Engineering for Tomorrow: Make It Simpler and More Enjoyable

Abstract

Engineering is rapidly increasing its complexity and complicatedness. But current engineering is still stuck with the idea of developing and producing better products. But to cope with the increasing diversification and personalization, products are no more designed and produced based on an individual product concept, but they are moving rapidly toward team products. Further, IoT (Internet of Things) is changing the whole scene. Living things (humans) and nonliving things (machines/products) come to work together in the same team. Until now, humans gave instructions to machines/products and they responded. It was conversation. But in the IoT Connected Society, communication will replace conversation. It becomes more and more often that the receiver needs to presume what is the intent of the speaker, although the intent is not explicitly expressed. Besides, our world is expanding rapidly, so the number of degrees of freedom increases exponentially. Thus, we cannot communicate verbally anymore. Therefore, we must establish a new way of nonverbal communication. This may be compared to establishing another culture. When we share the same culture, we can communicate nonverbally. In other words, engineering tomorrow will be changing from product development to culture development. To achieve this purpose, we must look at engineering from a very different perspective, i.e., how we can make engineering much simpler, but produce more satisfaction. This paper describes new approaches of engineering toward achieving such a goal. The basic idea is to change from product-focused to process-focused. Value is no more evaluated on product functions. Adaptability is increasing its importance. AI is expected to solve the problem. But their growth is exponential so that it is feared in 2045, it will exceed humans, and technological singularity will happen. People fear they might lose their jobs. What make the matter worse, population is decreasing rapidly in some countries. These issues are discussed here and it is pointed out that making engineering much simpler and more enjoyable and let nonexperts enjoy the processes of engineering is expected to be the best solution.