Sunday, 5 June 2011

The return of making or local will win

I've been threatening to do a piece (hopefully blog and in a bona fide magazine) about how in the long run production cannot remain global. There's a lot of small points and large trends that all add up to that conclusion but I've not had the time to put it all together yet. Damn the world for being busy ...

But in the meantime small things that may be large things keep cropping up. Like this piece in the NY Times recently called the Kitchen Table Industrialists. There is a growing trend for people wanting to make things themselves, captured for example in Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft.The step to thinking of individual makers as industry is a really interesting one though. To see co-operatives coming together to share 3D printers is awesome.

And it makes me a little jealous and wistful for my time in Boston. It would be great to be close to that kind of energy as it doesn't seem to exist in the UK. If there is anyone out there that can prove me wrong do let me know, but my sense is the kinds of groups discussed in Anand just don't thrive in this country.

More than anything else though I need to get the larger article done!

F

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