Engineering Tomorrow Will be a Game of Soccer

This is not a research paper, but a paper to discuss in which direction the author considers engineering tomorrow will be heading for. Engineering up to now has been final product-focused and product development has been on an indivual product basis. And intrumental rationality has been important. How faster, cheaper and better products can be developed was evaluated. The industry framework has been tree-structured. But what becomes crucially important in engineering tomorrow is fast and flexible adaptability, because environments and situations change very frequently and extensively. Therefore, not only humans, but products and further products and humans (things) must work together, as rapidly progressing IoT demonstrates. Collaboration was needed yesterday, too, but it was tree-structured and static. Collaboration tomorrow will call for adaptive network. We need dynamiclly varying collaboration as a team tomorrow. Therefore, we have to design and develop products as a dynamically adapting team from the first. Thus, organizational development and operation become crucially important tomorrow. It is only users who understand what is happening now. Therefore, engineering tomorrow must change from producer-centric to user-centric and the importance of decision making of users increases. In short, engineering tomorrow will be realizing the highest human need of self-actualization, which Maslow pointed out and will be satisfying our needs to answer to our intrinsic motivations, which Ryan and Deci pointed.