杏吧原创

Reports of the future鈥檚 arrival have been greatly exaggerated (Image: Alamy)

, Design Museum, London, until 3 November.

An exhibition on manufacturing鈥檚 future and an evangelical book on nanotechnology highlight that the directions we鈥檒l take are very much up for grabs

See more in our gallery: 鈥�Future objects: The changing face of everyday items鈥�

THERE鈥橲 a quiet revolution taking place in factories worldwide.

In 2013, manufacturing may still resemble old mass-production assembly lines, but increasingly, technological advance means they are producing customised items that need never be the same twice. And that is changing how designers and manufacturers think, as the focus shifts from homogeneous products to end users and their desire for individuality. Designers are now keen to have us co-design products, and even manufacture them at home.

But when it comes to how these changes will affect us, neither we nor manufacturers have a clear idea, it seems. So an exhibition celebrating new design and manufacturing at London鈥檚 Design Museum should be timely.

Called The Future is Here: A New Industrial Revolution, its remit is to explore how the boundaries between designer, manufacturer and consumer are becoming blurred.

There is certainly no shortage of ideas and ways forward. Mass customisation is a recurring motif in the exhibition, which showcases consumer concepts such as Mi Adidas, a website that allows customers to design their own trainers from the sole up. Then there are more unusual initiatives, like the smart production line of US electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, shown on video. Its robots receive different commands car-by-car to create unique vehicles. And there鈥檚 UCODO (User Co-Designed Object), a website where anyone can customise a design by shape, size and colour.

The exhibition also highlights how users can become an integral part of manufacturing. That may mean bringing digital life to products such as brewing kits or home-lighting systems through the use of a tiny Raspberry Pi computer or Arduino circuit boards. These open-source electronic kits can control just about any DIY hardware project.

Or it can involve getting seriously hands-on with 3D printing. Part of the appeal of the much-hyped 3D-printing revolution is in manufacturing objects from a digital model, and the Design Museum has 3D printers you can play with.

But while the exhibition brims with ideas, areas such as nanotechnology, flexible electronics and biomanufacturing are under-represented. Perhaps things are changing so fast that a pick-and-mix was the best the curators could hope for, but it leaves the show struggling to present a future it claims is 鈥渉ere鈥�.

Instead, the emphasis on current, if novel, processes creates a feeling of faddishness rather than coherent prediction.

Luckily we can at least address the lack of nanotechnology with K. Eric Drexler鈥檚 latest book, Radical Abundance. A long-standing nano evangelist, this time Drexler focuses on the engineering that will take nanotechnology from a vague scientific discipline to the mainstream. To deliver on its early promise, he says, scientists must copy engineers and make stuff that 鈥渏ust works鈥�.

Drexler鈥檚 suggestions resonate with at least one of the exhibits. Take his 鈥渕icroblocks鈥�. This idea turns science into production and employs a cascade of thousands of tiny robotic cells. Each builds components at the molecular level, feeding those components to increasingly larger robots until a full-size product is created. It may be the ultimate customisable production line, allowing designers to tweak products from the molecular level up. Tesla Motors鈥� production line may be a step in this direction.

Drexler also expects that such bottom-up techniques will eventually let us use radically different, abundant materials such as carbon, nitrogen and silicon oxide rather than scarcer elements such as zinc and tin. That in turn will let us manufacture products far more economically 鈥� financially and environmentally.

Bold claims abound, but they highlight a sticking point with both Drexler鈥檚 book and the Design Museum鈥檚 future-gazing: of course many of the ideas and products are exciting, but neither book nor exhibition presents a compelling enough sense of what the future might actually look like.

Not only will new technologies change the way we live, but the mere anticipation of change may be enough to shape expectations and outcomes, warns Drexler. And while custom-producing from home has great appeal, he fears our enthusiasm might run wild and see us turn our homes into factories, churning out disposable goods that we tire of in days.

聯We could turn our homes into factories, churning out disposable goods that we tire of in days聰

A way out of this scenario is offered in one of the other strands running through the exhibition: 鈥渆motionally durable design鈥�. The Optimist鈥檚 Toaster, for instance, was designed so that its material value and longevity (evident in its date-stamped, all-aluminium build) signal that it should last for generations. This idea extends to digital electronics. For example, a Sony concept device called Wandular would use software updates and hardware plug-ins to ensure that it is cherished over a lifetime, while its functionality keeps pace.

But once again, the exhibition鈥檚 curators seem unsure what to back. Next to the Optimist鈥檚 Toaster, for example, sits a pair of Puma trainers designed to biodegrade. These shoes are a totally different approach to tackling the problem of discarding old objects in favour of new. Ultimately, the exhibition does little to help us work out whether the great shift will drive us deeper into disposability or return us to a tradition of looking after our possessions.