These visions for future manufacturing emerged from a 2-day event, ‘RECODE International Symposium – Future Visions of Manufacturing: Customisation, Redistribution and Technology’, held in May this year at IMechE, London. You can find details about the RECODE project here

RECODE is an EPSRC funded network made up of a number of projects. Our project explored the impact of engaging people in design decision making in New Product Development and across the product lifecycle to understand if these interactions can create new and unusual business scenarios for sustainability, focusing on ideas of redistributed manufacturing. Four scenarios emerged that represented both short and long life products and involved different interactions with people: from algorithm based data collection for NPD decision-making, to individual conversations exploring ways and reasons to prolong product life. The work addressed how people (consumers) involved in the design loop could better influence NPD product preferences, product-life behaviours and product durability in a context of both circular and redistributed manufacturing economies.

The work will be presented at the PLATE conference, TU Delft, November.