Fabrica by Design as Politics

1_ Research _ inspiration _ historical perspective _ problem statement _ research question

2_ Methodology

3_ Design

_ motivation _ validity _ constraints _ output

_ design concept _ urban positioning _ visualisations _ technical details

Federico Riches/ Design as politics/ P5 presentation

1_ Research _ inspiration _ historical perspective _ problem statement _ research question

2_ Methodology

3_ Design

_ motivation _ validity _ constraints _ output

_ design concept _ urban positioning _ visualisations _ technical details

Federico Riches/ Design as politics/ P5 presentation

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The factory has to provide the economy for the city in which it is locatedâ&#x20AC;? A. Olivetti Democrazia senza partiti

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Olivetti industries Ivrea

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Olivetti industries Pozzuoli

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The industrial shed

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1) land occupation

2) boundary

3) dependency on infrastructure

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4) mono functionality

London

Barcelona

Buenos Aires

Chicago

Milan

Vienna

Federico Riches/ Design as politics/ P5 presentation

-17th century

CRAFTMAN WORKSHOP AS AN EXTENSION OF THE HOUSE

18th century

CASA FABRICA ARE BORN IN THE RAVAL, AS CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION CAPITAL

19th century

FABRICA PAR PAVILLONS IS POWERED BY THE STEAM ENGINE, IT IS HIGHLY POLLUTING AND THUS REQUIRES A DEGREE OF AUTARKY

20th

21th

THE MODERN FACTORY REFLECTS THE PRINCIPLES OF THE MODERN MOVEMENT. IT IS POWERED BY ELECTRICITY AND THUS CAN HAVE A BETTER URBAN SYMBIOSIS.

THE CONTEMPORARY FACTORY REFLECTS THE GLOBALISED PRODUCTION. ITS SALE AND MATERIALISATION PREVENTS ANY INTEGRATION WITH THE CITY

century

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century

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overwhelmed by Japanese competitors,

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

rivals with “lightsout” manufacturing. The idea was that factories would become so

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advantage, it turned out, lay not in

Reboot: Adidas to make shoes in Germany again – but using robots

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The 4,600-square-metre plant is still being built but Adidas opened it to the press, pledging to automate shoe production – which is currently done mostly by hand in Asia – and enable the shoes to be made more quickly and closer to its sales outlets. The factory will deliver a ﬁrst test set of around 500 pairs of shoes from the third quarter of 2016. Large-scale production will begin in 2017 and Adidas was planning a second “Speed Factory” in the United States in the same year, said Hainer. Hainer insisted the factories would not immediately replace the work of sub-contractors in Asia. “Our goal is not full automatisation,” said Gerd Manz, head of innovation and

other lowerwage countries as workshops. Prompted by the global financial crisis, some Western policymakers now reckon it is about time their countries returned to making stuff in order to create jobs and prevent more manufacturing skills from being exported. That

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smarter and more dexterous robots, some

the factory of the future. Several dozen machines are humming away, monitored from a glassfronted control room by two people looking at computer screens. Some of the

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industrial robots, has automated some of its production lines to the point where they can

machines are the size of a car, others that of a microwave oven, but they all have windows that you can peer into. One is making jewellery, others are producing the plastic grip for an

Erasmus 56 mins ago

electric drill, the dashboard of a car, an intricate lampshade and a bespoke artificial leg. One is even making parts to build more machines like itself.

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

print day and night.

This is the headquarters of 3D Systems, a firm founded by Chuck Hull, who in a 1986

Charlemagne 57 mins ago

patent described a system he had invented for making threedimensional objects as “stereolithography”. It worked by using a beam of ultraviolet light to solidify a thin layer of

Daily chart: Fukushima at three

Yet manufacturing will still need people, if not so many in the factory itself. All these automated machines require someone to service them and tell them what to do. Some machine

A third industrial revolution

a broader range of skills. And certain tasks, such as

The boomerang effect

Gulliver 2 hours 11 mins ago

assembling components, remain too fiddly for robots to do

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wage countries.

process, building objects up layer by layer. 3D printing was originally conceived as a way to make oneoff prototypes, but as the technology is getting better more things are being printed as finished goods (a process known as

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additive manufacturing). Currently around 28% of the money

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spent on printing things is for final products, according to

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Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are

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expensive and need human experts to set them up (who can

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cost more than the robot). They have a long way to go before they can replace people in many areas of manufacturing. Investing in robots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers

Terry Wohlers, who runs a research firm specialising in the

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sized businesses robots are generally too costly and too inflexible.

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field. He predicts that this will rise to just over 50% by 2016

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he thinks, because the ability to make prototypes quickly and

and to more than 80% by 2020. But it will never reach 100%, cheaply will remain an important part of the mix.

