[p2p-research] Fwd: P2P Blog Post on defining a post-industrial style

[Michel Bauwens]

to be published nov 2 and following days in 3 parts,

excellent analysis from Eric,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:17 AM
Subject: P2P Blog Post
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


On Defining a Post-Industrial Style

Industrial Age blobbyness:

In any given culture predominate styles of design coalesce as a function of
the aesthetic principles/theories/notions dominant in that culture at any
given time and the nature of the dominant techniques of art, fabrication,
and industrial production employed in its communities. Archeologists and
anthropologists understand this well and commonly identify cultures and time
periods by tell-tale characteristics of the design of artifacts and their
manufacture. Even for the laymen this is a relatively easy things to
discern. We can readily see the stylistic differences between ruins of
ancient Roman, Egyptian, pre-Columbian, and other past civilizations. We can
easily see the differences between pottery from ancient China, native
American Pueblos, Greece, and Africa. But what about our contemporary
civilization, for which we should have a more intimate understanding? What
predominate characteristics denote the nature of design and manufacture in
our current Industrial Age culture?

Given the industrial illiteracy common in the contemporary society, one
could be forgiven for assuming there are no predominate characteristics of
Industrial Age culture because there are so many kinds of products and
industrial processes and such a vast diversity of aesthetics along with
-thanks to the global and mobile nature of our current civilization- a
mish-mash of world ethnic cultural stylistic elements. In most any American
household one might readily find artifacts with stylistic features lifted
from any number of cultures past and present; Chinese dishware in the
kitchen, Dutch tiles on the countertop, Scandinavian modern furniture in the
living room, Japanese lanterns in the back yard, middle-eastern rugs,
Javanese batik patterns on clothing and bed sheets, Italian Palladian
elements in the basic design of the suburban home -and we're not even
talking about artwork and the like put up purely for decoration. It's almost
impossible to go anywhere in the industrialized world and not find such a
mix. And yet when one learns a bit about manufacturing and industry and
looks carefully at the artifacts making up our habitat one begins to see
common characteristics in the design of factory-produced goods. Though the
spectrum of industrial processes used today is vast, there are some
techniques and methods more dominant than others and which are more strongly
associated with the key paradigm of the Industrial Age; economy and ubiquity
of goods through centralized mass production. The logistics of mass
production itself imposes limitations reflected in the design of goods -even
where design often attempts to disguise or conceal them in some way. Like
the tell-tale mold marks on an injection-molded toy, there is a subtle,
underlying, Industrial Age style imposed on most everything in our habitat
today that transcends any of the decorative stylings we apply to it all on
the surface. A series of characteristics that, if you look for them,
clue-you into products fabrication processes and to a general schema for
manufacture as a whole.

Dominated by this overriding paradigm of centralized mass production, across
the Industrial Age we have seen an evolution in industrial design
culminating in what designers Steven Skov Holt and Karim Rashid dubbed -and
SF/futurist writer Bruce Sterling popularized- as the 'blobject'; a
mass-produced artifact characterized by streamlined organic 'blobby' forms
deriving from the use of CAD/CAM and moldable materials such as plastic in
largely monolithic shells. Commonly regarded as a very recent phenomenon,
the actual origins of the blobject probably trace back -at least- to the
application of Bakelite and similar early press-formed plastics to early
consumer electronics and appliances as well as the use of pressed steel
welded unibody construction in cars prior to WWII. It's roots lay in the
desire of industrial design to accommodate a Modernist streamlined aesthetic
of the period, to separate style from function as a means to aid the
specialization of design as a profession independent of engineering, to
facilitate forced obsolescence through fashion, and to accommodate
Industrial Age manufacturing's tendency to seek to eliminate all aspects of
hand craft in production through simplified fabrication processes (producing
simplified forms) in order to insure uniform consistency and efficiency.
These ideals tend to favor production processes based on molding of some
form that can be easily mechanized -processes which are now predominate in
contemporary manufacture.

The essential physical architecture common to most common blobjects today
may actually have its origin in the 1955 Regency TR-1; the first pocket
transistor radio and one of the first mass produced consumer electronics
products employing a two-piece snap-together injection-molded case. This
might seem too functionalist and rectilinear a design to be called a
blobject -it's less 'blobby' in shape than the Art-Deco style radio
enclosures of the pre-WWII era-, yet all the essential characteristics of
the contemporary blobject are there including the exploitation of the
mutability of topology of electronic systems to accommodate a design whose
form is dictated by other factors. Though contemporary design forms may be
increasingly fanciful, the architecture of a printed circuit board and other
components suspended within a two-piece clam-shell enclosure is the dominant
architecture among current consumer electronics products. The key difference
between blobjects of the past and present is the economy of production
tooling. The approach was always favored for its economy over other
approaches that were more craft-dependent but the nature of molded plastic
and metal production compelled maximization of production volumes to
accommodate high tooling costs, particularly in the fabrication of steel
molds and dies. This limited early blobjects to a spectrum of products most
likely to be produced in volumes of many hundreds of thousands or millions
of units. The reason for the explosion in application of these forms today
is due to the application of CAD/CAM resulting in a radical reduction of
costs for such tooling allowing the use of such forms to be justified for
products of relatively low -and falling- production volumes.

The blobject now dominates contemporary product design and with their design
process now empowered with computer modeling and their prototyping radically
simplified through rapid prototyping technology, blobject characteristics
can now be seen in everything from home appliances to spacecraft like the
famed Spaceship One. However, a peculiar side effect of this has been a
deterioration in the general competency of design. It's professional
specialization now total, the design 'industry' increasingly disregards
engineering and the technicalities of production, treating design as
something pure and independent of such things. Students can graduate design
schools without any working knowledge of any science or technology and we
are increasingly seeing the showcasing and lauding of imaginary CGI based
product designs that are quite simply impossible to ever produce in reality,
defying even the most basic laws of physics. And as a community, designers
seem decreasingly concerned about this because they treat the 'reality
checking' as someone else's job. Industrial design is eliminating that
industrial aspect. It's becoming a kind of art, which would be OK if the end
result wasn't an increasing number of products that are wasteful and poor in
function and performance and whose price is inflated on the basis of style.
Style can now put a $100 price tag on a piece of cardboard. Is this a
triumph of design, or a perverse aberration of it?

The blobject is the quintessential Industrial Age artifact. An object
optimized for automated mass production where handcraft is completely
eliminated and design is largely independent of function and production
technique. While considered emotionally engaging, the blobject is often the
basis of a kind of dishonesty in design. An attempt to hide the way things
work, how they are made, and to disguise what they are made of and to base
their quality on subjective aspects of aesthetics and stylistic reference to
certain socio-economic classes. In this they tend to reflect the Industrial
Age notion of a sliding scale of economy for everything in life, including
social class status. Blobjects are also often deliberately irreparable and
un-upgradeable -sometimes to the point where they are engineered to be
unopenable without being destroyed in the process. This further facilitates
planned obsolescence while also imposing limits on the consumer's own use of
a product as a way to protect market share and technology propriety.
Generally, repairability of consumer goods is now impractical as labor costs
have made repair frequently more expensive than replacement, where it isn't
already impossible by design. In the 90s car companies actually toyed with
the notion of welding the hoods of new cars shut on the premise that the
engineering of components had reached the state where nothing in the engine
compartment needed to be serviceable over a presumed 'typical' lifetime for
a car. (a couple of years) This, of course, would have vastly increased the
whole replacement rate for cars and allowed companies to hide a lot of dirty
little secrets under that welded hood. In his 2004 speech to SIGGRAPH
entitled "When Blobjects Rule The Earth" Bruce Sterling commented on the
dark side of the blobject saying;"...they haven't started ruling the Earth
yet. Because they're still too primitive. They're not sustainable, so
they're merely optimizing the previous system. They are a varnish on
barbarism."

