Joe Justice is the ideator of Team Wikspeed: a team of volunteers distributed around the world who recently created a prototype car that is open source, modular and ultra-efficient in just three months, using processes borrowed from software development, the world from which Joe comes from. In addition to being a visionary, Joe is a fantastic and discussion prone person and this interview contains a very open and fruitful discussions I had with him at the end of April. I recommend you read it because it will be useful to you to understand how manufacturing – and consumption – are fated to change in coming years if, as Joe says, we want to continue living on this planet for a while. Wikispeed builds ultra efficient cars and we do this with seven days development cycles using agile methodologies. Those methodologies include several aspects, for example about managing distributed teams – like with SCRUM – or methods to ensure an high quality bar and focused work – much like Extreme programming and Test Driven Development as part of XP – that we reworked for the manufacturing process labeling it Extreme Manufacturing.
Traditional manufacturing runs in 3 to 25 years long development cycles: this means you can go to a Porsche dealer and buy a brand new Porsche 911 car and that would be the best engineers thought you might want 24 years ago and, if we stuck with this example, Porsche recently announced that the current Porsche 911 wil be with us for the next 14 years. In Wikispeed we are aiming for mass customization, very rapid development and technologies and efficiencies that haven’t yet existed, that are fully gamechanging and not just and incremental evolution of old and sometimes defunct technologies. To do that we iterate on seven days development cycles, that means that we can change every aspect of the car every seven days. This is possible through modularity: the car splits into eight modules that are loosely coupled so we can change one and not change the others. Wikispeed is missionized to rapidly solve problems for social good. We don’t just make cars. I recently gave a talk on methods for vaccine distribution to help eradicate Polio: we worked with a group that develops low cost medical centers and communites for this and we’ve done significant work with them.
Imagine in a world when your commuter car goes more than 100 Miler per Gallon in the United States cycles, that is about 1.5 liters per 100 km in Japan cycles for example, and imagine that you could maintain it by yourself – if you are inclined to do it – or that is very inexpensive to maintain if you’ve someone else to maintain it for you. Imagine it to be modular and changeable to follow your life changes, from a convertible to a sedan to a pick up truck, and that’s exactly what we’re bringing to everyone right now and OSE is giving us the platform to share it with as many people as possible. When you produce you need roughly three kind of things: materials, machinery, and person hours. We have volunteers for person hours, and we have donated machines and donated materials – or small amounts of capitals that led us to buy those. With the indiegogo capital campaign we are going to obtain more materials to be able to prototype more rapidly and increase our innovation pace, we are going to acquire faster machinery and that increases our pace of innovation again. We’re also going to be able to finance some graduate schools stipends – this is not a job, it pays too little for being it – that will allow this graduate school students to work almost full time with the team passionately and very quickly and this will end up in an increasing the number of iterations we can achieve, eventually increasing our pace of innovation once again.
The direction we’re trending is that the same amount of profit will be generated in the world but will be generated by everyone, in a way that is more equitable – in an equitable distribution of wealth mode. So instead of us going into a traditional employer that keeps a larger percent of our work, and replicating the same approach with people that work under us – as a country we do it for counties that support us and they do the same for countries under them – instead of that, everyone will have an equitable share that is proportional to the amount of value he contributes to the world. We’re not there yet but we’re moving closer: open source hardware movements are making this more possible than ever before. In addition, with these open source movements, we’re innovating more quicker and that’s compatible with the current financial structure: this allows all companies to have product development cycles that are much more quicker than they are now.
But then what we are seeing independently from that, is the democratization of precision tooling: when people can buy machines – or build their own – that have a level of quality that is comparable to mass manufacturing. Suddenly you have the opportunity for a garage manufacturing revolution where people can make a new type of shoes or a new type of car and actually make it via viable competitive components in the marketplace today and that decentralization of manufacturing starts with decentralization of the supply chain and of profiteering. And if the same level of profit exist in the world we have now the opportunity of equitably distribute that across the world, and the differences between a third world and a developed world country will then reduce. Certainly there’s the possibility that traditional big business can act to impede that but we didn’t see it until now, on the contrary we’re seeing encouragement by these businesses and political bodies: we’ve seen poor protectionism movements and instead more embracement because rapid development products are appealing. ( 5elected from meedabyte.com )