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like carmakers, who remain the biggest users of such machines, but even in highly automated car factories people still do most of the final assembly. And for small and medium

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added a wide variety of personalised options at later stages of production. Thus the

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purchaser of a Swatch has thousands of different options in terms of colour, straps,

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product. In the case of a watch, the internal mechanism is a platform to which can be

fascia, and so on. Yet all are based on only a few timekeeping mechanisms. The same is

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increasingly true of cars. Even a traditional mass production manufacturer like BMW now boasts that no two of its new cars are identical.

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Mass customisation is made possible by the use of information technology. Levi Strauss,

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which pioneered the idea in 1994 with its Original Spin jeans for women, measured customers in its stores and sent their details electronically to its factory. The customised

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Technology General Electric

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There has been plenty of research to show that manufacturing is good for economies, but in recent years some economists have argued that there is nothing special about making

customers to build a vehicle from a palette of online options. Companies that have difficulties introducing mass customisation tend to have them on two counts:

Science and technology | Jul 18th, 19:08

and bad jobs in both manufacturing and services. But on average manufacturing workers do Cleveland, for the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington, DC (see chart 2). Manufacturing firms are also more likely than other companies to introduce new and innovative products. Manufacturing makes up only about 11% of America's GDP, but it is responsible for 68% of domestic spending on research and

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innovation, helps to reduce trade deficits and creates

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recycling and green energy. These are all good reasons for a

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country to engage in it.

If one building can be said to have produced modernity, it is this. Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, built in 1771 near Derby, supplanted the workshops of feudalism and brought workers together in great numbers. Earlier buildings such as Venice’s Arsenale had amassed labouring bodies, but they lacked powered machinery. This innovation concentrated wealth in the hands of the mill owners (Arkwright died the richest untitled man in Britain), but it also created the proletariat as a self conscious class. Marx predicted that the bourgeoisie had thereby dug its own grave, as the united workers would inevitably revolt; they did, but that grave still lies empty. The factory has filled plenty of others since: the dark satanic mills killed men, women and children in their thousands, and they still do in many countries. Those who survived endured unspeakable conditions inside these buildings, and beyond: the factory blackened the landscape, and great grim cities grew around them.

operations accordingly. • They fail to shift their production satisfactorily from a system based on a series of tightly

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integrated processes, as demanded by mass production, to a system of loosely linked

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Pine, an early writer on the subject, put it: “Mass customisation organisations never know what customers will ask for next. All they can do is strive to be ever more prepared to meet the next request.” There is a danger that mass customisation becomes so popular that it detracts customers

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shops where customers could put together cassette tapes from the recordings of a wide range of artists. It soon found that the service was such a hit that it was cannibalising

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sales of traditional cassettes and cds. Joseph Pine pushed the idea a step further. In “The Experience Economy: Work is

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Five hundred years from now, says venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, less than 10 percent of people on the planet will be doing paid work. And next year?

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Previous technological innovation has always delivered more longrun employment, not less. But things can change Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition

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Oiling the wheels: Americans are spending more of the oilprice windfall...

IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, Production at Ford Motor Company’s new engine plant in Elabuga, Russia, will be 95 percent automated.

As a founding partner at the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and a board member at SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Steve Jurvetson spends a lot of time thinking about the future, often the distant future. One of Elon Musk’s biggest backers—Jurvetson boasts that he owns the first Tesla production Model S—he was also a founding investor in Hotmail and sits on the board of Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics, the constructor of the first synthetic cell.

deindustrialisation. Nearly 9m people were employed in British manufacturing in 1966; by 2011 fewer than 3m were. Manufacturing’s share of the economy is around 10% today, half what it was in 1990. In different countries, from rustbelt America to rustic China, a

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chorus of voices is urging government to boost domestic industry so that it makes more stuff. The trouble is, according to a study published in Britain on October 30th, most

His firm claims to have funded companies that have created more than 20,000 jobs in the past five years, and to have brought nearly two dozen companies to $1 billion in value before exiting. Jurvetson spoke to Business Reports senior editor Nanette Byrnes about why he thinks 90 percent of people will be unemployed in 500 years and how we might transition to that sharply different future.

transforming it.

the future many manufacturers will not even have a factory, according to the report, which was commissioned by the British government from expert panels made up of 300 business people and academics*. Their verdict: “Manufacturing is no longer just about production. Production is now the core of a much wider set of activities.” Manufacturing has traditionally been considered to be a process that turns raw materials into physical products. Nowadays, though, the physical part of production is at the centre of a much wider value chain. Manufacturers are increasingly generating revenue from other activities, many of which are categorised as services. As the report points out, 39% of British companies with more than 100 employees derived value from services related to their products in 2011, up from 24% in 2007. Those services are varied. RollsRoyce, for instance, now gets about half its revenue from services, including leasing jet engines to airlines on a “powerbythehour” basis. ARM, which designs the chips that are used in most smartphones, does not have a factory but licenses its designs to a federation of other firms that makes them. Scores of specialist engineering firms in a successful British cluster in the motorsport industry develop new vehicles for global carmakers, but build few cars of their own.