Today we recognize that a new set of cultural paradigms are emerging to
supplant those of the Industrial Age, driven by an emergent and progressive
demassification of culture amplified by digital communications and
paralleled by a similar demassification of industrial production by virtue
of digitally enhanced machine tools. We characterize this emergent
Post-Industrial cultural shift by these processes of demassification and by
the progressive miniaturization and automation of tools and processes of
fabrication resulting in a localization and personalization of industrial
production and progressive customization/personalization in the design of
goods. The consumer of the Industrial Age is evolving, slowly, into a
'prosumer', increasingly engaged in the lifecycle of design and production
of products as well as their use, adaptive-reuse, upcycling, and recycling.
New miniaturized processes of production radically alter how things are
likely to be designed and made to accommodate the topological and logistical
limitations. As we have just seen, the Industrial Age culture is indeed
characterized by predominant production techniques and a resulting
predominate theory in design. Thus we can anticipate that the same would
emerge with the emergence of a Post-Industrial culture. Let us now consider
what a theory of Post-Industrial design might be like and the stylistic
characteristics that are its hallmarks.

Industrial Ecology:

Alvin Toffler suggested that the transition between cultural 'waves' of
civilization was not strictly serial in nature. That the seeds of the Second
Wave (the Industrial Age) were emergent in the midst of the First Wave (the
Pre-Industrial or Agrarian Age) and likewise the seeds of the Third Wave
(the Post-Industrial Age) are currently emergent in the midst of the Second
Wave. This is perhaps no more clearly apparent than in the history of the
Industrial Age's greatest technical achievement; the personal computer. For
in this achievement lay one of the seeds of the Industrial Age's own
obsolescence; a new and commonly overlooked industrial paradigm called the
Industrial Ecology. The personal computer is the single-most  sophisticated
mass-produced artifact human beings have ever created.  Bill Gates once
suggested that the creation of a new personal computer operating system was
akin in complexity and man- hours to engineering and building a new jet
airliner. And yet the astounding thing about this device is that, over the
span of a couple decade, what was originally a multi-million-dollar colossus
became a blobject one can carry in a pocket, is now so cheap and ubiquitous
that people who can't even afford basic housing can still often afford a
computer, and is so simple in composition that a child can be taught to
assemble one in less than an hour using components made and bought from all
over the globe -and it will boot up and run the first time it's turned on!
This is an incredibly astounding feat that we are generally oblivious to.
This is the single-greatest accomplishment of the Industrial Age, and most
of us never think twice about it.

How was such a feat possible? We commonly attribute the rapid shrinking in
scale of the computer to the advance of integrated circuit technology. But
that's just a small part of the story that doesn't explain the economy and
ubiquity of computers. The real force behind that was a radically different
industrial paradigm that emerged more-or-less spontaneously in response to
the struggle companies faced in managing the complexity of the new
technology. Put simply, the computer was too complicated for any one
corporation to actually develop independently -not even for multi-national
behemoths like IBM that once prided itself on being able to do everything. A
radically new way of doing things was needed to make the computer practical.

The large size of early computers was a result not so much of the primitive
nature of the technology of the time but on the fact that most of that early
technology was not actually specific to the application of computers. It was
repurposed from electronic components that were originally designed for
other kinds of machines. Advancing the technology to where the vast
diversity of components needed could be made and optimized specifically for
the computer demanded an extremely high development investment -more than
any one company in the world could actually afford. There simply wasn't a
big enough computer market to justify the cost of development of very
sophisticated parts exclusively for computers. While performing select R&D
on key components, early computer companies began to position themselves as
systems integrators for components made by sub-contractracted suppliers
rather than manufacturing everything themselves. While collectively the
development of the full spectrum of components computers needed was
astronomically expensive, individually they were quite within the means of
small businesses and once the market for computers reached a certain minimum
scale it became practical for such companies to develop parts for these
other larger companies to use in their products. This was aided by progress
in other areas of consumer, communications, and military digital electronics
-a general shift to digital electronics- that helped create larger markets
for parts also suited to computer applications. The more optimized for
computer use subcomponents became, the smaller and cheaper the computer as a
whole became and the smaller and cheaper the computer the larger the market
for it, creating more impetus for more companies to get involved in
computer-specific parts development. ICs were, of course, a very key
breakthrough but the nature of their extremely advanced fabrication demanded
extremely large product markets to justify. The idea of a microprocessor
chip exclusive to any particular computer is actually a rather recent
phenomenon even for the personal computer industry. Companies like Intel now
host a larger family of concurrently manufactured and increasingly
use-specialized microprocessors than was ever imaginable just a decade ago.

For this evolution to occur the nature of the computer as a designed product
had to be very different from other products common to industrial
production. Most industrial products are monolithic in the sense that they
are designed to be manufactured whole from raw materials and very elemental
parts in one central mass production facility. But the design of a computer
isn't keyed to any one resulting product. It has an 'architecture' that is
independent of any physical form. A set of component function and interface
standards that define the electronics of a computer system but not
necessarily any particular physical configuration. Unlike other
technologies, electronics is very mutable. There are an infinite variety of
potential physical configurations of the same electronic circuit. This is
why electronics engineering can be based on iconographic systems akin to
mathematics -something seen in few other industries to a comparable level of
sophistication. (chemical engineering) So the computer is not a product but
rather a _platform_ that can assume an infinite variety of shapes and
accommodate an infinite diversity of component topologies as long as their
electronic functions conform to the architecture. But, of course, one has to
draw the line somewhere and with computer parts this is usually derived from
the topology of standardized component connections and the most common form
factors for components. Working from this a computer designer develops
configurations of components integrated through a common motherboard that
largely defines the overall shape possible for the resulting computer
product. Though companies like Apple still defy the trend, even motherboards
and enclosures are now commonly standardized, which has ironically actually
encouraged diversity in the variety of computer forms and enclosure designs
even if their core topological features are more-or-less standardized and
uniform.

Thus the computer industry evolved into a new kind of industrial entity; an
Industrial Ecology formed of a food-chain of interdependencies between
largely independent, competitive, and globally dispersed companies defined
by component interfaces making up the basis of computer platform
architectures. This food chain extends from discrete electronics components
makers, through various tiers of sub-system makers, to the computer
manufacturers at the top -though in fact they aren't manufacturing anything
in the traditional sense. They just cultivate the platforms, perform systems
integration, customer support, marketing, and -decreasingly as even this is
outsourced to contract job shops- assemble the final products.

For an Industrial Ecology to exist, an unprecedented degree of information
must flow across this food chain as no discrete product along this chain can
hope to have a market unless it conforms to interface and function standards
communicated downward from higher up the chain. This has made the computer
industry more open than any other industry prior to it. Despite the
obsessions with secrecy, propriety, and intellectual property among
executives, this whole system depends on an open flow of information about
architectures, platforms, interfaces standards, software, firmware, and so
on -communicated through technical reference guides and marketing material.
This information flow exists to an extent seen nowhere else in the
Industrial Age culture. It's hard to even characterize the computer industry
as something of the Industrial Age because of this. And perhaps the
single-most ironic part of all this is that most of the people in this
industry have no grasp of this concept of an Industrial Ecology or any
concrete notion of how their own industry works. They never see the forest
for the trees -leading to repeated strategic blunders from the top with
executives forever left puzzled because they still think they're in an
industry that works like Henry Ford's car industry. This whole thing evolved
ad-hoc, aided by the rather abstract or high-level nature of digital
electronics and software engineering with their basis in symbolic languages.

