ewoTALK #3 – Industry 4.0: The Future is Now

Two international experts were invited to talk to ewo at Vienna Design Week 2016: designer Clemens Weisshaar and journalist Marcus Fairs—founder of Dezeen, one of the most influential online magazines for design and architecture.

The title "The Future is Now" led the conversation to the big future questions for the design sector: How will advances in digital technology and robotics change the sector? And how will these changes affect society as a whole? The central vision for Industry 4.0 is the use of cyber-physical systems. This will enable the networking of machines, factories and supply chains, which could soon lead to drastic changes in production.

Weisshaar and Fairs jointly asked themselves how this "third industrial revolution" could affect the world of product design. Their premonition: soon everything that can be networked will be networked. Machines will be networked with each other and with supply chains and will communicate with each other. Fairs is convinced that the digitalized production of goods—which has already begun—will completely change the market.

Clemens Weisshaar presented some of the approaches he has developed with his colleague Reed Kram for the joint Kram/Weisshaar design studio: innovative software, new materials, robots and new processes such as algorithmic modeling sequences or computer-aided numerical control of production. This also provided ewo as a company with useful information on the direction in which industry and design are developing.

In the future, companies will produce much smaller quantities in a greater variety of products; each product can be adapted to the specific needs of the customer. Modular systems will enable great flexibility and thus personalized design.

Download the online full-text version on "Industry 4." and the ewoTALK at Vienna Design Week 2016 HERE.