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Free exchange | Oct 8th, 12:08

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not without dangers. One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

Gulliver | Oct 8th, 11:10

For the most part, they did not. Nowadays, the majority of

Are today’s new digital technologies destroying or creating jobs?

Asia | 1 hour 46 mins ago

I absolutely believe in the near to medium term there is going to be net job creation, as there always has been. Think of all the Uber jobs. The opportunity is not yet fully tapped to, in a sense, distribute [over the Internet] the service economy. The service economy is bigger than the goods economy, so the online equivalent should be even bigger and more powerful than the online marketplace for physical goods.

The Economist explains: Why more migrants are coming to Europe as winter... The Economist explains | Nov 13th, 05:05

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“Five hundred years from now everyone is going to be involved in some kind of information or entertainment … There will be no farmers, there will be no people working in manufacturing.”

: Retail sales, producer prices, wages and exchange rates Markets and data | Nov 12th, 13:17

: Foreign reserves

Many of these new jobs, including those at Uber, are taking shape on what you call the “edge of automation.” 1/6

on the use of labour will increase incomes. That will

Harvard University

generate demand for new products and services, which will

United States

in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. To think

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

otherwise has meant being tarred a Luddite—the name taken by 19thcentury textile workers who smashed the

Do you fear that these jobs might quickly disappear as technology keeps evolving?

up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less

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As manufacturing goes digital, it will change out of all recognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the business of making things will return to rich countries

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OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs,

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Hong Kong's New Territories. When China's first Special Economic Zone was established in the early 1980s, workshops started to grow and glistening skyscrapers began to rise

stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its

live in dormitories close to the factories that have helped make this city one of the richest

it is a celebration of the worker using his mind and hands to create the world we live in. That is a familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable ways that will

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in China.

transform the future of manufacturing.

Erasmus | Oct 11th, 02:29

One of those factories is known as Foxconn City. Owned by Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwanese company, it is among the largest manufacturing complexes in China,

One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows machines for making prototypes of products, the tools needed to put those things into production and all

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employing some 230,000 people. Some of Apple's iPhones and iPads are assembled here. In March Apple agreed to improve working conditions at its Chinese factories after

manner of other manufacturing kit. Oldschool engineers worked with lathes, drills, stamping presses and moulding machines. These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oily machinery

Europe | Oct 10th, 17:09

tended by men in overalls. Hall after hall is full of squeakyclean American, Asian and

an outside audit found abuses of labour codes, including excessive overtime.

in front of computer screens. Nowhere will you find a hammer.

Europe | Oct 10th, 15:20

A third industrial revolution

And at the most recent EuroMold fair, last November, another

and toy factories moved to the mainland. But with increasing

Back to making stuff

prosperity Chinese workers want more pay, shorter hours

The boomerang effect

printers. Instead of bashing, bending and cutting material the

and more benefits, just as Taiwanese, Japanese and South

Forging ahead

way it always has been, 3D printers build things by depositing

Korean workers did before them. Labour costs in China

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All together now

coastal regions to inland China, where costs are lower,

Making the future

number of firms, especially those making clothes and shoes, have upped sticks and moved to Bangladesh, Cambodia,

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most of its trainers in China, but many of its big suppliers have moved elsewhere, and in 2010 Vietnam became the company's biggest production

will move again in the future; Myanmar looks tempting, provided that reforms there continue.

material, layer by layer. That is why the process is more

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properly described as additive manufacturing. An American

Germany’s refugee crisis Merkel at her limit

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Indonesia and Vietnam. Nike, for instance, used to make

http://www.economist.com/node/21552898

group of machines was on display: threedimensional (3D)

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Some labourintensive businesses are now moving from the

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Forging ahead Solid print Layer by layer

design and you will be presented with a bill for thousands of

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head, machine it to a suitable finish, turn a wooden handle and then assemble the parts. To do that for one hammer would be

Apr 14th 2012

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prohibitively expensive. If you are producing thousands of

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hammers, each one of them will be much cheaper, thanks to

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economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though, economies of

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http://www.economist.com/node/21552901

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The boomerang effect

firm, 3D Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print a

dollars. The makers would have to produce a mould, cast the

The new McCarthyists: Republicans in turmoil as Kevin McCarthy exits the Speaker race The EU, religion and tolerance: A Eurocratic demand to punish hate speech and Holocaust Apr 21st 2012 denial

A third industrial revolution Back to making stuff

hammer for your correspondent, complete with a natty wood

factory today to make you a single hammer to your own

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effect handle and a metallised head. This is what manufacturing will be like in the future. Ask a

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arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who built it, says

Bagehot's notebook | Oct 11th, 09:42

up. Its population is now around 12m, including perhaps 6m migrant workers. They often

emerges (which, as this report will suggest later, is entirely possible), these businesses

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base worldwide. Unless some way of making shoes and clothing without manual labour

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though the infrastructure may not be up to the mark. A

capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across

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have recently been growing by around 20% a year.