One of the surprising aspects of such an Industrial Ecology is the
multi-directional flow of design and development influence along the food
chain. One might assume that control over the evolution of computer
platforms flows strictly from the top down. It doesn't. In fact, IBM learned
that lesson the hard way. Competition produces innovation at any level of
the food chain with impact flowing both vertically and horizontally through
the ecology. And though a particular platform may define a particular food
chain down through the ecology, any number of potential food chains may be
hosted in that same collective ecology. This is why such radically different
platforms as the Macintosh and PC can be products of the same ecology.

Progressive modularization and interoperability standardization tends to
consolidate and simplify component topologies near the top of the food
chain. This is why a personal computer is, today, so simple to assemble that
a child can do it -or for that matter an end-user or any competitor to the
manufacturers at the top. All that ultimately integrates a personal computer
into a specific physical form is the motherboard and the only really
exclusive aspect of that is its shape and dimensions and an arrangement of
parts which, due to the nature of electronics, is topologically mutable
independent of function. There are innumerable possible motherboard forms
that will still work the same as far as software is concerned. This made the
PC an incredibly easy architecture to clone for anyone who could come up
with some minor variant of that motherboard to circumvent copyrights, a
competitive operating system, a work-around the proprietary aspects of the
BIOS, and could dip into that same food chain and buy parts in volume. Once
an industrial ecology reaches a certain scale, even the folks at the top
become expendable. The community across the ecology has the basic knowledge
necessary to invent platforms of its own, establish its own standards
bottom-up, and seek out new ways to reach the end-user customer. And this is
what happened to IBM when it stupidly allowed itself to become a bottleneck
to the progress of the personal computer in the eyes of everyone else in its
ecology. That ecology, for sake of its own growth, simply took the
architecture of the PC from IBM and established its own derivative standards
independent of IBM -and there was nothing even that corporate giant could
ultimately do about it.

Today even end users compete with the 'apex manufacturers' at the top of the
food chains. A PC can be as readily built by an end-user himself or
built-on-demand in a shop as it can be bought pre-made with some large
company brand. This has led to some companies adopting strategies of 'mass
customization' based on allowing customers to select configurations of PC
products assembled on-demand -a powerful concept in a demassifying culture
increasingly subject to Long Tail market phenomenon and which is now
spreading to other industries where there are means of introducing similar
flexibility in production, usually through modularization of optional
features. So all along the food chain of the PC platform parts developers
are alternately thinking about and marketing to OEMs (original equipment
manufacturers), parts distributors serving custom PC makers, and even
end-users. Again, this is all an astounding revolution in the way things are
supposed to work in the Industrial Age. A great demassification of
industrial power and control. Just imagine what the car industry would be
like if things worked like this -as well one should as this is, in fact,
coming. Increasingly, the model of the computer industry is finding
application in a steadily growing number of other industries. Bit by bit,
platforms are superceding products and Industrial Ecologies are emerging
around them.

So what does this story have to tell us about Post-Industrial design? Well,
from the Industrial Ecology we get our first precept for a Post-Industrial
design theory;

       With the exception of very simple artifacts and elemental components,
platforms supersede
       products. Many artifact forms can share a common platform,
representing applications of the
       platform. Soon there may be few products. Just platforms and their
applications.

Bruce Sterling recently characterized this principle with the concept of
'spimes', suggesting that in the near future we will all become 'spime
wranglers'. A spime is an artifact whose platform architecture becomes
digitally enmeshed with its lifecycle so that, across all its instances as
an artifact, it becomes self-aware of its use and lifecycle, feeding
information back into its design and progressive evolution. So for every
artifact there is a kind of digital network associated with it linking what
users do with it to its original digital design. This design thus learns
from all activity associated with its instance artifacts, evolving to
self-optimize relative to the passive -and active- performance evaluation of
its users. In effect, the artifact becomes a sensory organ for the digital
design through which that design -as if it were an intelligent entity in and
of itself- senses the satisfaction or frustration of the users and the
impact on the environment, evolving itself to suit. We see the beginning of
this kind of thing in software, where programs increasingly automatically
feed back information about their use and failures with that information
subsequently being used for -encoded into- later automatic software updates.
Imagine if most everything in our environment worked this way, learning and
evolving by our interaction with it. In this notion we get yet another
precept of Post-Indfustrial design theory;

       Artifacts are static instances of an evolving design through which a
design learns. A design
       thus has a lifecycle independent of, but in parallel to, the
lifecycles of its instances. The
       intrinsic value of an instance of a design is quite tiny compared to
the design itself as the                        embodiment of the collective
knowledge -the genetic heritage- gathered through all its
       instances. Deliberate variant designs may be owned but primary
designs -platforms- exist
       as a    community resource evolved from the encoded contributed
experience of their users.
       This is the basic meaning of Open Source.

This is actually a pre-industrial idea. Before Industrial Age culture's
obsession with everything being owned by someone somewhere, no one
individually owned the designs of artifacts. Once they came into common use,
designs became cultural knowledge constantly communicated across communities
and refined by the feedback of users who were also often their producers.
And so there is a kind of organically evolved perfection in the designs of
early artifacts rarely seen in products of the present. However, this is
beginning to re-emerge as digital technology gives our artifacts feedback
networks to their virtually-embodied designs. This is a common feature of
Post-Industrial culture; a re-discovery of certain pre-industrial paradigms
within the context of new technology.

Now, the notion of spimes is not entirely passive, given the limitations of
the artifact alone as a sensory system of the user experience and
environmental impact. And so these same networks of feedback will be
employed for active communication from users and communities as well,
imposing design specifications for reasons other than performance
-particularly environmental and safety. We see this today in the form of
users groups, customer review forums, standards committees, and occasionally
government regulatory control. In the near future, as production continues
to demassify and localize, local and personal customization of designs will
become commonplace and function like a deliberate experimentation in the
genetics of platforms. Most everyone will actively engage in this as a
consequence of their compulsion to personalize things. This brings us to
another precept;

       Though often initiated by individuals, designs persist as social
constructs. A successful
       design invites customization. Like a culture, a design that resists
or has stopped evolving
       is obsolete. Dead.

This is the point where peer-to-peer theory starts to become very important
to our discussion. If we except the proposition that a design becomes a
social construct through, basically, the reverse-engineering of the user
experience and then add in the option for a community of users to
pro-actively participate in that design evolution, then we are dealing with
a peer-to-peer process of iterative design. For this to work the network
entity that represents a spime must be structured in such a way that the
communication it facilitates is multidirectional. It must become a social
network of sorts. Remember how, in the computer industry's industrial
ecology, it became necessary for information to flow not just from the
top-down but in all directions because, ultimately, innovation could be
generated at any level of the food chain with impact spreading out to all
levels? Well, this is also true in the network of a spime. A spime is not
simply a linear link from user to design. It's is a chain-link through the
larger network of the collective industrial ecology of every component that
goes into it -and through them bridging to every other spime associated with
any other artifact's platform -and their individual social networks. All
design, all industry, all technology thus begins to merge as a peer-to-peer
system. It's easy to see, then, how Sterling can suggest that, in the
future, we'll be spending most of our time spime wrangling.

