A SELF-REFLECTION ON THE FUTURE OF MAKING THING S
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A SELF-REFLECTION ON THE FUTURE OF MAKING THINGS By: G. Page Singletary Jr., Major Account Sales Executive, Autodesk
Dedicated to my father, Gene Page Singletary, Peanut Executive and Maker “I got to thinking, what would my childhood have been like in the new era of connection.” My name is G. Page Singletary. I work as a Major Accounts Sales Executive in the Media & Entertainment group at Autodesk. I live in the wonderful city of Austin, TX. I have some amazing customers and my job is a lot of fun. From hanging out in Mountain View watching self driving cars navigate streets, to touring theme parks in Los Angeles or Orlando, to watching a Digital Colorist work on Super Bowl commercials at The Mill in New York City. It’s a great gig and very stimulating. We have a new calling card at Autodesk called The Future of Making Things. The Future of Making Things or FOMT is about how rapid advances in technology are profoundly changing how our customers design and make things and how people consume and interact with the things that are made. FOMT starts by looking at the disruptions that are shaping the way consumers and producers make buildings, infrastructure, stories, and products. What are the implications of these disruptions for the way we are going to work in the future? And what techniques can we employ to manage these disruptions as we enter upon this new era of making things? My Future of Making Things story starts in 1967, in a small farm town near the Atlantic Ocean in the Southern United States by the name of Wakefield, VA. Wakefield is literally a one-stoplight town, half way between Richmond, the capital and Virginia Beach the resort city on the coast. Using the vernacular of my beloved farming community . . . I got to thinking, what would my childhood have been like in the new era of connection. Let’s take a look. What was happening in 1967? The Vietnam War was in full force Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing title In England a new type of model became a fashion sensation by the name of Twiggy Skirts were getting shorter The Beatles continued to reign supreme The Grateful Dead were just getting going Color televisions became more mainstream as prices began to come down Going mobile at the Googleplex
But none of these things really mattered much to an eight-year-old boy. Most of the technology that I needed was in the form of a small AM transistor radio that my Grandfather gave me for my 7th birthday. It had a beautiful leather case with a little holder for the headphones.
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It really was a simpler time. During the day we played out in the yard or walked through an old cemetery to a little league field that I had helped build with other boys in our town. Have you seen the movie Field of Dreams? I lived in Wakefield because my father was in the peanut processing business. This meant that when the peanuts came out of the fields they were brought to his plant by trucks and trailers. They were weighed and then unloaded for processing. The peanuts would make their way by conveyer belts to the top floor of the mill and then come down through various shoots and belts, until they were shelled and sorted into different sizes, eventually being bagged and shipped out by rail to food processing plants where they were made into products like peanut butter or peanut oil. The process was very labor intensive. Sometimes dad had over 300 laborers in the mill. Now I had one other cool piece of technology. It was a wooden skateboard that I made myself. With that skateboard, my world got a tiny bit bigger, because I could scoot around the block to the corner drug store where I would buy packs of Topps baseball cards for a dime. I landed a Johnny Bench rookie card and became a Cincinnati Reds fan that very moment. Johnny became the greatest catcher the game has ever known and the Big Red Machine won multiple World Series titles during my youth. That same summer I discovered that if I sat on my front porch after about 8 o’clock at night, I could pick up WLW at 700 on the AM dial, the 50,000-watt voice of Reds Baseball. I would listen to the first five or so innings outside and then as the signal got progressively clearer, I would go up to my room and listen until the game ended, sometimes using the headphones so my parents thought I was asleep. For the scientific reader, the clearer signal is because the composition of the ionosphere at night is different than during the day because of the presence or absence of the sun. Truth be told, I never shut down the transistor until the Red’s broadcast duo of Marty Brennaman and Joe Knuxhall uttered their nightly sign-offs. Marty: “There’s a fly ball to left field, George Foster settles under it . . . and . . . this one belongs to the Red’s.” Then another 30 minutes listening to the Red’s postgame show, and Joe would always wrap up the night. “This is the old lefthander, rounding third and heading for home, goodnight everybody.”
