Rhythmeering

In other blogs, I’ve quoted Alan Kay’s statement that “hardware is just software crystallized” and I’m about to do so again(the link will show up in the comments) because as more and more hardware companies move into software, people are realizing where the real value is. Consequently I though it might be valuable given the pending release of the iPhone, to revisit how this transformation began and what the driving forces are. I covered that topic in the first few pages of Jazz and the Future of Global E-Commerce which follow.

Engineering has been undergoing a profound transformation in the past 50 years, going from a discipline which dealt primarily with matter and energy, to one which deals with knowledge processing. This change in engineering is so fundamental that it requires a new term to describe the discipline. Rhythmeering™ is that term.

Early in the industrial era progress in engineering seemed to be correlated with increasing size and force as machines got larger and more powerful. However, with these increases came the need for greater precision and efficiency. Both required greater volumes of more accurate information from which the knowledge of how and when to manipulate matter and energy could emerge. This information was acquired and manipulated by brute force techniques until the demands of World War II brought about the computer era. After the war, during the space race and cold war, machines rapidly began to get smaller and/or lighter.
Energy Shifts

The energy associated with large machines tends to be primarily thermal and kinetic (in other words, derived from the motion of matter). As machines get smaller and/or lighter, they either have more to do with electrical energy or require more information for analysis and design, or both. Electronic measurement techniques ultimately deal with vibratory, rhythmic phenomena, so they can be easily digitized and represented as information.
Dematerialization Appears

At the same time that the reduction in size and force was increasing the role of information in engineering, another factor was also contributing. Dematerialization, the shrinking of the scale of manipulation of matter and energy, began to turn engineering structures into information structures and engineering process into information flow generated by electronic signals. As a result of dematerialization today, a significant part of all engineering activity is concerned with things not visible to the human eye. This is true even for large, complex machines such as cars and planes.

Greater emphasis and value is placed on smaller size and more subtle force. Compare the size and physical force of a $20,000 car and a $20,000 computer. Then consider implications of the fact that the car is becoming more and more computerized! The design, construction and operation of light, aerodynamically efficient, high-performance vehicles is an information-intensive process. From composite materials for cars and planes to microchips to nanoscale devices, the amount of material per dollar for products is shrinking.

In industrially developed economies, dematerialization…is an established trend. When measured in terms of physical quantity per constant dollar of Gross National Product (GNP), basic materials use has been falling since the 1970s…. Practical examples of this trend are the steadily declining size and increasing power of computers, or the nearly 20 percent drop in the average weight of U.S. automobiles between 1975 and 1985.
Industrial Ecology

Bulking Down

There is also a reduced emphasis in engineering and manufacturing on the importance of bulk matter. In the Industrial Age, a great deal of time and energy was spent storing and moving materials, parts and products. Raw materials were shipped to manufacturing plants, turned into parts and shipped to a warehouse. Parts were shipped from the warehouse to another manufacturing plant where they were assembled into products which were then shipped to a warehouse. Products were then shipped to stores from warehouses to stock the shelves or to the customer.

Nowadays, inventories are disappearing. Typically, materials, parts and products are shipped only when needed and warehouses are becoming final-stage manufacturing or assembly locations. In less time than it took for the PC to evolve from the first computer, this trend will be extended dramatically by nanotechnology and teleportation technologies currently being developed. Clearly something is going on here! Yet engineering has not yet incorporated enterprise information structure and flow into its methodology, which continues to maintain the outmoded perspective of large machines.

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