New And Emerging Technologies

In 1961 a General Motors plant in New Jersey installed a machine called Unimate. It had one arm, it lifted hot die castings off a line, and it did the single job that had burned and deafened the people who did it before. Nobody at the time called it a change in the design of a workplace. Sixty years later a factory is laid out around its robots rather than around its people, the maintenance engineer earns more than the operator, and the building itself has different doors, different floors and different lighting because of what happened to that one arm.

This lesson is about that chain: a technology changes, so a process changes, so a workplace changes, so a job changes, so a product changes, and somewhere at the end of it a designer has to decide whether any of that is a good idea. You will learn what automation, computer aided design, computer aided manufacture, flexible manufacturing systems, just in time and lean manufacturing actually do; how enterprise raises money and sells without a shop; what finite and non-finite resources cost the planet; and how to judge planned obsolescence, design for maintenance, ethics and environmental impact without simply saying that new is good. This is core technical principles content, so it is examined in Section A of Paper 1, and it produced three of the ten multiple choice items on the specimen paper.