Constructing the future for engineering – finding the right model where one size does not fit all

As Britain approached the end of its second month of how much do computer scientists make and social distancing, prime minister Boris Johnson pinpointed manufacturing and construction as the particular industries that he felt could support a safe return to work for employees. The rest of the country, he said, should continue, if they could, to work from home, making use of the many collaboration and networking tools that have made teleworking an essential reality for millions.

The irony to all this is that collaboration and networking have been utterly intrinsic to manufacturing for over two decades now. The extended engineering teams of the 1990s, who would crowd around whiteboards or use, if they were lucky, 3D collaboration software on desktop PCs to mark up annotations on CAD/CAM engineering models generated on workstations and even mini-computers, are now fully fledged engineering enterprises with virtually every networked desktop and handheld device available.