On mass manufacturing and what it means to humanity
Previous post pointed to this installment of The Genius of Design:
The second episode can be found here:
Some great quotes and perspective from episode 1 follow.
The division of labor and the Designer
Toward the middle of the video, they venture into the creation of the Designer, which happened as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution … the maker and the designer became two separate entities, with potentially bad side-effects for the maker.
Dieter Rams (designer from Braun & others):
My grandfather, he was a specialist for surfaces … I learned from him to polish by hand, and his thumb was like his tool … he was thinking not in mass[-manufactured] products, and that is what what we have to think today, too; we have to change mass[-manufactured] products into quality products.
This clearly points to the goal of the modern designer, the desired end-product: the modern designer should create something that is compatible with today’s manufacturing techniques and capabilities, but which emulates the hand-crafted nature of the individually created product.
Narrator voiceover, talking about the future of manufacturing, given Rams’s observation:
But controlling a multi-faceted manufacturing process is more challenging than throwing a pot on a wheel. Designing for industry is based on a bold premise: that the craftsman’s skills can be replicated by a mechanical system in which machines act like humans, and humans [act like] machines.
This introduces the unpleasant side of the divide between the maker and the designer. The maker becomes a cog in a machine.
Bob Casey, Historian at the Henry Ford Museum:
What happens in a mass-production system is that the craftsmanship is transferred from the people who are physically assembling the product back up the chain away from the mass who are doing the assembly. The labor historians have a word for it: they call it ‘de-skilling.’ It says we are going to take the skill away from the majority of people, and were going to invest it in a smaller group of people who are designing [the product].
The obvious difficulty is how to avoid things like sweatshops and working conditions in which workers routinely throw themselves off buildings [insert sidelong glance at Apple & Foxconn]. The Henry Ford approach seems the most obvious … odd that so few seem to have emulated it. Ford turned his employees into his customers by paying them wages high enough that they could afford to buy a car of their own.
The problem was seen back when the industrial revolution began. Fiona MacCarthy, WIlliam Morris Biographer (after narrator voiceover “For William Morris, the most celebrated and influential designer of the 19th century, machines were at best a threat; at worst a menace.”):
He wasn’t against machines per se, because he could see that machines could, if properly regulated, make life better for people. But he couldn’t bear the thought of this beauty being achieved at the expense of the people who were producing in these inhumane conditions.
A beautiful object really must be made in beautiful surroundings by people who are living reasonable lives, lives with some pleasure in them … not the kind of lives that a lot of people in Victorian England were being forced to live and work in.
To address what he saw as the problem, Morris learned all of the crafts & skills that the machines were taking away from people … he believed that these were skills required by the designer — necessary for the designer to do his job properly. Evidently, he never managed to address the problem … because his works had significant hand-crafted aspects to them, they cost more and were thus relegated to the wealthy who could afford them.
The unadorned beauty of the everyday
There is a great section on the marriage of form and function, of beauty and purpose.
Sam Hecht, designer:
Design can never be a pure activity, because it’s always connected with how things are bought, how things are sold, how things are used, how things are thrown away or recycled. All of these different aspects of how consumption operates need to be acknowledged, understood, and sometimes manipulated so that you can create beautiful, resolute, astounding pieces of work.
The video goes on to point out that Japan, despite its rapid and whole-hearted acceptance of modernization and mass manufacturing, nonetheless as a culture appreciates and, as a consumer society, pays for hand-crafted high quality work on everyday objects. Things like teapots and teacups … quality hand-made items are sought after, and the objects carry price tags high enough to enable the artist/craftsman to continue crafting the object for the future. This is a culture that appreciates, recognizes, and rewards quality, all in the face of mass manufacturing.
Naoto Fukusawa, designer:
The Japanese see beauty in the functionality of an item, like tools and other everyday items. We place great emphasis on harmony and being at one with the world … We want products to melt into the environment and become one with it. The goal for us is creating harmony.
The interesting question is how to instill this attitude outside of the Japanese culture. Europe seems to have an appreciation for quality, though I do not know the extent to which it mirrors that of Japan. America, on average, has an appreciation only for price … and we use it to distinguish all goods from food to medicine to clothing to house construction. Scary.
On the frequent mental divide between function and appeal, specifically targeting the automobile industry:
For designers, the chassis is the platform, which exists to support their designs.
For engineers, design is styling, sometimes pronounced “packaging.”
Pretty humorous; it mirrors the divide between hardware and software engineers that I wrote about for a business article a while back:
“Reward: How to foster a technology-innovation culture within a large organization (What you can learn from startup companies).” Bruce Jacob. Chapter in The Handbook of Technology Management. H. Bidgoli, Editor. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken NJ. 2010.
Last but not least, a great quote from Steven Bayley, writer:
There are three great and significant 20th-century art forms, I think: the one is the movies; the second is rock music; the third is industrial design, of which the automobile is the paradigm.
The piece spends a bit of time talking about Ford and the demise of the Model T, brought down by its own success (Ford became less an automobile manufacturer and instead a Model-T manufacturer), and there are some great quotes from designers at the company today.
A single, perfect sphere
It is clear that the challenges are two-fold: first, designers must make pieces that, despite their production numbers and the techniques used to produce them, retain the same essence of humanity inherent in a hand-crafted object. Second, the manufacturing processes (or, perhaps more appropriately, the manufacturing environments) must not dehumanize the workers. We as consumers must insist on these via the decisions we make with our wallets. It certainly seems possible to achieve both; Ford’s example shows that it is possible to leave profit (sometimes significant profit) on the table and yet grow or at least sustain one’s company. Happy, healthy, well-paid workers do not equal the impending downfall of a company … but perhaps I am naive.
The solution is typically innovation … when a company can compete on nothing other than price, then exploitation of workers seems an inevitable endgame. On the other hand, when a company competes on innovation, then interesting things can happen. Neat example in the video is the Coalbrookdale bridge:
[Though] mass production complicated ideas of beauty, the [cast] iron bridge in Coalbrookdale is an early testament to the beauty of the machine-made and the truth of the mass-produced.
This is the picture at the top of the post. I love that, with its reflection in the water, the bridge makes a perfect circle.