Tool Adaption:

As we noted earlier, the dominant tools a culture uses impacts the possible
practical design. Contemporary design has largely disconnected itself from
the nature of the dominant tools to such an extreme that many less
conscientious designers have little knowledge of how the things they design
are actually made -and in the long run the end-user even less. This is
possible because the flexibility of a few key contemporary manufacturing
processes is so great. One of the key aspects of this industrial flexibility
is scale. We have seen a growth in diversity of blobject-type products not
just because of the growing economy of their development but also because
molding technology has afforded a steady increase in the maximum scale and
topological complexity of objects these processes can handle. In 1955, when
the Regency TR-1 appeared with its small two-piece injection-molded plastic
case, that was about the average size of anything made with that production
process. At the time such cases were relatively new and is was still more
common for consumer electronics to employ pressed metals, pressed plastics,
wood and wood composites, hard leather, and even coated forms of cardboard
for enclosures. Larger appliances and products relied almost entirely on
pressed sheet steel using techniques common to the auto industry -this as an
improvement over the earlier reliance on woodcraft. By 1985, injection
molding had reached a point where quite large and complex single piece
objects were becoming possible, the largest at the time, at 1.75m long,
being the body of the ill-conceived Sinclair C5 electric vehicle. With the
introduction of rotomolding exceptionally large plastic structures have
become increasingly practical, such as hot tubs, large chemical and water
tanks many meters high and wide, and simple shelters. With such plastic
tanks already being repurposed for utilitarian shelters, one can expect
entire roto-molded cabins of significant size in the near future.

Such feats are very dependent on the nature of production facilities, which
with centralized production evolved to become exceptionally large -as big as
towns with some industries. It is of little importance for such facilities
that typical machines like the sheet steel press could commonly be three
storeys high. But with the progressive miniaturization of machine tool
technology and the progressive localization of production, practical
limitations in scale appear and new approaches to design become necessary to
realize products of scale using smaller tools. As noted earlier, we
characterize the Post-Industrial culture, in part, by its reliance on a new
spectrum of miniaturized machine tools used in a local -potentially
personal- context. Here the mode of production is demand-driven and highly
diverse. Typical Industrial Age factories could specialize huge facilities
for the production of just one product. But the Post-Industrial fabrication
shop of the near future seeks to produce the full spectrum of artifacts
supporting a high standard of living within the confines of a single small
facility. Thus the miniaturization of the production facility must impact
the approach to design in order that artifacts of large size and great
diversity can be made.

Interestingly, a similar problem exists for the visionaries of prospective
space habitats. In order for human beings to ultimately inhabit space, we
will need to be able to deploy a complete industrial infrastructure there.
But there's a key limitation. One cannot easily precision-fabricate
artifacts in the ambient environment of space. Thus, by logical extension,
one cannot precision-fabricate anything in space that you cannot fit through
a pressure hatch. Because of this simple fact it becomes very easy to
discern the difference between plausible and implausible proposals of space
habitats by virtue of the visual indications of how they are made. If they
look, for instance, like they appear to be made in the fashion of a
conventional air liner it is safe to assume they are implausible because
they would need a pressurized enclosure bigger than they are to make them in
with some kind of pressure hatch large enough for them to pass through
whole. However, modular structures -particularly those based on space
frames- are obviously more plausible because they break down into a series
of small modular components one might make in the confined spaces of a
habitat, easily get through some modest-sized hatchway, and assemble simply
in the ambient space environment -most likely with some robotic assistance
of limited dexterity.

We can apply this same logic to the design of Post-Industrial artifacts
based on a similar limitation in the scale of the independent fabrication
workshop. Practical products of the local 'fab shop' must, by necessity,
limit the maximum scale of any monolithic component, will favor modularity,
and will favor employ of multi-functionality in components. This also suits
the logic of the 'prosumer' who is seeking to optimize the ease of
production of an artifact he is often making for his own use. This brings us
to our next precept;

       By virtue of the dimensional limits resulting from the
miniaturization of fabrication systems,
       Post-Industrial design favors modularity following a strategy of
maximum diversity of function
       from a minimum diversity of parts and materials -Min-A-Max.

As a consequence of this when combined with the tendency of Post-Industrial
artifacts to be based on platforms rather than discrete self-contained
non-evolving designs we derive yet another precept;

       Post-industrial artifacts tend to exhibit the characteristic of
perpetual demountability, leading
       to ready adaptive reuse, repairability, upgradeability, and
recyclability. By extension, they
       compartmentalize failure and obsolescence to discrete demountable
components.
       A large Post-Industrial artifact can potentially live for as long as
its platform can evolve -potentially
       forever.

A scary prospect for the conventional manufacturer banking on the practice
of planned obsolescence, but then Post-Industrial production isn't concerned
with a profit motive. It is concerned with maximum yield in productivity for
the prosumer. Essentially, a prosumer seeks a maximum quality of life by
maximizing his labor yield in the support of a given standard of living. All
profit equates to time from people's lives. A Post-Industrial culture seeks
to exploit demassification, localization, and ultimately personalization of
industrial production as a means to recover the personal time lost to other
people's profit in an Industrial Age consumer culture where you never get
paid what you're worth and you never get your money's worth on anything you
buy. That potential dividend is huge, especially if the productivity
leverage of automation if fully implemented to that end. This is why
discussions of Post-Industrial cultural emergence often revolve around such
concepts as post-scarcity, cashless economics, and the job-less lifestyle.
We foresee a point where maintaining a high standard of living requires
about as much attention and effort as running a free web server.

Lifecycle, Resources, and Impact:

Another key characteristic of Industrial Age design concerns materials and
the progressive shift across the past century from the natural to the
synthetic and then to the increasingly complex synthetic in the spectrum of
materials employed in manufactured goods. Until quite recently, this
transition has been accompanied by a shift from the recyclable and
biodegradable toward the non-recyclable, and non-biodegraseable, though the
general concern for such things at all is fairly recent in industry. They
have always had somewhere else to unload waste -even if the search for that
place as increasingly approached the point of absurdity. The driving force
behind this progression toward the synthetic has been both the compulsion to
eliminate hand labor processes through molding techniques and costs. As
we've depleted many common materials, industry has sought to use them
increasingly efficiently (well, efficiently from the context of only one
side of the equation...) to keep costs down. Wood is a good example of this.
>From the start of the 20th century on there has been a compulsion to find
ways for the total utilization of lumber to maximize the value of the raw
timber. This resulted in a trend in mainstream American housing that first
saw traditional post and beam construction supplanted by light 'stick'
frame, then saw that stick framing increasingly replaced by composite or
engineered lumber, and now sees a growing use of Structural Insulated Panels
that are a sandwich of plastic foam and oriented strand board. The modern
house is evolving from a structure of wood to high-tech papier mache and,
increasingly, plastics are being introduced. In the form of fiber-reinforced
plastic extrusions, they are now even taking a structure role. People once
scoffed at the Monsanto plastic house of the future at Disneyland, and yet
this is exactly where we are today -even if we prefer to hide that reality
behind drywall and paint. Plastic represents the most complete use of the
lumber resource with an indifference to lumber quality (which is
deteriorating worldwide due to over-harvesting and artificially accelerated
tree growth) when it's being reduced to raw cellulose. On the positive side,
this is bringing an end to the need for actually sourcing that cellulose
from trees at all, allowing utilization of more quickly renewable plant
sources like bamboo. But on the negative side the resulting composites and
plastics are commonly less easily recyclable. Home renovation is a major
source of landfill waste.

