Somewhere indside everyone’s mind, there is a haunting question: what causes the faint seam on the side of a glass bottle?
Well, maybe not. But there must be people intrigued about the power train in their new Harley-Davidson. Or golf fanatics who would love to hear about the role of wax in their titanium club heads. Or chocoholics who might never guess where their favorite sweet comes from.
Those who are curious can visit a new website, “How Everyday Things Are Made,” that offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the manufacturing world. Some 50 videos show what goes into the making of products as diverse as airplanes, jelly beans and wool sweaters. (The bottle seam is formed by the slight gap between the two halves of the mold that shapes hot glass.)
Started 1 1⁄2 years ago, the site is a joint effort of Stanford’s Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing and Design4X, a company specializing in online engineering education. AIM groups industry professionals with engineering and business faculty and students in a “continuous learning community” and information exchange. The new site seeks to educate the public and spark interest in technical careers.
The videos are meant to be educational, but they aren’t dry textbooks-on-film. A lesson in aircraft construction is accomplished through a Boeing-supplied video that uses time-lapse photography to shrink the entire creation of a 777 jet—from schematics to flight test—down to five minutes of high-speed action. Viewers learn that the 777 has 120,000 unique parts. They also see contrasting footage from the early 1900s in which factory workers, like quilters at a bee, nimbly stitch cloth covers for wings, and craftsmen shape propellers by hand. An ordinary chocolate bar becomes more exotic when viewers get to see Latin American farmers using machetes to lop football-sized cacao pods off branches, then watch the cream-colored seeds turn chocolate brown after days of fermentation.
“We wanted people to see manufacturing as the amazing technology that it is, and then pass this along to their friends,” says Mark Martin, PhD ’00, president of Design4X. Using videos supplied by manufacturers, Martin narrates and keeps things lively. Explaining how yarn stays intact, he quips that at any given moment, “your clothes are just a few twists away from falling apart.”
Martin teaches in Stanford’s continuing studies program and developed the idea for “How Everyday Things Are Made” while teaching a course of the same name for non-engineers. He treated his students to plant tours and screened manufacturing videos lent to him by companies. When he took his pursuit of informative multimedia to the web, however, he hit a stumbling block. “While there are a lot of pictures [on the web],” he says, “there’s not a lot of information in video format showing things being made.”
Martin began talking with Rick Reis, AIM’s executive director, in mid-2002. The alliance’s member companies, including Ford, General Motors, Intel and Cisco, quickly jumped onboard; AIM provided $30,000 for the project.
“[We hoped] it would add to the luster of the idea behind technical careers in engineering or math or science,” Reis says. These days, manufacturing looks in need of a shine. Of the 2.7 million jobs lost in the economic downturn between March 2001 and August 2003, 90 percent were in manufacturing, according to David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers. Even so, employers are having trouble finding the workers they need. The group’s 2003 report found that 80 percent of manufacturers face a shortage of skilled labor.
Martin and Reis are optimistic that their site can attract new and better brain- and muscle-power to the sector. Response to the website is encouraging. Fueled only by an initial press release and word of mouth, the blog community provided free publicity for the site, which soon was receiving 5,000 to 10,000 hits a day. So far, visits total more than 486,000.
They’re not all just passersby wondering what molten glass looks like. Lourdes Rosario, an engineering professor at the University of Puerto Rico, uses the videos in her courses. “The students can see different processes and this helps them to understand the basic principles,” she commented by e-mail. “They are more interested about the course topics after seeing the complexity involved when designing a process to make a product.”
Martin and Reis have submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation in hopes of making the site an even more effective resource for junior high and high school teachers.
“The goal is that teachers incorporate this into their science and math classes,” Martin said. “You’re not going to take a lot of time to teach manufacturing, but maybe you can teach physics using manufacturing videos. Maybe you can teach environmental issues using manufacturing videos.”
If instead of reciting the Third Law of Thermodynamics, high school students get to “watch hot gobs of glass flying through the air,” as Martin puts it, perhaps they’ll learn some physics, too.
BARRETT SHERIDAN, '06, is an economics and international relations major from Yorba Linda, Calif.
