Open collaborative design/Vast libraries of machines and components
With enough people feeling that the priciples of open source are worthwhile reasons to collaborate over designing physical objects then vast libraries of designs for everything from components and various sub-assemblies to complete artifacts, machines and large complex systems will emerge, freely available for anyone to download and make use of.
As in software, for components to be as widely re-usable in many different machine designs, they will need to be made as modular as possible. This will enable a huge reduction in duplication of effort and allow people to focus their efforts on creating new machines of increasing complexity, building on the work of others.
To aid the re-usability of components (and more complex parts) the CAD software should be able specify the vital dynamic functions of a component or assembly, so that it can easily be modified to be incorporated into new designs while ensuring it still works correctly.