In the Post-Industrial production context, waste becomes a local problem
that cannot be avoided by the local producer. They don't have the luxury of
putting tons of trash on barges to send to distant economically
disadvantaged communities out of sight and mind of the genteel folks. It
also becomes a resource as the detritus of the Industrial Age can prove a
valuable source of cheap raw materials for the imaginative. Early proponents
of Post-Industrial theory and culture also tended to be strong proponents of
the concept of adaptive reuse, seeking to employ industrial and
architectural cast-offs in novel ways. The new designer/prosumer must be
much more concerned about the whole lifecycle of artifacts, the management
of waste as key to one's net productivity as any method of fabrication. This
brings us to our last precept;

       An effective design anticipates a lifecycle hierarchy defined by
direct reuse, adaptive-reuse,
       upcycling, recycling, biodegradeability, and finally ultimate waste.
Materials are chosen with
       this lifescycle in mind, thus favoring designs that use -and
venerate- materials in simple
       unadulterated forms wherever possible. Paint and glue are sins.

This notion parallels the idea of employing modular component systems as
direct reuse is the most efficient form of recycling. We can anticipate that
common Post-Industrial artifacts will tend to rely more on mechanical
assembly and feature far smaller spectrums of simpler materials where
possible to accommodate other modes of reuse and recycling. Recycling
technology tends to lag far behind other areas  of advance in industrial
technology. It has so long been such an overlooked aspect of industry that,
even at the large and primitive Industrial Age scale of things it remains
nascent. it may be some time for this technology to catch-up at the
localized production scale. And so one must manage waste on the front-end;
by the choice of materials and a conscious limitation on
applications/decorations that hamper their recycling. Thus Post-Industrial
design anticipates not just some product lifecycle but the total materials
lifecycle. Being forced to live with one's own trash is an important impetus
for thinking smarter about it.

Examples:

Let's now consider some examples of artifacts that exhibit characteristics
of Post-Industrial design sensibility. We've already discussed one of the
prime examples;

The personal computer:

The PC represents the prime example of a product of an industrial ecology
and the prime example of a platform superseding the designs of a very large
variety of products based on it. The computer enthusiast can now personally
create a computer in any form with any level of performance and features
they desire simply by picking from an infinite assortment of parts found in
innumerable on-line catalogs. If this is not enough, there are any number of
services available for further customization of parts like enclosures. And
this is global. The PC is the first 'world product'. Choices tend to dwindle
with size, however, as the smaller the form factor the less flexible the
integration of components and the more exclusive the designs of motherboards
become to the designs of enclosures. With laptop computers
assembly-on-demand is quite rare due to extreme limits on form factors and
we have seen most portable computing devices evolve into blobjects as a
result.

Today we are seeing the platforms of computers evolve in such a way as they
don't just supersede any one form of product, they are no longer embodied by
any one device. Network technology is now replacing the motherboard as the
primary integrator of an overall personal computer system, with the
resulting trend being a dissolution of the computer into a cloud of network
integrated appliances that, individually, are becoming more blobject-like
because they are so reduced in size and increasingly portable in nature.
Early personal computers would seek to integrate everything that made up a
computer -even the keyboards- into a single enclosure. A Swiss Army Knife
logic prevailed with computer product design. Today, however, the primary
subsystems and user interface elements of a computer are now often broken up
into smaller separate self-contained components that may all belong to the
same platform but are not of any common model line or even the same
manufacturer. CPUs, network interfaces, hard disk drives, CD/DVD drives,
monitors, keyboard, and some portable devices, all of these elements that
collectively make-up a personal computer now are found as discrete
network-integrated devices. In the near future, these devices will work
collectively in multiples and without regard to physical distance and will
be joined by many other consumer electronics and home appliances and many
mobile devices that, today, exist as separate computers. TVs and their media
servers, electronic toys, computerized tools and home appliances, laptops
and mini-laptops, tablet displays and eBook readers, cell phones
(increasingly taking the form of mini-tablets) and headsets will all become
user interface appliances for a collective personal computer integrated
without much respect to location. Curiously, while the individual components
of the personal computer are evolving away from the Post-Industrial model
towards becoming blobjects, the platforms of personal computers are evolving
closer to the Post-Industrial ideal of complete architectural openness and
community ownership.

Living Structures:

(
http://popupcity.net/2009/07/free-classic-how-to-build-your-own-living-structures-by-ken-isaacs/
)

The brain-child of designer Ken Isaacs, Living Structures and their building
system -dubbed Matrix- were among the first deliberate attempts at
Post-Industrial design. They are also some of the first examples of
'furnitecture'; furniture that crosses the line between furniture and
architecture by exhibiting an integration of many zonal functions of
living/working spaces and sometimes having characteristics of enclosure.
They were also one of the inspirations for what came to be known as the
Urban Nomad movement.

Like many mid-century intellectuals, Isaacs anticipated a radical
transformation of western culture in the wake of what seemed, at the time,
like the imminent wholesale failure of Capitalism and the rest of the
Industrial Age paradigms. Thus he sought to use design as a means for
society to re-appropriate the technologies of the collapsing Industrial Age
in a new social context. Craft was all about hand-craft technique and talent
-an art form little concerned with producing artifacts of practical use.
This could not have mass impact. One needed to apply technology toward new
fabrication techniques that maximized personal productivity toward
independent support of a good standard of living realized in spite of the
traditional cash-economic systems that seemed on the verge of failure. (much
as they do today) Thus he envisioned a new 'do it yourself' ethic based on
that premise. One could argue that Isaacs was the original Maker -as we call
such enthusiasts today.

With this notion in mind, Isaacs devised a modular construction platform
based on simple materials that could be handled with simple cheap tools yet
serve for a very large variety of uses. Called Matrix, this simple system of
2x2 wood frame construction based on bolt-together 'trilap' joints and using
simple surface-mount panels of plywood would later be revised in the form of
a system called Box Beam that became a catalyst for the later Soft-Tech and
grass-roots renewable energy movements of the 1970s. Today it has re-emerged
under the name Grid Beam.

Using this simple building system and a system of modular element design,
Isaacs then developed a series of furnitecture designs called Living
Structures -because one could customize and adapt them spontaneously using
the simple rules of the building/design system. The first of these devised
as a way for he and his wife to maximize the use of the volume of a modest
studio apartment, these DIY constructions combined multiple furniture
features into common structures of roughly cubic unit forms that also
allowed for access to the normally unusable overhead volume of a room,
creating many levels of functional space in the standard single-storey
volume. Resisting suggestions to market these designs as Modernist furniture
products, Isaacs published his designs to free public use in a book entitled
How To Make Your Own Living Structures and conducted a series of short
courses teaching their construction in colleges around the world,
admonishing his students to use and adapt the system to create for
themselves. And so they did, with Living Structures emerging in the works of
many young designers of the time and appearing in other books such as the
Nomadic Furniture series and others similar focused on notions of adaptive
reuse of common objects and industrial cast-offs.

Isaacs went on to experiment with ever-more-ambitious applications of his
Living Structure principles, seeking to develop a practical system of
'nomadic housing' that suited a model of a future migrant intellectual youth
culture that traveled the deteriorating cities and suburbs of the collapsing
Industrial Age and repurposed their detritus into a new culture. An idea not
so far removed from what SF writer Corey Doctorow -in the contemporary Maker
context- recently dubbed the Outquisition. Switching from the wooden frame
construction system to stressed-skin plywood structures and the use of early
forms of pipe-fitting frame systems such as the ubiquitous Kee Klamp
framing, he devised a variety of novel microhouse designs that have inspired
many designers to this day, such as those of the N55 group in the
Netherlands. Isaacs and his supporters even explored the creation of
vehicles. However, as the scales of structures explored increased, Isaacs
encountered increasing challenges with the limitations of simple materials,
particularly with weatherizing his structures for use in the outdoor
environment. Most of his microhouses proved short-lived -but then in the
nomadic context they were not intended to be permanent in the manner of
conventional housing. More like the traditional housing of native Americans
and Polynesians, they were intended to constantly evolve and be renewed.

