More of the Why Regarding the Future of Making

In a recent blog post, I shared part of Autodesk's vision for the future of making to make the case that we need to help our customers do more and better with less. I cited housing for our growing population and feeding that population as examples. Being a fan of the Talking Heads album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, I entitled my blog post "More Words About Buildings and Food."

This blog post is an extension of that post by sharing more of Autodesk vision of the future of making.

• 400,000 people are joining the middle class each and every day, and along with this growing population comes a growing demand.

  

   

• This shift to the middle class means that 400,000 more people every day will desire — and deserve — what we all do: things like mobile phones...

  

   

• ...and motorized transportation...

  

   

• ...and housing.

  

   

• By 2050, two-thirds of us will live in cities.

  

   

• We'll need to invest in new infrastructure...

  

   

• ...not to mention the cost of repairing our old crumbling infrastructure. We’re going to have to build the new world at the same time as we continually rebuild the old.

  

   

• The more we make, the less of our limited natural resources we leave ourselves.

  

   

• To solve this fundamental capacity issue, we’re going to have to fundamentally rethink the way we make things. We can’t continue doing things the way we do today.

  

   

• Construction creates almost a third of all global waste.

  

   

• When 70% of the spare parts we make today aren’t ever needed, we’re losing the efficiencies of manufacturing within inefficient supply chains.

  

  We’re wasting warehouse space, wasting materials, and wasting money. Reducing our negative impact — on the planet, and on people — is a reality we all need to face up to.

   

• Addressing the inevitability of having to do more, along with the reality of doing it with less negative impact, is a massive design challenge, but addressing this fundamental capacity issue is also the biggest design opportunity we have ever had.

  

   

• At Autodesk, we make software tools to help people with design challenges every day.

  

   

I end most of my blog posts with a standard message:

Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental).

I hope you can see why.

Persuasion is alive in the lab.