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often accused of running sweatshops, and labour in China

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and Everything about Uber has been automated except for the driver. The billing, the fetching—every part of it is a modern, information-centric company. Interestingly, what that means is as soon as automated vehicles arrive, that driver is easily removed. You don’t have to restructure any part of that business.

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was undoubtedly cheap: that was why Hong Kong's clothing

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1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end

Economics

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

Lawrence Summers

doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from

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Comparative advantage

As Chinese wages rise, some production is moving back to the rich world

Markets and data | Oct 8th, 10:18

For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely

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machines taking their jobs.

vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they

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productivity, they argue, any automation which economises

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The boomerang effect

This year, almost half of survey respondents say that re-shoring manufacturing jobs to the U.S. is on their companies’ mind.

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economists confidently wave such worries away. By raising

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In the future more manufactured products like these will be packaged with services: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/10/manufacturing

leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was

outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not

policymakers don’t understand modern manufacturing, let alone how technology is

In Britain and elsewhere the days of grimy smokestacks and oily rags have long gone. In

John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would

BRITAIN, like many other countries, has gone through a period of huge

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from more profitable sales. A company in California, for instance, offered booths in record

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http://www.economist.com/node/21552899

Many early factories resembled Palladian villas, the fashionable choice for building in the British countryside; the contrast between the serene aristocratic facades and the activity within could scarcely have been more pronounced. In Europe, early factories were patronised by monarchs, and were even grander Ledoux’s saltworks at ArcetSenans are a sublimely weird example. However, in Britain flimsy pilasters soon gave way to reveal the brick boxes beneath, as the rationalising mania of the Industrial Revolution extended to its buildings. But rumblings of discontent were voiced regarding its effect on people, and nonconformist industrialists set out to reform factory work, now widely seen as degrading and risking unrest. They provided improved housing and improving chapels (but no pubs) in tweely authoritarian factory villages like Bournville.

autonomous units that can be configured as and when the consumer wishes. As Joseph

Buttonwood's notebook 2 hours 48 mins ago

10% of the workforce deployed by China, says Susan

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Commodities flowed from them, along with money for their owners but the factory also produced new ways of living, of thinking, and of designing

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find out what limits their customers are happy to live within, and then organise their

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Making the future

Despite China's rapid rise, America remains a formidable now about the same as China's, but it achieves this with only

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limits are, and then to be allowed free rein within them. Successful mass customisers first

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Layer by layer

production power. Its manufacturing output in dollar terms is

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http://www.economist.com/node/21552892

Cheer up, 48%: Britain’s unparalleled diversity is here to stay

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appraisal by engineers, stylists and clients before getting the goahead. Any changes can be swiftly reprinted in a few

The company put together the components as requested at

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

Charlemagne 55 mins ago

Forging ahead Solid print

customers more or less to assemble their own PCs online.

Erasmus 54 mins ago

All together now Making the future

established its leadership of the PC market by allowing

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news

Erasmus 55 mins ago

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but a 3D printer can bring down the cost by a huge margin.

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liquid plastic, a bit like ink, and repeating the process by adding more liquid plastic. Other

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cutting and injection moulding that operate

More than 20 years after Adidas ceased production activities in Germany and moved them to Asia, chief executive Herbert Hainer unveiled to the press the group’s new prototype “Speedfactory” in Ansbach, southern Germany.

sophisticated supply chains has enabled companies the world over to use China, India and

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andneck with China (see chart 1). In the decade to 2010 the number of manufacturing jobs

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jeans were then cut electronically and mailed to the customer.

without any human intervention. And additive manufacturing machines can be left alone to

Adidas, the German maker of sportswear and equipment, has announced it will start marketing its ﬁrst series of shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017.