Tivoli Model One Radio:

(http://www.tivoliaudio.com/product.php?productid=164&cat=262&page=1)

One of the most iconic Modernist electronic appliance designs of the 20th
century, the Model One radio was the creation of high fidelity audio
technology pioneer Henry Kloss who cofounded a string of companies  across
his career producing breakthrough home audio products that, for the most
part, all featured a characteristic minimalism in design, at once
retrospective and modern, very high in quality yet understated in
appearance. More an engineer than an industrial designer, Kloss' designs
were always about the technology on the inside of the box. In that they make
a powerful visual statement in their external simplicity. The origin of the
Model One design lay in the two-piece KLH Model Eight monaural table radio
(one box for the radio, one matching box for the speaker, and both designed
for convenient bookshelf placement) -the product of the second company Kloss
co-founded. Brought out of retirement to co-found the Tivoli company, he
revised this design with more modern MOSFET technology producing the Model
One monaural radio and its related Model Two stereo system. This remains the
anchor product of the Tivoli company to this day, the basic form factor and
its simple aesthetic now adapted to support more contemporary CD players,
satellite radios, and digital audio systems.

It is the minimalism of Koss's design that makes the Model One a model for
Post-Industrial style. A throw-back to some degree to the construction of
the earliest of home radios, it takes the form of a simple open-ended
finished wooden box that uses simple recessed flat alloy plates to enclose
front and back and simple internal stand-offs to support its circuitry, all
held together with a few screws on the back plate. A 3" circular speaker is
matched to a 3" tuning nob with two smaller nobs and two simple LED lights
in between rounding out the only controls. Many old electronics devices have
used similar enclosures but, whether by insight or chance, Koss arrived as a
particular set of dimensions for this simple box (212.7mm wide, 114.3mm
high, and 133.35mm deep) that not only proved visually appealing and most
convenient for placement on a table or shelf but also proved well adapted to
accessory components and many other electronic device uses. A simple
modification of the front and back faceplates is all that is needed to
accommodate different applications. More recent products of the company have
diverged from the original design form but a half dozen products in the
Tivoli line still employ this exact same enclosure in a variety of color
options. Thus this design has become a platform for many kinds of electronic
devices relating to the original radio. It could work for much more. One can
easily imagine this exact same enclosure employed with countless devices
including personal computer hardware.

In the context of early Post-Industrial production, where fabrication
technology still remains somewhat limited in flexibility and scale, an
enclosure design like the Model One's would accommodate the need to maximize
productivity from a minimum of reusable modular component elements. One
could thus readily imagine today's Makers employing such an enclosure in a
thousand applications and readily evolving their internal components as
technology evolves without throwing away other perfectly reusable
components. It was with the inspiration of the Model One that this author,
some time ago, proposed the concept of enclosure profiles; extruded tubular
profiles in a small range of sizes that would accommodate a large variety of
appliances and electronics using the same basic design approach. These
extrusions might be made of a variety of materials -though aluminum is
most-likely- and would feature integral circuit board slots, screw tap
ridges, and external ridges for heat sink fins and stand-off legs. The
profiles would be produced as a stock material, cut to length, and routed on
their open ends to accommodate simple recessed face and back plates held in
place by screws. Simply by using different profile lengths, cutting and
marking different face and back plates, and mounting different internal
components an endless variety of devices could be accommodated with the same
profile, and this would be further expanded by a small spectrum of profiles
for common device sizes;pocket scale devices like music players and cell
phones, tablet-like devices like portable computers or monitors,
desk/shelf/table devices like radios, small appliances, and computer
hardware, large appliance enclosures for things like computer printers,
microwave ovens, and so on. For the largest enclosures, composite profiles
would be used, based on precision-interlocking corner or side panel profiles
with different optional formed-in features.

Currently, the Maker community continues to rely largely on adaptive reuse
of found objects for electronics enclosures. But when indigenous enclosure
component designs start to become standardized among some users, it's likely
that something very similar to the Model One design will emerge.

The Africar:

(http://www.oldwoodies.com/feature-africar.htm)

The well-intentioned but ill-fated brainchild of famous photojournalist Tony
Howarth, the Africar was perhaps the first Post-Industrial vehicle design.
After many years traveling the roughest parts of the globe, Howarth came to
the realization that the industrialized countries were doing a great
disservice to the developing countries in the export of used conventional
automobiles designed to suit the roads and auto service infrastructure of
those industrialized nations but very poorly adapted to the situation and
environment in the rest of the world. In the poor road conditions of
developing countries, common automobiles were short-lived and repairs -if
possible at all- impossibly expensive because of reliance on imported
components. (this is why, today, we commonly see a ubiquity of just a few
brands and models of cars and trucks in the developing world -typically the
few most rugged and cheap of Japanese made vehicles like the Toyota pickup
trucks) To address this problem, Howarth came up with the notion of
developing a new low-cost automobile specifically adapted to the situation
of developing nations. A car that could handle the rough conditions of
unpaved roads, was simple enough in design that it could be largely made
locally even in these poor countries, and which was very simple to repair
even with crude tools because it would be made mostly of wood.

With a design akin to a cross between a station wagon and a very light sport
utility vehicle in four and six wheel variants and a pickup truck form, the
Africar employed the suspension, engine, and drive train from the then still
ubiquitous Citroén 2CV and a carriage-style frame and body made of
engineered wood laminates and resin-impregnated marine plywood that could be
repaired with low skill and potentially endlessly customized. Though this
use of wood seemed strange to the generally unimaginative motor enthusiast
community, engineers had well demonstrated its equivalent strength and
safety to any other composite materials used in the most expensive sports
cars and was potentially very environmentally sustainable -particularly with
the potential use of bamboo laminates. Development plans even called for
eventual development of a low-precision engine that could be fabricated in
lower-tech machine shops, replacing the use of the 2CV engine.

Africar International Limited was formed in 1986 and plans called for the
creation of numerous small local production facilities across the world.
Unfortunately, Tony Howarth's skill as a businessman was not remotely close
to his skill as a photographer and from the beginning his start-up company
spiraled into an uncontrollable escalation of debt and missed milestones.
Constant re-design of the vehicles delayed initial production and in an
ill-conceived attempt to cover escalating debt cars were sold in advance of
production and a dubious loan crowdsourcing scheme introduced. Today a
concept of this sort would have most-certainly been approached as an open
source project but at the time that was a very new and alien concept even to
the computer industry, though, ironically, the roots of the open source
concept are said to actually originate in very early auto industry history
and the formation of the Motor Vehicle Manufacturer's Association. With a
chronically nebulous business plan, mounting debts, a growing mob of
increasingly frustrated customers and investors, and no end to the design
and engineering finalization in sight, the fate of the Africar was sealed.
To avoid prosecution when the company finally collapsed in 1988, Howarth
exiled himself in the US until 1994, whereupon he was arrested on return to
the UK. The Africar briefly resurfaced in the form of the Bedouin, a kit car
with a fiberglass body shell offered as a 2CV conversion and made by the
company called Special Vehicle Conversion. Only a few of the kit conversions
were produced before this vehicle also disappeared. For reasons unknown, to
date no plans of the Africar or Bedouin are known to exist. With so many
OScar projects now emerging around the world, it seems odd that this obvious
contender has not reemerged. Either the plans have been completely lost or
those who hold them are grossly lacking in foresight.

