereal beauty of Venice and inflexible certainties of industrial production system may not seem obvious. But the connections start at the very center of this city that sits on an island - in a series of buildings guarded by a pair of stone lions, a few minutes walk from Piazza San Marco.

Prototype buildings carbon and glass fiber sized print 3D

Like many other former industrial sites, the Arsenal of Venice is now used mainly as a cultural center. But was there for over 500 years, that modern industry was born. The shipyard was the first user to significant production of standardized parts - 16 000 people worked at the site in 1500, handling everything from firearms to large wooden ships, some of which were produced in a matter of days.

The standard parts are one of the major influences behind the development of the industrial system of the twenty-first century. The process makes possible the production of 1 billion devices that support and enhance human life, and employs about 10% of the population active.

But manufacturers have always faced a problem: how to make new items and complicated, the right way, in small quantities. The difficulty has always been accommodate the opposing aims speed and efficiency of a hand and flexibility and variety of the other.

With the three-dimensional printing, machines produce complex shapes from plastic and metal

The emergence of "custom manufacturing" promises to solve this contradiction. Using computerized design, three-dimensional printing techniques such as will enable companies based in Birmingham or Belize manufacture intricate parts for products ranging from space rockets to trucks, which can be mounted almost anywhere. The options for customer choice in relation to the appearance of artifacts will increase, with only a minimum commitment of quality or cost.

This event puts the world on the threshold of the fifth era of industrial production: the "mass customization". Under the 3D printing - also called "additive manufacturing" - machines based on advances in electronics, laser technology and chemical produce complex shapes from plastic or metal pellets.

"It contributes to a new industry that will greatly reduce the gap between design and production," said Ian Harris, the Additive Manufacturing Consortium, a research center in the United States facing the industrial sector. "The manufacturers will tell customers 'Tell us what you want' and make specific products for them."

The mass customization opens the door for a period of more creativity. Large and small companies will see the end of the restrictions inherent in the system of interchangeable parts that began in Venice. The standardization allowed an incredible variety of products - provided they were supported by a "menu" fixed components. Otherwise, all the benefits in terms of speed, accuracy and price were lost.

The Arsenal of Venice, pioneering in the manufacture of standard parts

These restrictions will be reduced, according to David Abbott, General Electric - the U.S. group which is developing applications for new techniques, alongside companies such as Siemens and BMW in Germany, Honda, Japan, EADS, Europe; and Rolls-Royce, UK. Additive manufacturing machines that are already being made by companies such as Stratasys and Z Corporation, the United States, EOS, Germany, and Arcam, Sweden, will be critical in this process.

"The new technology will greatly improve the flexibility of the industries in the design of new parts and products for a variety of reasons - be they the greatest savings in fuel consumption of a gas turbine, is in changing the look of a kitchen utensil for purely aesthetic reasons, "said Abbott. The product developers will be able to projects "off piste", or unusual, gaining more freedom to develop products in areas ranging from medical equipment to consumer electronics.

The techniques also flush potential competition for those who "missed the train" in the earlier periods of industrial development. Professor Brent Stucker, University of Louisville, Ky., said one of the most significant is a reduction in the level of conventional industrial infrastructure - machine tools, test equipment and machinery related to production - that companies and countries need when want to be considered industrial competitors in weight.

"They make it easier for countries in early stages of industrial development - like Africa - deviate from the conventional path toward the creation of production capacity, and make a valuable contribution to the global industrial sector much earlier than they could consider possible "says Professor Stucker.

These opportunities should also be open for smart people, says Professor Stucker. The large and well-organized global manufacturers continue to have competitive advantages, but the new ideas will again put more emphasis on workers dealing with artisanal production - a race that is almost extinct in most rich nations since the end of the blacksmiths.

In the era of customized production, the first products likely to be made a routine manner are items that need to fit the unique biological characteristics of an individual. They include bones and teeth implants, hearing aids, stents to unblock arteries and specialized surgical instruments.

These products are likely to be followed by objects that individual preferences are important items and fashion jewelry to lighting systems and furniture. The mass customization will also benefit from the manufacturers of industrial goods essential, but often not noticed, in which the need of change is connected to the engineering. Manufacturers of valves, for example, now produce up to 500 thousand varieties to meet the needs of flexible operating procedures of different industrial sectors.

Humanity has reached this stage after a journey that began around 1200 BC, using traditional techniques to make products ranging from pots and pan the arrowheads. During this "customized low volume," everything was done on a per unit basis. Even with semiformalizadas techniques as used in the production of glasses, the procedures were slow and expensive.

The standardization paved the way for the production of parts and pieces that can be exchanged, which in the late eighteenth century, the United Kingdom, helped spur the first industrial revolution - the set of events that established the industrial production and the strength behind the progress of civilization.

Production systems based on standard parts was inserted in sectors such as the production of machinery and industrial engineering. Nevertheless, progress has not been easy. In the 1890s most industries remained wedded to traditional techniques. The introduction of standardized procedures for low-volume involved considerable costs - investment in machine tools and design - which could hardly be justified unless the savings were too high. And for that to happen, the products needed to be produced in larger volumes - something that occurred only when demand increased substantially more than it used to be the case at the time.

It was the automaker Henry Ford adapted the systems of interchangeable parts created in Venice to the needs of the early twentieth century. He did this by increasing the scale under which functioned the production of standard parts. He also benefited from new ideas about management and procedures at the factory, in the process creating the "standardization of high-volume" - the third major stage of industrialization. The benefits could be seen in the price of the Ford Model T, which fell from U.S. $ 850 in 1909 to $ 690 in 1912, and less than half that a decade later. It was a great advertisement for the "mass production" - a process that others, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners to power turbine generators, quickly adopted.

The Ford cars were characterized for the quality and relatively low prices, but also the inflexibility of the design. (It is a memorable gift that Henry Ford made to customers that they could have "a car painted any color ... as long as it's black.") The standardization was used in large volumes for the manufacture of identical products, it did not work so well with products were different.

However, some thought that it would be possible to adapt the system. Among them was Peter Drucker, a management theorist who in 1973 challenged companies to find ways to use the smallest possible number of interchangeable components to make the largest possible number of products. Toyota's managers accepted the challenge and found a way to meet customer demands - that particular color or style bumper - with a series of assembly procedures, all based on standard parts.

Thus was created the fourth era of industrial production. The Toyota production system, or more generally, "personalization of high volume," is the system that gave the world the flexible format in which all types of industrial and consumer products are made on a large scale. Although there has been a huge commercial success, the continued use of standard parts makes it difficult to make fundamental changes in the design of established products. With mass customization, the world will have the opportunity to create, from basic materials, parts prepared in accordance with the principles favored by creative designers and manufacturers.

What's next? Despite the promise of personalized production, manufacturers continue manipulating materials on a molecular basis, as people have done for millennia. The challenge now is how they can work on a submolecular level, molding materials on the nanometer scale - equivalent to one billionth of a meter.

The challenge was launched by the American physicist Richard Feynman in a famous lecture delivered in 1959: "I'm not afraid to consider the final question: if we end up getting in a wonderful future, have the atoms the way we want, the very atoms, all way! "

Feynman's comments raise the possibility of getting the 100 chemicals found in new molecules to create a huge number of materials with which at present can only dream.

Given the current pace of development of nanotechnology, it seems likely that the issue raised by Feynman will be answered by 2050, when the sixth era of industrial production, "nanoprodução" mass market, would be ready to start. The 3000 years of evolution of the global industrial production still have many opportunities to pursue.

Source: Value

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