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automation but in leanproduction techniques, which are mostly peoplebased. Many of the new production methods in this next revolution will require fewer people

OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs,

glassfronted control room by two people looking at computer screens. Some of the

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news

is a familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable ways that will

that you can peer into. One is making jewellery, others are producing the plastic grip for an

making prototypes of products, the tools needed to put those things into production and all

is even making parts to build more machines like itself.

presses and moulding machines. These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oily machinery tended by men in overalls. Hall after hall is full of squeakyclean American, Asian and European machine tools, all highly automated. Most of their operators, men and women, sit in front of computer screens. Nowhere will you find a hammer. And at the most recent EuroMold fair, last November, another group of machines was on display: threedimensional (3D) printers. Instead of bashing, bending and cutting material the way it always has been, 3D printers build things by depositing material, layer by layer. That is why the process is more properly described as additive manufacturing. An American firm, 3D Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print a

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“

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Geoffrey Howe, 19262015: What Geoffrey Howe’s career revealed about... Bagehot's notebook | Oct 11th, 09:42

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in China.

a Taiwanese company, it is among the largest manufacturing complexes in China,

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employing some 230,000 people. Some of Apple's iPhones and iPads are assembled here. In March Apple agreed to improve working conditions at its Chinese factories after

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an outside audit found abuses of labour codes, including excessive overtime. Countries that make things more cheaply than others are often accused of running sweatshops, and labour in China was undoubtedly cheap: that was why Hong Kong's clothing

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prosperity Chinese workers want more pay, shorter hours

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and more benefits, just as Taiwanese, Japanese and South

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Korean workers did before them. Labour costs in China

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have recently been growing by around 20% a year.

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Some labourintensive businesses are now moving from the

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coastal regions to inland China, where costs are lower,

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though the infrastructure may not be up to the mark. A number of firms, especially those making clothes and shoes, have upped sticks and moved to Bangladesh, Cambodia,

“

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As Rodrik points out, there are important gaps between the skills of the great unwashed masses in India versus China, where elementary technical training reached a larger mass of humans. In addition, China did better on core economic policy choices about (a) Removing protectionism; (b) Removing barriers to FDI; (c) Building hard infrastructure and (d) Rationalising taxation.

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Indonesia and Vietnam. Nike, for instance, used to make most of its trainers in China, but many of its big suppliers have moved elsewhere, and in 2010 Vietnam became the company's biggest production base worldwide. Unless some way of making shoes and clothing without manual labour emerges (which, as this report will suggest later, is entirely possible), these businesses will move again in the future; Myanmar looks tempting, provided that reforms there continue.

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environmentally messy, another of Mr Chouinard's peeves. In business, Mr Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, an outdoorclothing firm, says he

companies, not countries, that design, manufacture and sell products, and there are good

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earn more, according to a report by Susan Helper of Case Western Reserve University,

and bad jobs in both manufacturing and services. But on average manufacturing workers do Cleveland, for the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington, DC (see chart 2). Special report

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innovation, helps to reduce trade deficits and creates

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recycling and green energy. These are all good reasons for a country to engage in it.

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Despite China's rapid rise, America remains a formidable production power. Its manufacturing output in dollar terms is now about the same as China's, but it achieves this with only 10% of the workforce deployed by China, says Susan

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social or environmental mission, and a legally binding

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reports on its social and environmental impact alongside its financial results. Other than that, it can go about business as usual.

green detergents, paper towels and other household products.

purpose company” (FlexC), which allows a firm to adopt a specific social or environmental goal, rather than the broader obligations of a B Corp. Another option in

Prospero | Oct 12th, 04:55

BRITAIN, like many other countries, has gone through a period of huge deindustrialisation.

The Economist explains: Why India is transfixed by elections in Bihar

Nearly 9m people were employed in British manufacturing in 1966; by 2011 fewer than 3m were. Manufacturing’s share of the economy is around 10% today, half what it was in 1990.

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In different countries, from rustbelt America to rustic China, a chorus of voices is urging Geoffrey Howe, 19262015: What Geoffrey Howe’s career revealed about...

government to boost domestic industry so that it makes more stuff. The trouble is, according to a study published in Britain on October 30th, most policymakers don’t

Bagehot's notebook | Oct 11th, 09:42

understand modern manufacturing, let alone how technology is transforming it. In Britain and elsewhere the days of grimy smokestacks and oily rags have long gone. In

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the future many manufacturers will not even have a factory, according to the report, which

Erasmus | Oct 11th, 02:29

was commissioned by the British government from expert panels made up of 300 business people and academics*. Their verdict: “Manufacturing is no longer just about production.

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Production is now the core of a much wider set of activities.” Manufacturing has traditionally been considered to be a process that turns raw materials into physical products. Nowadays, though, the physical part of production is at the centre of

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a much wider value chain. Manufacturers are increasingly generating revenue from other activities, many of which are categorised as services. As the report points out, 39% of

America is the lowprofit limitedliability (LC3) company, which can raise money for

British companies with more than 100 employees derived value from services related to

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socially beneficial purposes while making little or no profit. The idea of a legal framework for firms that put profits second is not confined to America.

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companies”. Similar laws are brewing in several European countries.

