Toward a Yacht Design 4.0. How the new manufacturing models and digital technologies [could] affect yacht design practices

Industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT) and Intelligent products have been developing rapidly in the last decade. Manufacturing passes from being a producer of objects to be a producer of services. Industry mixes with the lives of people quickly and continuously drawing from them useful indications to redefine the production itself. In this panorama, the doctoral research foresees the role of the new digital technologies of Industry 4.0 and the new manufacturing models in the transformation of the yacht design sector. The yachting sector is facing several challenges linked to the world economic, environmental, and societal context. Furthermore, the global Yacht Industry, led by Italian production, is projected to grow by up to 11% by 2022, considering both yachts length and number of vessels under production. Despite that, the sector is suffering from technological backwardness and is recovering from a downturn that began in 2010. The recent economic crisis has highlighted both a needing of significant changes in the production systems led by an afterthought of the entire yacht design process. The driving research hypothesis is the assumption that digital technologies of Industry 4.0 will change the manufacturing models of the yachting sector – as is currently doing in another industrial context – affecting, therefore, the yacht design process. According to this consideration, the research aims at answering the following questions: • Did the new manufacturing models and digital technologies of Industry 4.0 affect yacht design practices? • How could the Industry 4.0 digitally-enabled technologies be better implemented in a Yacht Industry 4.0 scenario? • How could the Industry 4.0 digitally-enabled technologies modify the disciplinary approaches to the yacht design project? So what are the alternative yacht design processes and tools? The choice of focusing on this research topic does not derive from a recognized field of study – the Yachting 4.0 topic is almost absent in the literature review – but rather from an intuition about the need to foresight the role of Industry 4.0 in transforming the yacht design sector to understand and guide the undergoing digital revolution. Due to the freshness of the Industry 4.0 topic and the lack of reference in literature and industrial cases, strategic thinking to explore alternative futures is prioritized. Therefore, the doctoral study is placed in the broader conversation on the relation between Discipline of Anticipation (DoA) and Design. The theoretical investigation on the field of anticipation aims at defining the methodological contest of the study and selecting the appropriate research strategy and methods. The six -ing phases of Strategic Foresight in which the research strategy is divided – Framing, Scanning, Forecasting, Visioning, Planning, Acting – are put into practice with two different mindsets: the first phases are characterized by an expert mindset and the using of qualitative methods, namely: industrial survey, cluster analysis, unstructured field observation, and key informant interview. The following phases have a participatory mindset and involve stakeholders in scenario-building workshops. At first, the study shows a general level of immaturity on the theme of Industry 4.0 in the whole yachting sector. The international industrial survey, the interviews with yacht designers and project managers in shipyards and the field-observation pointed out a global lack of awareness on the opportunities introduced by the fourth industrial revolution on a strategic design level. In order to build a forecasting framework, a Case Studies analysis on 4.0 enabling technologies applied in the yachting industry was carried out in order to understand relations between industry 4.0 design principles and digital technologies and to reveal opportunities and trends for the scenario building phase. The resulted Yachting 4.0 Forecasting Framework represents the guiding backdrop for yachting 4.0 foresight activities. At last, the outcomes of the scenario building workshop are gathered in three roadmaps aiming at bridging the gap between the co-design visions and the present situation. The main research results – the Yachting 4.0 Forecasting Framework and the Yacht Design 4.0 Roadmaps – came from a systematic and comprehensive study of future alternatives with the purpose to answer the research questions. Sustained by all the qualitative data and knowledge collected by case studies and by the co-design visioning activity of the IY4.0 sws, the roadmaps represent an unavoidable subjective synthesis of the research results on impact on yacht design processes. They furthermore contain a reflection on novel yacht design practices affected by the new manufacturing models and digital technologies of Industry 4.0 – in particular on data input, design processes, design tools, and communication media – as the main contribution of the study in the Yacht Design field. The study results are positioned on a conceptual level of the research in the field representing, as the fourth industrial revolution itself, visions of possible digital development. Because of this, they still need to be pragmatically tested and verified by applied research projects both in shipyards and in design studios.