Something I am calling Design 2.0 is bubbling up in the engineering community, injecting new energy into the profession. In many ways, it's the new Moore's Law. <\/p>\n
Hackathons, accelerators, incubators, and crowdfunding sources are some of its key elements. Its motivation is to enable anyone with a good idea to make more innovation happen faster. <\/p>\n
It has a sort of parallel universe in the Maker movement that's geared more for fun than for profit. Similar sets of tech-savvy geeks inhabit both worlds, dipping into a communal pool of tools such as open source software and low-cost boards -- Arduino, Raspberry Pi, flavor of the month. <\/p>\n
At a time when corporate design methodologies are exhibiting an advanced sclerosis of documented best practices, Design 2.0 is the Nike of a new generation, saying, \"Just do it.\" <\/p>\n
For example, I know a veteran microprocessor designer who left Intel not long ago, complaining that it takes a decade to get from a good idea to a shipping SoC. By contrast, Thomas Sohmers, a high school dropout, aims to create a chip next year that will beat the pants off anything in GFlops\/Watt. He was inspired in part by Andreas Olofsson, who shipped multiple versions of his Epiphany chips in less than five years on less than $5 million in funding. <\/p>\n
The Web 2.0 crowd helped spawn Design 2.0. The first hackathon I ever attended was at a Facebook event, where I heard its motto, \"Move fast and break things.\" <\/p>\n
Hackathons make sense for folks such as Facebook and Google. They run vast server farms where you can plant a new software program and -- with some luck and considerable tweaking -- quickly wind up with a bumper crop of profitable web services. <\/p>\n
Facebook applied this design philosophy to its data center hardware with its Open Compute Project, disrupting the staid markets for servers and switches. The GoogleX lab did the same for hardware projects from smartglasses to driverless cars. <\/p>\n
We've written stories on all these things, but there's much more to be told. It's early days for Design 2.0. You have many still-evolving stories we need to hear. <\/p>\n
I'm hoping to hear from the full spectrum of engineers, from twenty-somethings getting their first work experiences to veteran corporate R&D chiefs trying something new. <\/p>\n
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Design 2.0: A New Moores Law<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something I am calling Design 2.0 is bubbling up in the engineering community, injecting new energy into the profession. In many ways, it's the new Moore's Law. Continue reading