Since the invention of pressed steel welded unibody construction in the
1930s, the manufacture of even the most practical and minimalist of
mainstream automobiles has been dominated by giant corporations with access
to massive amounts of investment capital able to cover the costs of
production systems of huge scale -in particular the three storey steel
presses used to produce primary chassis shell pieces and whose forms alone
are said to cost millions to make and must be cost-justified by ridiculously
large production volumes. The Africar was one of the few contemporary
mainstream vehicle designs to defy this norm. It was a vehicle that could be
built in facilities of small scale and relatively low technology, was
designed in anticipation of free customization and evolution by its own
users, and was so serviceable and repairable it could live forever. It was
an excellent example Post-Industrial design principles. It embodies exactly
what would be an ideal open source car -far more so than most of the designs
currently being developed by OScar projects. Had the Africar succeeded it
might have radically changed the situation in the developing world and
emerged as the successor in ubiquity to the 2CV and VW Beetle. It's a
tragedy that such a promising and potentially world-changing design was
felled by mere executive incompetence.

The Honda Unibox:

http://world.honda.com/Tokyo2001/auto/UNIBOX/it/index.html

The most novel entry in the 2001 Tokyo Motor Show was a vehicle so unlike
anything seen before that it left western auto industry reporters and
reviewers largely confused. Many reviewers panned the design because of its
extensive use of transparent body panels -completely missing the obvious
point of their use as a means to showcase the very novel structural features
of the vehicle. Designed by Sam Livingstone, the Honda Unibox is 'kai van'
type of microvan vehicle and one of the few attempts at a totally modular
automobile platform. Like the motherboard of a personal computer, the
foundation of this platform is a flat chassis module hosting six wheels; two
large front wheels linked to an extremely compact front engine module and
two pair of smaller wheels in the back. A unique wheel-integrated suspension
system eliminates conventional bulky suspension systems. The top surface of
the chassis module features a wooden deck with longitudinal aluminum alloy
slots into which seats and other fixtures are plugged in and freely
positioned. A heads-up-display replaces conventional dashboard instruments
and a drive-by-wire control system puts all driving controls into a
repositionable joystick. A video rear-view monitor is mounted in a bar
spanning the whole top edge of the wind shield space providing a panoramic
view. A folding touch display emerges from slot in a curved wooden front
bulkhead, providing access to a navigation system, audio system, and
Internet. A set of aluminum truss beams plug into the chassis to form the
boxy shape of the vehicle and host external and internal body panels as well
as LED indicator lights. Within the interior volume created by the trusswork
a series of accessories are stored, including an electric mini-scooter and
powered cart. 17 alternately clear or opaque (all clear in the concept
vehicle) panels make up the body of the vehicle which also features two
large side doors with integral electric lifts for the folding scooter and
cart and a large back door.

Virtually all the components making up the Unibox are demountable and
interchangeable, bolted-on or employing a plug-in interface. The side panels
in particular are intended for owner-customization, being freely swapped
with clear or opaque panels in any number of colors, patterns, or surface
textures. The form of the vehicle would be freely modified by a different
set of plug-in truss elements, allowing it to assume a vast assortment of
forms. While the prototype employed an extremely compact but conventional 4
cylinder in-line engine module, the form factor could readily suit any
number of different power plants and anticipates the use of hybrid or
electric power.

Though like most concept cars it is less than entirely practical and will
never become a production vehicle, the Unibox is like an embroidery sampler
of every key industrial design concept likely to become significant in the
21st century. This is the epitome of a Post-Industrial vehicle, though in
practice it is more likely that functional vehicles of the emerging
Post-Industrial age will rely -initially- on more durable space frame
chassis as with luxury 'supercars'. (which are commonly built in small
facilities and use space frames and composite bodies both for their superior
performance and as a way to avoid the cost of large steel presses. As we've
seen with the Model One, luxury products often have characteristics in
common with the Post-Industrial style due to their basis in small volume
hand-based production in modest scale facilities. In many ways
Post-Industrial production is a revival of pre-industrial modes of
production enhanced in productivity by new technology)

Tomahouse and Jeriko House:

http://www.tomahouse.com/
http://www.jerikohouse.com/
http://www.tkithouse.com/

Across the 20th century inventors and architects have been experimenting
with means to industrialize housing production in order to address the
ubiquitous and worsening problem of homelessness and sub-standard housing
that emerged as a side-effect of Industrial Age paradigms themselves. For
the past century the production of housing has resisted all attempts to
industrialize it in any effective way, in part because the scale and
complexity of the typical home is so great (in point of fact, the automobile
is the largest artifact effectively produced by centralized continuous mass
production. Everything larger tends to be produced in intermittent series
production -like airplanes), in part because the traditional builder
community has always tended to resist new technology which it always regards
as a threat to job security, and because there is a fundamental economic
aberration in the relationship between built structure and property value
resulting in an essential dysfunction of the common housing finance paradigm
-made painfully obvious in the past two years on a global scale.

The industrialization of housing was a particular obsession of mid-century
Modernist architects who often saw a solution in the concept of
modularization. However, none of the countless modularization schemes
devised over the century proved viable -and this is not because they were
impractical in function and performance but rather that they persistently
failed to find the necessary support from industrialists to bring them to
market. Though commonly attributed by the inventors of these systems to
simple stupidity and lack of foresight on the part investors and corporate
executives, the fact of the matter is that these proponents of modular
architecture tended to have very poor grasp of the natural of industrial
production nor a clear understanding of the difference between products and
platforms. Often they would pursue ideal or 'perfect' house architectures
which they thought could be universally standardized like the essentially
universal architecture of the mass produced automobile. Essentially the
problem of the practical industrially produced house is exactly the same as
the problem as the practical cost-effective personal computer; housing is
simply too big, complicated, and diverse as a technology for any one company
to industrialize it  effectively and comprehensively by itself. And thus the
solution to industrialization of housing production is largely the same as
that which proved the case with the computer; the industrial ecology of
multiple manufacturers in a ecology of interdependence defined by
architectural platforms. But unlike the computer industry, the housing
industry had no ground-up modularization in another more fundamental
industry (electronics) on which to rely as a source of established
components production that could be re-purposed to a housing application. In
other words, there was no other kind of building industry whose already
established production of components offered potential repurposing to the
housing application. Thus there was no basis of an ad hoc evolution toward
an industrial ecology for housing as there was for the computer. This needed
a purposeful cultivation -which of course was not possible when architects
and building system inventors generally lacked the slightest comprehension
of how industrial production and its underlying economics actually worked.

However, there were hints of a solution, in the notion of 'plug-in
architecture' and in Modernists' experiments in adaptive reuse of
prefabricated industrial structures -as exemplified by the mid-century work
of Charles and Ray Eames. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eames_House) The
concept of plug-in architecture was devised as a strategy of
industrialization through the modularization of building elements intended
to simplify and speed the on-site construction process while affording
pre-fabrication of the bulk of a structure in a factory setting. Most
plug-in architecture schemes tended to be hopelessly large in unit module
scale, in part because many architects could not relinquish their ego in the
design of platforms for housing rather than discrete house designs. This
would ultimately lead to industrialist indifference because there simply is
no one or even few housing designs that can be standardized as universal. No
one house design can hope to have the market appeal to realize the
production volumes necessary to justify large scale continuous mass
production. But another, rarer, group of designers looked at the concept of
plug-in architecture from the context of a much smaller component scale
geared toward owner-building. They envisioned systems of housing akin to
very advanced office partition systems where the owners of homes could
readily build durable structures of their own using simple rules that could
be encoded, in some fashion, into the interfaces of system components,
creating a pre-engineered fool-proof building system. And here is where this
concept converged the explorers of adaptive reuse of modular industrial
building systems, chosen for their pre-fabricated virtues, their simplicity
of assembly, and their over-engineered structural performance making their
use fool-proof in a housing context. But the industrial building systems of
the time tended to be designed for large space structures with large steel
structural elements that precluded ready owner-building except at the scale
of finishing elements. It would take some decades more for industrial
building technology to realize something more suited to the small component
plug-in architecture scheme.