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So in summary, while Dad was at the peanut mill dealing with hundreds of employees, conveyer belts, gear shafts, shaking machines, and other equipment; I was either playing baseball with other farm kids at the old cemetery, riding my homemade skateboard to the drug store to collect baseball cards, listening to baseball on the radio, or locked down in an exciting board game of something called APBA baseball. APBA (commonly called "app-bah" by its loyal followers) is an elaborate board game with dice and player statistic cards for every major league player – 24 teams times 24 players equals 576 cards. A kid who loved baseball could entertain himself for hours on end, making lineups, rolling the dice as each player came to the plate, making pitching changes, pinch-hitting at crucial times, and keeping an elaborate scorebook, all by pencil and paper. That was then, and this is now. How to play APBA
Why are we at Autodesk talking about The Future of Making Things? Because advances in technology are changing how things are made at a ‘disruptive’ rate. Autodesk has always thrived in disruptive-times; thus we are uniquely positioned to create new tools for the future that will help our customers be successful. To better understand how Autodesk is helping our customers through the disruption, we need to answer these questions: What were the past eras of disruption and why this new era is called the Era of Connection? What are the advances in technology that are causing the disruption? How will ‘making things’ change in the future and how will consumers interact with these things? The 60’s and 70’s are best defined as the Era of Communication – radios, televisions, fax machines. I suppose my transistor radio was once a major technology disruption! This was followed by the Era of Documentation, starting in the mid 80’s about the time Autodesk was founded. Autodesk led the industry transformation to computer aided design (CAD) on the Personal Computer. This era improved on the production of manual drawings (pencil and paper) by creating files that described what was to be produced. This made the process of ‘drafting’ highly efficient. This was followed by what we call the Era of Optimization – moving customers to a new level of digital technology and 3D modeling. This new era focused on the development of intelligent models with useful data to simulate physical and performance characteristics. This helped people imagine, design and create better buildings, better infrastructure, better stories, and better products. Today we are moving into an entirely new era, the Era of Connection. The Era of Connection is producing a monumental shift in the world, unlike anything any of us have ever experienced in our lifetime. What are the IT trends driving this new Era of Connection? • • •
First, everyone has access to massive amounts of computing power. As millions of square feet of data centers open every year around the world, the availability of computing resources – for anyone, not just the largest corporations and institutions – is becoming a reality. Concurrent to this is the increasing reliability and bandwidth of our networks that can connect people to people and people to resources at high speeds. The explosion of portable smart devices, making it possible to access the computing power and the collaboration capabilities, from the palm of our hands.
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Restated, these trends lead to a world where everyone has a powerful computational device on them at all times, wherever they are, connected at high speeds to an even larger pool of computational power. It is driving major societal changes – from wearable tech to the internet of things. And it has significant implications for the future of how things will be made. So what would the world look like if I were a kid today on the front porch, in the little town of Wakefield? Well I suppose my homemade skateboard would be a lot nicer, because I would learn from others on Instructables. I would outsource a fiberglass board and wheels from any number of manufacturers, all easily found on the Web. I could still play baseball at the park beside the cemetery and collect baseball cards, but I wonder if I would? What if my Grandfather gave me a new iPhone 6s with an unlimited data plan? I would download a baseball video game and spend hours playing simulated games. No need for board games, dice, and manual score sheets. I wouldn’t even have to go to a friend’s house to play the game together. I would also listen to or even watch any major league game, right on my phone, regardless of where I was or where it was being played or what was going on in the ionosphere. And what about my dad’s peanut mill? What will be different in the Era of Connection? Well, the tractors drive themselves, just like the cars of the future. And the peanut processing equipment is more automated, as robots and machines do much of the work that was once done by humans. What would my father think of this new world? It is all too commonplace to be negative or cynical when comparing the way-things-used-to-be, with the way things are today. I am not one to spend time wishing things did not change. I enjoy the newest technologies and I love living in what is perhaps the most exciting time in human history. However, in closing, I want to reference Geoff Colvin, and his new book Humans are Underrated - What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. As we continue to share our FOMT stories at Autodesk, I hope we also pay attention to the themes in Colvin’s book: “As technology advances, the economy increasingly values the most deeply human interpersonal abilities: empathy, social sensitivity, collaboration, storytelling, leading, and relationship building.” I was blessed to have a father who understood all of these things. I hope I will always remember the lessons he taught.
Gene Page Singletary (Jan 7, 1932 - Dec 10, 2014)
(See then and now photos on Page 5)
A SELF-REFLECTION ON THE FUTURE OF MAKING THING S
Then: Circa 1967
Now: The Era of Connection
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