Agile development of a physical or hardware product takes place with cross-functional teams, capable of developing different design ideas in parallel, transforming them into partial products or their high-value mockups of corporate knowledge.
This incremental development is done in order to validate design ideas even before building the product in its entirety.
The big advantage, which I constantly verify with the different teams I work alongside in physical product development, is that this mode really allows for concurrent design, of which Design for X is a key aspect.
Physical realization of the product
The physical realization of parts of the product, in fact, allows us to delve into different aspects of industrialization that complement those more related to functionality.
There is thus a continuous construction of physical elements, necessary to continue, iteratively and incrementally toward the goal.
This is very close to a craft way of doing things, where the basic concepts are:
- the construction of an single and unique parts
- the logic of physical construction to bring ideas into better focus.
I have seen in practice that even in the construction of industrial products, digital twins ranging from CAD3D models to simulators very often cannot provide answers as much as a physical product.
Thinking about, for example, the assemblability of elements of a product in very confined spaces is very difficult to do while remaining in a virtual world.
Constructing physical objects that are identical or very similar to the final one allows for a more practical solution, giving rise to solutions that are very difficult to identify with CAD tools.
Making a sample of the product
Being able to quickly make a sample of the product with 3D printing, done by hand, or with modern CNC machine tools, allows those who are creating it, to have immediate feedback on their ideas.
Ideas are validated by doing practical experiments, for which the necessary equipment must be designed and made.
Thus, there is a need to break out of the patterns of classical industrial production designed to repetitively produce consolidated products.
It is like returning to a creative workshop, in some ways similar to those of the Renaissance where the work of art was not built on the first attempt but through successive touch-ups or remakes.
In a similar way, craft workshops operate, with the craftsman being both the creator and the builder of the work.
Within today’s creative economy, the individual person alone is inadequate to meet the challenge of product development, which integrates several technical disciplines and requires unprecedented cooperation.
Working as a team then becomes a necessity to cope with the complexity of today’s product development.
The digital twins and building technologies available today are so powerful that they allow us to extend human capabilities, almost as if they were prosthetics that enhance our ability to imagine products.
Technologies in the service of humans
So I am talking about a craftsmanship where technologies are at the service of humans, and where the agile approach makes sustainable a way of working where designers and manufacturers work side by side, making it difficult in many cases to distinguish the two roles.
