Mickey McManus: LinkedIn Blog - Warp and Weft

Mickey McManus is a visiting research fellow in the Office of the CTO, spending 3 months exploring the implications for design, business, technology, and education of a future where computing ceases to be confined to any particular, "box," but instead is freely accessible in the ambient environment. Some call this coming age the rise of the Internet of Things or the era of Pervasive Computing and characterize it as a time when atoms and bits combine to form an information ecology. Mickey is the author of Trillions which is a field guide of sorts to this new era. He has spent the last 13 years leading MAYA, a research lab and technology design consultancy that spun out of Carnegie Mellon 25 years ago and has dedicated itself to taming complexity and putting people first. Mickey wanders throughout Autodesk, asking questions, fostering conversations, learning by making stuff where possible, and digging deeply into our own products and research initiatives to understand where Autodesk is going and how we can be an integral part in cultivating a future where innovators can thrive and their efforts are in essence "born trillions ready."

Mickey had a post on his blog you should check out:

Read the article.

I found it fascinating. Here are some of my favorite quotes.

• "...research... suggests that on average a manufacturing job supports 1.6 jobs outside of manufacturing, and that more advanced manufacturing activity has even higher multiplier effects, nearly 5 jobs across the broader economy as a result of the high wage jobs and wealth that manufacturing brings into a community."

• "In 1980 clothing manufacturing, one part of the broader textiles industry, was a significant contributor to jobs in the USA.... Unfortunately, ...by 2007 95% of clothing was imported from another country. ...America lost more than 900,000 jobs. ...Where the jobs went, so went the innovation. ...In 2006, more than 371,000 patents, and utility patents were filed with the Chinese patent office (SIPO), from which 76% came from Chinese applicants."

• "...modern computing itself got its start when Herman Hollerith saw punch cards on a Jacquard [weaving] loom and built the first calculating machine to tabulate the 1890 US census. His invention finished the process YEARS faster than prior censuses and he went on to create a company we now know as IBM."

• "...e-textiles are this really weird corner of the embedded computing design space. We grapple with all the problems of being a low power mobile computer, but we're also worried about the position of sensors in real space in real time. Even in computing we're a little different. In distributed computing you don't necessarily care about where the computers are. You rolled up a sleeve? We need to know that."

Manufacturing is an industry long-served by Autodesk. It's great that Mickey is on board with us on the cutting edge of where the intersection of computing and textiles will take us. Comments? You can post below, post on the original LinkedIn blog, or email to [email protected].

A computing jean-genie is alive in the lab.