Toward a Yacht Design 4.0. How the new manufacturing models and digital technologies [could] affect yacht design practices

In the field of design, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things and intelligent products are profoundly transforming not only the representation of a design project but also formal references, input data, communication strategy and the design process itself. In this scene, the doctoral research estimates the role of the new digital technologies of Industry 4.0 and the new manufacturing models in the transformation of yacht design practices. The main research results – the Yachting 4.0 Forecasting Framework and the Yacht Design 4.0 Roadmaps – came from a systematic and comprehensive study of future alternatives to answer the research questions: How could Industry 4.0 digitally-enabled technologies be better implemented in a Yacht Industry 4.0 scenario? How could these scenarios modify disciplinary approaches to the yacht design project? The study results contain a reflection on novel yacht design practices – in particular on data input, design processes, design tools, and communication media – positioning the study achievement on a conceptual level that still needs to be pragmatically tested and verified by applied research projects both in shipyards and in design studios.