Digital dominates this year’s discussion
The response to our 2024 Design World Trends call was the biggest yet. This print issue contains five features summarizing just a small portion of this year’s observations and insights from experts in motion and automation; tune into designworldonline.com/trends over the next two months to read all the Trends features in their entirety.
In fact, this year’s dominant industry developments tracked 14 different themes:
- New digital transformation initiatives
- Digital manufacturing advancements
- The increased viability of sustainability
- North American EV battery production
- Training, human-centric design, and augmented reality
- Trends in linear motion
- The move to reshoring and supply chain security
- Mechanical components
- New motor designs redefining capabilities
- Developments and drives in motion controls
- New industrial uses for artificial intelligence
- Driving changes in packaging automation
- Burgeoning laboratory automation uses
- New automation in agriculture and off highway
All these trends have been spurred to one degree or another by the relentless digitization of anything that will allow it.
However, when push comes to shove (or electromagnetics comes to rotary motion if you will) it’s the drives, motors, and mechanical components (including those for linear motion) that allow manipulation of the physical world for discrete automation.
Quite fittingly, this year’s Design World Trends excerpts an interview we recently had with Ted Lin — a legend in the motion-control industry and engineer who after more than four decades of work is still inventing motor technologies to benefit our industry and humankind. Figures such as these aren’t often in the limelight, probably because they’re too busy improving technologies and teaching to engage in self-promotion. Such types are often due recognition more than anyone.
Lisa Eitel | linkedin.com/in/elisabetheitel
Filed Under: Trends, DIGITAL ISSUES • DESIGN WORLD