TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Amanda Peyton:

I titled this post “APIs for Manufaucturing” because that’s what I hope will happen; in many ways the changes are already underway. The dream is that manufacturing will eventually be democratized through a series of APIs. They will make it easy for aspirational producers to access expensive production devices that they would not be able to get access to on their own. Because sadly manufacturing is still extremely difficult and out of reach for all but the most tenacious producers. Open-source hardware and consumer-friendly 3D printing is slowly changing that, but getting any sort of scale remains quite difficult.

This is the right way to be thinking about the future. Like software, designing and manufacturing hardware is going to become something that almost anyone can do. If that’s the case, we should expect many small organizations to flourish which make products designed for very specific niches. Manufacturing will be the commodity, a relatively unimportant element in making products, and an element where very few people can gain an advantage over competitors. The main point of leverage for organizations will be design.

I don’t use “design” to mean merely the conceptual and physical design of products, but rather in seeing connections between disparate technologies and concepts that, when combined, provide outsized value compared to before. The iPhone is illustrative example of this; it brought together mobile processors, touch screens, the web and an operating system originally developed for desktop PCs and created an explosion of app development. I wrote about this in September 2011 in an article titled “The Age of Insight”:

We have to think. This is an age where all of our gains will come from insights into what make products, services, processes, and structures fundamentally better for us. Whereas the twentieth century was about standardization and following a series of steps in a well-defined process, in this new century, there are no defined processes. Everything is to be questioned, re-thought, re-made, or even thrown out altogether.

This is going to be a century where all of the tools for creating products and services are almost entirely commoditized and available to everyone. This will mean fundamental upheaval in our economy functions and therefore in employment for people. People will lose their jobs and some will be unable to re-train for jobs at a payment level anywhere close to their previous level. But it will also allow everyone to participate in creating what they see as a better way to do something. These changes will create pain for many, but it will also allow for incredible opportunity for people to create their future in a way the world’s never seen before.

This will require us to think differently. In this new century, potentially everyone is an entrepreneur, a designer, a creator. And therefore, our education system will need to be re-designed to grow critical and creative thinkers, people who are constantly looking around at the world and analyzing how things work and thinking about how it could be better.