# Manufacturing is important and often ignored Physical things need to be manufactured if you want to have more than one of them. There is a whole set of properties that make something more or less manufacturable. [[Skunkworks podcast]] mentioned several times how the key to moving fast was to have people who were going to manufacture the thing sitting in the room to point out where a design might be manufacturable. Things can fail in manufacturing in a bajillion different ways. You could build a completely functional prototype of something that is entirely unmanufacturable. (Can things fail in scaling in a bajillion different ways?) The people who handle and have heuristics around manufacturing are usually not the same people who do the prototyping and original building. The informal interaction that ‘having the person in the room’ during the prototyping process enables is a [[Transaction costs]] that is reduced if the people are all part of the same firm. (Thanks [[Robert Coase]]!) The whole point of design reviews is when the people who are manufacturing and designing are not in the same firm (or not in the same org within the same firm.) The gap between people who design and prototype and people who manufacture is especially bad in academia. ([[§Academia and Research]].) From my experience, people doing university research literally do not think about manufacturability at all. This missing perspective is one of the gaps left by [[aroraChangingStructureAmerican2020]]. Manufacturing is the atomland instantiation of software scalability in bitland. ([[§Atomland, Bitland, and Peopleland]] - what is the people land version? Replicability? Systemization?) The difference is that you don’t have to worry about scalability until you increase use by orders of magnitude, manufacturing needs to happen from day 1 for dispersion. Manufacturing is the gap between [[TRL7 - prototype version in real environment]] and [[TRL8 - production version tested in real environment]]. A “production” version has been manufactured in the same way that every other version would be. In software when going from TRL7 to TRL8 you can get away with doing almost nothing - maybe changing a few more settings, adding more tests, etc. There are two reasons for this tiny gap. The first reasons is that “Production” versions of software don’t need to scale because the cost to disperse a new production version that does scale later is nothing. The only cost is the up-front cost of building it in the first place. The other reason is that you can develop and prototype using roughly the same ‘tools’ as you would use to produce it thanks to standardized software environments, containerization, etc. In Atomland there are gaps both between the CAD/simulation design, the prototype, and the manufactured product that can be uncrossable if you didn’t take into account where it the thing needs to go. In the past, manufacturability was less of an issue because the gap between prototyping tools and manufacturing tools was smaller. Everything was made by hand or with simple tools anyway. Manufacturing is an important place where [[Learning by doing]] is key. Manufacturing is a failure point in DARPA’s transitions. [[DARPA has a mixed record on transitioning]]. From what I can tell DARPA doesn’t really consider manufacturability during programs. Constraints on manufacturing: * Tooling * Time * Materials * Accessibility * Number of parts ### Related * [[List of things that affect dispersion]] * [[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]] * [[Skunkworks podcast]] * [[Process Knowledge]] * [[Dan Wang 2019 Letter]] * [[Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction]] * [[New manufacturing paradigms can remove bottlenecks for other paradigms]] * [[Materials and manufacturing underpin civilization]] * [[Designing something to be manufactured can make a drastic difference in its success]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Manufacturing+is+important+and+often+ignored) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Manufacturing+is+important+and+often+ignored)