Transcript


Interviewer: What is your name, position/role and your institution?

Philip Jackson: Hi, i'm Phil Jackson, i'm the technical specialist for the automation and robotics function at the Manufacturing Technology Center.

Interviewer: Could you provide an explanation of the impact that digital manufacturing is having on your sector?

Philip Jackson: So we know that this digital technology can have an incredibly and profoundly powerfully positive impact on our work. There's plenty of evidence to show that we literally just have to look at the figures from elsewhere and other territories that have adopted these sorts of technologies at a faster rate than we have.

But at the same time there's still reticence, there's reticence about you know what this kind of technology means for our working lives and how comfortable we are working with it. Now this is the incredible thing about the digiTop toolkit because it's such a broad and excoriating analysis of so many different scenarios that there's something for any application that i can imagine.

This means that all of the things that you didn't know that you didn't know, you can find out by looking through all of the different bits of work that have been done it is really remarkably powerful stuff.

Interviewer: Could you explain the ways in which digiTop and other digital manufacturing research can help companies?

Philip Jackson: Now the digiTop toolkit is an incredible utility imagine for a second that you want to adopt some new digital technology into a manufacturing space but you're well aware even though you know that technology is good stuff and it's been used elsewhere to great effect you know full well if you just dump it on the shop floor and run you're unlikely to be successful with that kit just because of human factors and perception and the rest of it.

Now the digiTop toolkit is there so that you can find out what it is that you didn't even know that you didn't know there's something for any circumstance whereby you have to you have to understand perception of the machinery you have to understand how people are going to relate to it you have to understand how people are going to react over a long period of time in terms of you know work productivity and attitudes.

It really is quite a revolutionary set of tools.