210 CHAPTER 10 Nanosystems and their Design vocabulary in order to work together and create standard specifications for inter- changeable components of industrial systems. Nanotechnology is no exception. Even though the nanotechnology industry is still in its infancy, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are jointly preparing a multipart Technical Specification (as a precursor to an International Standard) for the vocab- ulary of nanotechnology (ISO/TS 80004), some parts of which have already been published. These specify terms and definitions relating to nano-objects and nano- structured materials, carbon nano-objects, the nano/bio interface, nanometrology, nanomanufacturing processes, and so forth. 10.11 CREATIVE DESIGN New ways of connecting known components together could yield new functions. The Nanotechnology Age may usher in a new era of creative leaps, reminiscent of the great Victorian era of engineering. When Richard Trevithick designed and built, in 1803, the first railway locomotive in the world (a replica of which is displayed in the hall of Telford Central Station in the UK) he had to solve design problems that no one had ever encountered before--and many of his solutions have persisted in essence to this day. The same applies to the bridges of totally new structure conceived by Brunel, the Stephenson brothers, and others. Will we now embark on a new panopticon of creative design comparable to the immense creative energy of that earlier era? One needs to examine how the novel possibilities of nanotechnology can be fully exploited from the design viewpoint. While structure is familiarly a fixed given that determines function, living cells present hints of function retroacting on structure. Can this principle be extended to the inanimate world? Can the "structure" intermedi- ate be short-circuited in nanotechnology?; that is, can we determine the components needed to assemble a device with specified functional properties directly, without considering what structure it should have? This may be especially relevant when considering structures that are not static, but act dynamically (e.g., an enzyme, cf. Section 11.3). The methods described in Section 10.7 are especially appropriate to such an approach. 10.12 PRODUCEABILITY Any viable design must be associated with a practicable route to fabrication. The evolutionary design process described in Section 10.7 could readily be extended to encompass manufacturability. A database of existing manufacturing systems could be a starting point for evaluating the fitness of a design, but the design process could be extended to encompass the production system itself. It is a corollary of the principles enunciated in Section 10.4 that very small fea- tures (with characteristic dimensions of a few nm) will have fluctuations of the order