Redistributed Manufacturing
Description
Sharon Prenderville et al.:
"Redistributed manufacturing is an emerging concept which captures the anticipated reshoring and localisation of production from large scale mass manufacturing plants to smaller-scale localised, customisable production units, largely driven by new digital production technologies. Critically, community-based digital fabrication workshops, or makespaces, are anticipated to be one hothouse for this new era of localised production and as such are key to future sustainable design and manufacturing practices." (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32098-4_49)
Discussion
by Liz Corbin & Hannah Stewart:
"The concept of Redistributed Manufacturing does not have a standard and widely accepted definition (Escalante and Rahimfard, 2016). The initial appearance of the term is in the 2013 UK EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)[11] RDM workshop report where it has the broad working definition of “technology, systems and strategies that change the economics and organisation of manufacturing, particularly with regard to location and scale” (Pearson, Noble and Hawkins, 2013). Subsequent definitions emphasise ‘localised production’ (Soroka, Naim, Wang and Potter, 2016), ‘customisable production units’ (Prendeville, Hartung, Purvis, Brass and Hall, 2016), decentralisation (Harrison, Ruck, Medcalf and Rafiq, 2017) regionalisation (Munguia et al., 2016) and geographic dispersal (Soroka, Naim, Wang and Potter, 2016).
The characterisation of RDM, refers to an increasingly distributed and varied manufacturing ecosystem and ‘on-demand economy,’ where the factory of the future may be ‘at the bedside, in the home, in the field, in the office, and on the battlefield’ (Foresight, 2013). These local manufactories and the associated decentralised business models change both markets and supply chains, with wide ranging implications and challenges (Pearson, Noble and Hawkins, 2013), it is in emphasizing these societal impacts that the ‘re’ became part of the naming convention. The understanding of distributed manufacturing itself has been historically fluid, evolving from MacCormack’s smaller scale plants serving regional markets (MacCormack, Rosenfield and Sloan, 1994), to decentralised production approaches (Kühnle, 2010), manufacturing at the point of use (Devor et al., 2012), and mass customisation and digital manufacturing (Kohtala, 2015) now being synonymous with orchestration of manufacturing though the cloud and digital networks (Zaki, Theodoulidis, Shapira, Neely and Teple, 2016)." (http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions/peer-reviewed-papers/redistributed-manufacturing-and-makerspaces/)