The impetus for all this comes from people like Mr Chouinard, who believe that existing

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laws governing corporations and charities are too restrictive. Forprofit firms, they argue, Chinese condoms often face pressure to abandon social goals in favour of increasing profits. Nonprofit Reds in the bed

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their products in 2011, up from 24% in 2007. Those services are varied. RollsRoyce, for instance, now gets about half its revenue from

Britain, for example, has since 2005 allowed people to form “community interest

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was Maryland, in April 2010. Patagonia was followed immediately by another 11

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goals. To qualify as a B Corp, a firm must have an explicit

shareholders. It must also publish independently verified

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pursue strategies which they believe benefit society as a whole rather than having to

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advantage of a new California law designed to give businesses greater freedom to

The B Corp is a deliberate effort to change the nature of There has been plenty of research to show that manufacturing is good for economies, but in recent years some economists have argued that there is nothing special about making

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sustainability and longterm profitability that he calls “the slow company”.

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opportunities in the growing “clean” economy, such as

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believes that welltreated employees perform better. (He wrote a book called: “Let My

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face and attach a rope to). Climbers often used to leave pitons in the cliff, which is

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development. According to Ms Helper, it provides betterpaid

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andneck with China (see chart 1). In the decade to 2010 the number of manufacturing jobs

Lawrence Summers

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in America fell by about a third. The rise of outsourcing and offshoring and the growth of

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otherwise has meant

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employees, 650 products, operations in 40 countries, over $2 billion in sales, and fifth in the

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sophisticated supply chains has enabled companies the world over to use China, India and

Economy, Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research and the Ministry of Finance, and now works at NIPFP where he coleads the NIPFPDEA Research

What policy advice would flow from this? India should not have have made these five mistakes in economic policy (low training for the masses, protectionism, barriers to FDI, weak investments into infrastructure and mistakes in tax policy). At the same time, this does not recommend a bias in favour of manufacturing. It is hard to discern a meaningful choice about emphasising services versus manufacturing in Indian economic policy. Participation in all global production is good. Governments should remove all barriers that inhibit global integration whether in goods or in services e.g. the five mistakes in Indian policy sketched

Apr 14th 2012

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in turn create new jobs for displaced workers. To think

world (ACT, now number 3, market capitalisation of $30 billion, not too far from Facebook’s about a year ago). In 2001 Ron Zwanziger founded Inverness Medical (now Alere) out of the leftover assets from the $1.3 billion sale of his glucosemonitoring business (OneTouch) to

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Consider India, which demonstrates the limitations of relying on services rather than industry in the early stages of development. The country has developed remarkable strengths in IT services, such as software and call centers. But the bulk of the Indian labor force lacks the skills and education to be absorbed into such sectors. In East Asia, unskilled workers were put to work in urban factories, making several times what they earned in the countryside. In India, they remain on the land or move to petty services where their productivity is not much higher.

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and toy factories moved to the mainland. But with increasing

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I have seen this kind of thinking among some policy makers in India also: that industrialisation is somehow special and good when compared with services. I would question this proposition, that I term `the widget illusion'. What matters to a country is having sophisticated firms that have a high marginal product of labour. We should not care whether this happens in services or in manufacturing. If anything, the opportunity to do it is perhaps better in services.

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than ignoring the existence of electricity or cars. And research is showing that as many, if

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necessities presented by technology is backing light speed into oblivion, and no different

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like carmakers, who remain the biggest users of such

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arguably more technologyintensive, generically, than any of the report’s wideeyed examples. Furthermore, for any business, anywhere, ignoring the opportunities and

Difference Engine: The end of trust

Solid print

outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not

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Davidson or American Express. In fact, medical devices and alternative energy are

not more, social and economic benefits of entrepreneurship accrue from nontech

sized businesses robots are generally too costly and too

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architects' models now appear in a 3Dprinted form for appraisal by engineers, stylists and clients before getting the

intrinsically more technological about Twitter and Facebook, say, than about Harley

Layer by layer

still do most of the final assembly. And for small and medium

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goahead. Any changes can be swiftly reprinted in a few

Forging ahead

whether it is diamond trading, transportation, construction, or energy. There is nothing

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machines, but even in highly automated car factories people

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THE distinction between tech and nontech entrepreneurship is false. Today, every

Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are

Investing in robots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers

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Making the future

a broader range of skills. And certain tasks, such as

Gulliver 2 hours 11 mins ago

they can replace people in many areas of manufacturing.

All together now

cheaply will remain an important part of the mix.

Oneoff prototypes can be hideously expensive to produce,

Back to making stuff

cost more than the robot). They have a long way to go before

Buttonwood's notebook 2 hours 49 mins ago

but a 3D printer can bring down the cost by a huge margin.