In the 1980s such an industrial building system did emerge -not in the form
of a system for industrial buildings but rather in a system intended for
structures used in industrial automation. Though predictions of an era of
Total Automation appeared early in the 20th century, the advance of
automation was long hampered by the combination of high systems cost with
high rates of obsolescence and a tendency for overspecialization in systems
design. The 'universal robot' remained a creature of science fiction while
actual automation systems proved difficult to cost-justify, making
industrial outsourcing a more effective option. Almost simultaneously during
the late 1970s and early 1980s, a series of companies around the globe began
offering a new modular building technology specifically for industrial
automation based on extruded aluminum T-slot profiles. Employing simple
bolt-together assembly and a burgeoning assortment of modular system
elements, T-slot offered a way to overcome some of the problems associated
with the adoption of automation by allowing systems to be both readily
custom-designed to a manufacturer's needs and perpetually upgraded to suit
changes in technology. T-slot quickly became ubiquitous, not only in
automation but in robotics research, science and engineering laboratories,
office furnishings, and even the arts. The advent of this technology may
have been key in the radical shift late in the century in favor of flexible
contract job-shop over traditional centralized production, resulting in a
decline in large factory development by and after the turn of the century.

Sometime in the late 1980s, a German resident of Bali named Frank Toma took
notice of this new framing technology and began to explore its application
as a light building system for vacation and resort cottages. He found many
of the countless accessory components potentially repurpose-able in a house
building context and developed an at once both simple and sophisticated
building system combining high-tech T-slot components sourced in Germany
with the hand-crafted woodworking found in Indonesia, Using aluminum
profiles for housing construction was, of course, not entirely new. Even as
early as the 1950s, this application had been demonstrated by
inventor/architect Jacque Fresco -now known for his work as a futurist with
The Venus Project. But this early technology had the same problem of all
modular house building systems devised in the past in that it was new and
exclusive to this housing application, had few home designs, and had to
establish a massive production infrastructure from scratch. Unlike all other
modular house building systems, T-slot had pre-established production as an
industrial product and so needed to justification as a house building system
for its primary parts production. The housing 'application' simply added to
the pre-established market for T-slot. This is the key element that has been
missing in the schemes for industrialized housing all along. This is what
was needed to bootstrap this modular technology -just as the personal
computer relied on the pre-established electronic components production as a
source from which to build its own industry from. With the aid of designers
Shinta Siregar and Pamela Pangestu of Nexus Studios, the fledgling Tomahouse
company devised an elegant aesthetic for a series of pre-fab cottage and
house designs that seamlessly blend Modernist, Asian, Polynesian, and even
nautical aesthetics while conforming the limitations of a completely modular
building system relying entirely on bolt-together construction.

Little of the underlying technology employed in the Tomatech system was
proprietary -given the increasingly ubiquitous nature of T-slot technology
itself, and as the Modernist Pre-Fab craze took hold across the 1990s and
T-slot profile makers began expanding their product lines to include larger
profiles, Tomahouse was quickly joined by a number of other developers of
T-slot based housing. Key among these are New Orleans based Jeriko House,
which at first started as a US distributor of Toma Tech, and iT House in
California. Several other firms employ similar technology with more
proprietary profiles. Frankly, all these housing developers are in nascent
stages of development and few complete houses have been built by any of
them. But this modular building concept has much traction today and interest
in the technology is growing.

With this technology edging toward an international open source building
platform, (which this author has dubbed collectively as Utilihab) it appear
to be realizing the ideal of plug-in architecture. Like the early computer,
it is still limited in efficiency by the limitations of adaptive reuse of
components not designed specifically for it. As it emerges as a significant
application -and hence market- it in own right it will likely evolve an
ecology of supporting developers and sub-component manufacturers in exactly
the same way the computer did -depending on just how effective its current
developers are at pushing the technology into the cultural consciousness.
Key to this is that, unlike most other modular building technologies of the
past, Utilihab has no pre-determined aesthetic to impose upon the designers
that work with it. One look at the photos of the beautiful Bale cottage
prototype developed by Tomahouse clearly demonstrates the aesthetic
versatility of this building system. This is not a future technology for the
fanciful 'house of tomorrow.' This is a high-tech approach to very luxurious
housing in the here and now.

In a Post-Industrial context, we have in this building technology a good
model for housing based on a broadly distributed and potentially localized
production scheme much as we see with the computer. Its potential for
cultivating an industrial ecology that could do for housing what it did for
the computer -the most costly and complex artifact humans ever produced-
puts it far ahead of any other housing technology. But will this potential
finally be realized, or will traditional Industrial Age self-interest among
its small current community of developers doom it to the same fate as all
the modular building systems of the past? Time will tell.

The Furniture Houses:

http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_Houses_index.htm

If T-slot architecture represents the foundation of a Post-Industrial
technology for housing, the Furniture Houses of Japanese architect Shigeru
Ban present us with a glimpse of what that technology may look like in its
ultimate refined form -analogous to comparing the mini-computers of the late
1970s to the personal computer of today. Best known for his novel and
elegant architectural applications of cardboard, Shigeru Ban is a designer
of the New Modernist school with a preference for very minimalist aesthetics
and a fondness for classic open-plan pavilion forms. Some time in the 1990s
he made an interesting observation. It seemed that the factory-fabricated
shelving and cabinet systems commonly employed in up-scale homes were
potentially of a much higher structural quality than the frame construction
common to houses in Japan in general and this suggested the possibility that
they actually could actually be used as primary load-bearing structural
elements in a home design. To explore this concept, he began a series of
designs called Furniture Houses (which include some named house designs like
the Nine-Square Grid House, Veneer Grid Roof House, and Sagaponac House)
where a specially adapted prefabricated cabinetry system is used to make
furniture elements doubling as primary structural elements. The result is a
series of spacious minimalist pavilion homes formed of a handful of a
remarkably small number of physical elements most of which serve multi-duty
as shelving, cabinetry, counters, and the like and often integrate many
utilities infrastructure elements. In effect the floor and roof of the homes
functions like a space-defining backplane -a motherboard- for the other
elements in the homes which serve as functional, partition, and structural
elements defining subspaces.

This prefab cabinetry system is not actually designed to function as a
plug-in architecture system. But the overall designs of the Furniture Houses
clearly suggests the way such a system is likely to evolve as the repurposed
modular component system of industrial T-slot adapts to the use of more
architecturally-specialized components integrating progressively more
technology into progressively more pre-finished and self-contained
structural elements. In the ultimate plug-in architecture vision we arrive
at digitally aware components where the characteristics of furniture,
appliance, utilities, and structural components merge into prefabricated
user-manipulated units that have largely tool-less integral quick-connection
mechanisms and an integral digitally networked sensory elements that allow
the house as a whole to track and monitor its structural integrity as the
occupants dynamically interact with it. We can thus envision a construction
process where the resident himself -with no tools- assembles floor and roof
'backplanes', jacks the latter up with temporary lifts, installs -with
digital guidance from live integral computers- plug-in furnishing,
appliance, and partition elements doubling as load bearing elements,
finishes enclosure with window and exterior wall units, and completes
construction with a choice of plug-in floor and ceiling panels, some with
integral lighting, heating, power, and digital network fixtures. For
solitary person this whole process might take as little as a single day. And
all of this would be freely adaptive and demountable. One could pack up a
whole house like a deployable piece of furniture. This is housing in the
Post Industrial Age.





-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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