Members of the LoCM team are preparing for an inaugural workshop of the EPSRC Platform grant (see previous news item) to be held at The 25th International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE2018) in Modena on July 3rd. To realise the ‘Manufacturing the Future’ utopia, requires ‘Designing the Future’ through the development of tools and competences for future resilient manufacturing; this future builds on the past and present (product and associated service knowledge) but anticipates and predicts the needs of the future by creating a new breed of ‘Trans-Disciplinary Design-Engineer’. This vision needs design and manufacturing researchers to: (1) create a trans-disciplinary suite of tools (e.g. a toolkit depository) and an intellectual framework to support the next- generation 3D/4D additive, traditional subtractive and hybrid manufacturing communities; (2) capture and integrate known design expertise across sectors into a local feed-forward hub to accelerate the integration of new materials, processes and technologies into existing and future products; (3) develop trans-disciplinary engineers (at the boundary of design-manufacturing) to accelerate the ‘manufacturing the future’ outcomes into tangible products and wealth.
In this regard, the workshop will focus on answering the following questions:
- How can we understand and characterise domain specific disruptive change occurring through new manufacturing technologies? And
- How do we rapidly engineer an integrated design and manufacturing tool kit to enable cross-sector uptake of these new technologies?
Inaugural workshop for the Platform grant on Resilient Trans-Disciplinary Design Engineers