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field. He predicts that this will rise to just over 50% by 2016

A third industrial revolution

The boomerang effect

wage countries.

write a reply.

business venture, entrepreneurial or otherwise, requires technology to be competitive,

operators will become machine minders, which often calls for

well, which is why assembly is often subcontracted to low

Babbage 2 hours 11 mins ago

unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour Recent Activity

even largely, about small, accelerated, lean social media startups. We invited him to

Graphic detail 1 hour 38 mins ago

Special report

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological

moment", promulgates the misimpression that entrepreneurship is exclusively, or

Charlemagne 57 mins ago

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: In the dark

assembling components, remain too fiddly for robots to do

Difference Engine: The end of trust

The boomerang effect Forging ahead

One of a kind

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hammers, each one of them will be much cheaper, thanks to

10/12/2015

A third industrial revolution Back to making stuff

spent on printing things is for final products, according to

he thinks, because the ability to make prototypes quickly and

Recommended Americas reading: Today's reading list

Sources & acknowledgments

to service them and tell them what to do. Some machine

Gulliver 2 hours 9 mins ago

Terry Wohlers, who runs a research firm specialising in the and to more than 80% by 2020. But it will never reach 100%,

Buttonwood's notebook 2 hours 47 mins ago

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head, machine it to a suitable finish, turn a wooden handle and prohibitively expensive. If you are producing thousands of

Demography and inequality: Back to the 19th century

All together now

dollars. The makers would have to produce a mould, cast the then assemble the parts. To do that for one hammer would be

prototypes, but as the technology is getting better more things additive manufacturing). Currently around 28% of the money

Babbage 2 hours 9 mins ago

Making the future

design and you will be presented with a bill for thousands of

Special report

are being printed as finished goods (a process known as

Difference Engine: The end of trust

Back to making stuff The boomerang effect

Layer by layer

This is what manufacturing will be like in the future. Ask a

3D printing was originally conceived as a way to make oneoff

Gulliver 2 hours 8 mins ago

Forging ahead

effect handle and a metallised head.

Yet manufacturing will still need people, if not so many in the

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: In the dark

not without dangers.

Executive Education, thinks that our special report on tech startups, "A Cambrian

Daily chart: Fukushima at three

factory itself. All these automated machines require someone

process, building objects up layer by layer.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: In the dark

Special report

hammer for your correspondent, complete with a natty wood

cutting and injection moulding that operate without any human intervention. And additive manufacturing machines can be left alone to print day and night.

forms of 3D printing have since emerged (see article), but they all work as an additive

leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was

Daniel Isenberg, who created the entrepreneurship ecosystem project at Babson

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

other factories use processes such as laser

Graphic detail 1 hour 37 mins ago

Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would

Erasmus 56 mins ago

run unsupervised for several weeks. Many

Daily chart: Fukushima at three

liquid plastic, a bit like ink, and repeating the process by adding more liquid plastic. Other

Graphic detail 1 hour 35 mins ago

industrial robots, has automated some of its

Charlemagne 55 mins ago

patent described a system he had invented for making threedimensional objects as “stereolithography”. It worked by using a beam of ultraviolet light to solidify a thin layer of

Daily chart: Fukushima at three

John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news

production lines to the point where they can

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

This is the headquarters of 3D Systems, a firm founded by Chuck Hull, who in a 1986

Charlemagne 54 mins ago

manner of other manufacturing kit. Oldschool engineers worked with lathes, drills, stamping

FANUC, a big Japanese producer of

Erasmus 55 mins ago

electric drill, the dashboard of a car, an intricate lampshade and a bespoke artificial leg. One

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows machines for

IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”,

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smarter and more dexterous robots, some lightsout manufacturing is now possible.

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news

machines are the size of a car, others that of a microwave oven, but they all have windows

Erasmus 53 mins ago

transform the future of manufacturing.

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the factory of the future. Several dozen machines are humming away, monitored from a

arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of the worker using his mind and hands to create the world we live in. That

working on the factory floor. Thanks to

INSIDE A LOWRISE building in a business park at Rock Hill, South Carolina, is a vision of

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stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its

http://www.economist.com/node/21542432

services, including leasing jet engines to airlines on a “powerbythehour” basis. ARM, which designs the chips that are used in most smartphones, does not have a factory but licenses its designs to a federation of other firms that makes them. Scores of specialist

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engineering firms in a successful British cluster in the motorsport industry develop new vehicles for global carmakers, but build few cars of their own. In the future more manufactured products like these will be packaged with services:

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news Erasmus 57 mins ago

components will come with sensors that give automatic alerts when the product needs http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/10/manufacturing

