Modularity all around us

The best way to explain modularity is through examples. When you are a consultant who helps companies create modular platforms you can’t help but to see modularity almost everywhere you look. You look at cars differently, if you rent a Nissan Altima one week and a Nissan Murano the next, you can’t help but to decipher which features are common to both models, and which have slight variances in appearance or size. You see what perhaps the car manufacturer doesn’t want you to see. You quietly praise the manufacturer for sharing parts between platforms, all the while wishing they would pass down some of that savings to you as a consumer. You wonder if they have a true modular platform, or if they are just employing some of the principals.

It doesn’t end with rental cars of course. You look at almost any consumer electronics item in a new light. You can’t walk into IKEA without thinking about it. Your brand new sectional could have been configured in a large number of different ways, all while sharing common pieces and attaching to each other in a standardized way. The barstools you purchased gave you the option of changing out an insert on the back, you could choose from perhaps 8 different options, but they all attached to the back in the same manner. You could choose different materials for the back and legs, and different fabrics or wood species for the seat as well. You ended up with a highly customized piece of furniture, but did so in a way that was easily manageable for the stool manufacturer.

The worst part of all of this is that you feel compelled to bring things like your children’s toys to work so you can make illustrative examples of modularity. You can easily convince a colleague to take pictures of the toys, and then turn them into a little modularity story in PowerPoint. It is a sickness really.

How many modules do you see? How many interfaces?