[p2p-research] Fwd: hacking the industrial mode of production

[Michel Bauwens]

Eric poses a very important question at the beginning of his contribution
here:

*<Would be nice to have a better way to track the activities of these
Post-Industrial pioneers and explorers. It's getting hard to keep on top of
all these interesting people do so much interesting stuff.>*

Apart from the delicous tag
http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Manufacturingand P2P-Hardware, I have
the following in the feedreader, see below.

QUESTION: WHAT AM I MISSING, WHAT SHOULD BE ADDED. COULD YOU RECOMMEND OTHER
TAGS, OTHER BLOGS ETC...


   - Agroblogger (0)
(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=77794115&site=4905101>
   - we dont do retro (0)
(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=72181630&site=15932946>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=72181619&site=7536564>
   - Erik's Blog: Discussing IT, personal fabrication and a new and b (0)
   (0) <http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=77784427&site=20105547>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=85495415&site=5242140>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=85307579&site=23492156>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=72182803&site=3444052>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=77787393&site=20108290>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=76110874&site=17075796>
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(0)<http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=84863950&site=22123104>
   - Ponoko - Blog
   <http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?sub=72181664&site=10516016>



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:59 PM
Subject: Re: hacking the industrial mode of production
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


Here's a review on that article. Very interesting work. Would be nice to
have a better way to track the activities of these Post-Industrial pioneers
and explorers. It's getting hard to keep on top of all these interesting
people do so much interesting stuff.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Interview with Otto von Busch - from We Make Money Not Art -
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/03/interview-with-13.php

Fashion may not be the first thing to come to mind when one thinks of a new
industrial revolution -especially for a nerd like myself who is quite
satisfied with a minimal wardrobe of sneakers, chinos, T-shirts, and army
surplus coats and has never even considered formal wear beyond Arthur C.
Clarke's Nehru suit. But clothing is indeed one of our major industries and
paradoxical in that it was host to the origin of machine automation and yet
has long resisted its advance, remaining one of the most
hand-labor-intensive industries today. Clothing is also an industry long
subject to a rapid pace of product change through the evolution of fashion
as well as demanding the largest product diversity as the key basis of
self-expression. Long before it was observed in the music industry, the
clothing industry had to learn to cope with a Long Tail market, and this
perhaps is one of the reasons for the resistance to automation. The vast
organic variation of the human form coupled to the similar variation in
personal taste and a desire for self-expression through this 'second skin'
greatly challenges the mass production paradigm. One could argue that one of
the roles -in a consumer culture context- of a haute couture design culture
has been to create a kind of top-down cultural authority for 'style' that
both imposes planned obsolescence -on a seasonal schedule!- while limiting
fashion's potential demassification from the bottom-up through
self-expression, creating a cultural system where style supersede
self-expression for the secret purpose of keeping clothing mass production
runs high enough to be profitable.

And so there is much relevance in a Post-Industrial context to the work of
Otto von Busch that the above noted article well introduces us to. Here we
see interventions in the conventional industrial process that put designers
on a peer level with fabricators, enabling them to interact in a new way and
to produce on-demand for a different production paradigm. Rightly referring
to his projects as a form of 'hacking' he is indeed getting at the software
underlying an industrial production paradigm, short-circuiting its
convention hierarchies and letting it explore new possibilities. This is
much enabled by the lack of automation in the system, since human labor
still has an advantage in flexibility unmatched by large machines with
capital costs tied to specific business models and the industry having long
established a practice of job-shop production at modest scales. However, the
outsourcing of so much of this production at a great distance from the
location of designers probably hampers such hacking and von Busch seems to
have found a niche in Norway that might be tough to find elsewhere. My only
fault with these projects so far that they do not yet incorporate end-users,
unless you consider the designers themselves to be prosumers. We are
bringing the designers down to the shop but not the end users up to it where
the whole cycle is closed.

Another very interesting aspect of von Busch's work is his recognition of
the hobby fields as nexuses of the cultivation of local or independent
industrial knowledge. Researchers in Post-Industrial technology largely
focus on the re-invention of mass production technology to bring it 'down'
to the prosumer level and yet there is also another side to this in the
hobby culture where a different set of production technologies can be
brought 'up' out of very-small-scale specialization as well. It's not all
about crochet, bird houses, and model trains. Hobbies, crafts, and arts have
become increasingly technically sophisticated -as witnessed by their role in
the origin of personal computing and their current involvement in robotics
and new digital machine tool engineering. It may come as a surprise to some
that such things as modular desktop CNC machines have existed in the hobby
sphere for some time. The model aircraft hobby commonly employs materials,
engineering, and technology on-par with military fighter aircraft -even jet
propulsion! Fine arts weavers now employ digital looms. Much hobby activity
transitions to the entrepreneurial, and as von Busch has researched, much of
this trade exists on a sub-micro-economic level; informal, personal,
neighborly. Here are the foundations of future local industrial networks.

Ultimately, von Busch's work does, as yet, not give us a complete set of
answers to the many questions of a Post-Industrial production paradigm. This
is, so far, tentative exploration on a new frontier. But it's certainly
vital exploration. Clearly, even clothing is going to be designed, made,
used used very differently and fashion mean something very different in the
cultures of the near future.

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com



On Sep 7, 2009, at 3:12 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:

 http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/03/interview-with-13.php
>
> Hi Kevin, Eric,
>
> thanks for looking to the above article and eventually commenting upon it
> for our blog,
>
> Michel
>
> Which conditions ensure that a lively network of pro-ams can thrive?
>
> Our purpose was not so much to look at the fertilizers of pro-ams or
> “creative industries and creative class�? as in the works of Richard Florida
> for example. Evren and I tried to find way to map the so far unexplored
> correlations between these networks and actors. But the sharing and
> spreading of new ideas is central, not only through the Internet, but
> socially. Various platforms, amplifiers and scenes are central for the
> sharing of knowledge at this level and this is actually something that can
> be supported beyond the “recreation�? or “hobby�? level it is perceived as
> today.
>
> But understanding this level of society is only in its cradle. We have
> spent centuries optimizing industrialism and institutional capitalism and we
> still lack models and maps for the low-level knowledge production.
>
> How can an expertise raised on non-profit and democratic principles meet
> with capitalistic modes of production?
>
> Well this is something that we need time to understand and experiment with
> and social entrepreneurship, activist business, and anti-preneurship are
> just a first wave of experiments. Perhaps we need to once again look
> seriously at local currencies and other means for exchange that can operate
> on levels where global capitalism does not fit. We need more tools to see
> how this works, it is apparent that there is no longer ONE public and ONE
> market but multitudes of publics, markets, levels and networks in society,
> and most probably we need several models to see them all. Not one theory
> will explain it. Not one ring will rule them all.
>
> Any upcoming projects you could share with us?
>
> Selfpassage has a new collection out, a cookbook to inspire and help you
> re-sew your old garments into new ones. This autumn I will work with an
> exhibition in Istanbul on “Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics�? exploring
> the interfaces between high fashion and the fashion hackers and craftivist.
>
> Evren and I will hold a summer course on social entrepreneurship and small
> change methodologies. We will also arrange a workshop on the connection
> between rural and urban modes to organize creative endeavors.
>
> Everything we do is published in PDF-format and in copyleft so get inspired
> and co-create - keep updated on the selfpassage and roomservices sites!
>
>
>
> --
> 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
>
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
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> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
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

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

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