Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
This not only served to let the customer realize how much product quality was
improved but also helped engineers because they could predict the operating
conditions more easily because they became uniform and arti
!
cial. The uniformity
of products and their environmental conditions made quality improvement much
easier than before and indeed quality became extremely better than before.
Ironically enough, making things uniform worked well at
!
first but as time goes
on, this accelerated our world expansion and it brought about the diversity of
lifestyles. Or it could be put in another way. Engineers have achieved uniformity of
products
!
first because it is easier to tackle with and then they achieved to make
environments uniform. But after achieving these uniformities, they realized that
their users are human and they are very much different from person to person.
3 Trust
This is the case of mechanical products, but same situations are now often observed
in other products, too. We are moving toward the direction of producing “only one
product just for you”. Therefore, we must develop new reliability engineering
focused on an individual product. This is the issue of trust. It may be said that
reliability is the issue of the producer, while trust is that of the customer. Trust is
more important in mechanical products, because the operation of mechanical
products vary from product to product.
If users can put trust in a product, they feel happier and get more satisfaction.
Trust is also an important issue in information on the internet, because we come
across new pieces of information all the time. Amount of information on the
internet are so enormous but they are different from piece to piece so we cannot
apply statistical approach. Such reliability of an individual piece is the problem of
trust. Then, how can we increase trust in our products?
4 Hardware and Software Developments
Software development provides one solution to this problem. They used to develop
software in the same way as hardware as shown in Fig.
2
.
But software developers soon found out hardware and software are very much
different. One of the greatest differences is hardware is physical. And we have a
long history of using it. So we have heuristic knowledge about it. And in addition
hardware is tangible, and touch sensing is a real time communication with the
object. We can touch and feel.
Software, on the other hand, is nonphysical and intangible. So software devel-
opers moved from the
!
fixed function development to the growing or evolving
function development.
