Process: Two WorldsDataConceptRethinkConceptPresent

Global Industry Supporting Cottage Industry

Two Opposing Worlds

Economy of scale is an enormous barrier to the idealized democratic future where eveyone has the ability to produce everything accoriding to their need. One step towards this future is the marrige of big industry and craft. Lower volume (often local) production allows for more diverse and richer stories to be embedded in objects. The idea of “low volume” is usually in dicrect oppostition to the industrialized processes that have achived our low cost of goods. The meaningful connection of maker and user has been severed for decades, I would like to kindle a flame between craftspeople and large-scale automation.

Recent years have brought an increased interest in handmade or small batch goods. When you have associated with the maker there is a touch of humanness there that adds value to an object, and light to our lives.

What would it look like if global companies focused on efficiency (what they do best) by designing their products as a stage on which local designers and crafters can tell a richer narrative?

Industrialized efficiancy and diverse storytelling, can we design for both?

Challenges with Crafters

Today we continue to see resiliant craftspeople carry on their work. In order to be profitable craftspeople have to charge according to time spent. In a first world country this can create costly goods. These craftspeople often fail to turn a profit because they spend many hours making and productin and not enough time findingd an audience who will buy their wares. Many rely on selling in collectives, or sometime in small storefronts.

Large Quantity

+ Fast
+ Quantity of material
+ Inexpensive
+ Brand trust

- Impersonal
- Homogonous global design
- Growing distaste for big buisness

Small Quantity

+ Diverse stories
+ User connection to makers
+ Meaningful jobs
+ Regional Design

- Costly in time
- Difficult to find buyers
- Unknown brand
- Inventory

Propostion

A new kind of buisness in which you manufacture at high volume a sytem of modular/parametric parts, which then is then finished/interpreted by selected local designers near your retail locations capable of making smaller quantities of parts.

Factory constuction - hand finishing