1/3

1/7

Never mind the hipsters. It’s the property developers who are ruining our cities | Dan Hancox | Comment is free | The Guardian

m.relatstorante@tude…

CONTENTS Business & finance

Economics

Science & technology

Culture

Materials

Manufacturing

Forging ahead

The third industrial revolution

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

Debate

Multimedia

Print edition

Comment (1)

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Manufacturers are increasingly working with new, gamechanging ingredients

The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too

Blogs

220

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in the late 18th century, with the

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mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks

together in a single cotton mill, and the factory

IT IS SMALL enough to be held in your hand and looks like an unremarkable chunk of metal

Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first

perforated with tiny holes, but it is fiendishly hard to make. That is because it must spin

two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is

12,000 times a minute under high pressure at a temperature of 1,600°C, 200°C above the melting point of the material it is made from. And it must survive that twisting inferno long

under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week's special report

enough to propel an airliner for 24m km (15m miles) before being replaced. In all, 66 of these stubby blades are used in the rear turbine of a RollsRoyce Trent 1000 engine, and the

(http://www.economist.com/node/21552901) argues, this could change not just business,

British company makes hundreds of thousands of these blades a year.

but much else besides.

American and European firms have sought salvation in highend manufacturing from the onslaught of lowcost producers. That increasingly involves becoming more inventive with

A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more

materials. This article will look at a number of such innovations, including the special casting system for the RollsRoyce turbine blades as well as the use of carbon fibre, recycled

dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of

As developing countries become richer and more

products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it

sophisticated, they too want to make things like aircraft, jet

was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each

engines and highperformance sports cars. In some cases Western firms subcontract part of the production work to firms

product tailored precisely to each customer's whims, is falling. The factory of the future will

in countries trying to build up the capabilities of their

focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers' cottages than Ford's assembly line. Towards a third dimension

A third industrial revolution

Forging ahead Solid print Layer by layer

For RollsRoyce, turbine blades are one of those key

All together now

technologies. The magic that creates them depends on a

Making the future

technology. When metals solidify after casting they normally contain lots of microscopic crystals. That would still leave

Erasmus 55 mins ago

French politics: From Sarkoleaks to Sarkogate

Daily chart: Fukushima at three Graphic detail 1 hour 37 mins ago

which creates a solid object by building up successive layers of material. The digital design

weakness in a turbine blade. So RollsRoyce uses a unique system which casts the blade in a nickelbased superalloy

can be tweaked with a few mouseclicks. The 3D printer can run unattended, and can make

with a continuous and unbroken crystalline structure. This

many things which are too complex for a traditional factory to handle. In time, these

ensures there will be no structural defects. 1/3

http://www.economist.com/node/21552895

Gulliver 2 hours 9 mins ago

Difference Engine: The end of trust Babbage 2 hours 11 mins ago

Buttonwood's notebook 2 hours 49 mins ago

Americas view 3 hours 25 mins ago

Agence France-Presse Wednesday 25 May 2016 03.49 BST

Adidas, the German maker of sportswear and equipment, has announced it will start marketing its ﬁrst series of shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017. More than 20 years after Adidas ceased production activities in Germany and moved them to Asia, chief executive Herbert Hainer unveiled to the press the group’s new prototype “Speedfactory” in Ansbach, southern Germany. The 4,600-square-metre plant is still being built but Adidas opened it to the press, pledging to automate shoe production – which is currently done mostly by hand in Asia – and enable the shoes to be made more quickly and closer to its sales outlets. The factory will deliver a ﬁrst test set of around 500 pairs of shoes from the third quarter of 2016. Large-scale production will begin in 2017 and Adidas was planning a second “Speed Factory” in the United States in the same year, said Hainer.

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Motor sports

Company unveils new factory in Germany that will use machines to make shoes instead of humans in Asia

Hipsters are the honeytrap, the property industry’s stimulus package; that doesn’t mean they get to eat all the honey. That sticky privilege belongs to landlords, to property developers, to local councillors moving seamlessly into well-paid jobs in “development consultancy” – in the end, not to young white men with beards, but middle-aged white men in suits.

Formula One racing Sport

Reboot: Adidas to make shoes in Germany again – but using robots

Technology is changing the nature of the jobs we do and the way we do them. What does that mean for the future of work?

Capitalism can’t get enough of hipsters and creatives; not least because it needs them to sustain itself – a revealing press release I found issued by a “hipster property agent” earlier this year began: “Hipster boutiques and eateries are sliding further into the City [of London] … there’s a growing appetite for independent shops and cafes. This is driven in part by people’s obsessions with London’s creative scene and a growing apathy for identikit high streets and mainstream brands.”

Demography and inequality: Back to the 19th century

Recommended Americas reading: Today's reading list

Radiology’s Growth

Young creatives, a senior property executive told me last year, have become the holy grail for every developer and local council: “It’s that magical something that [London boroughs] all want. They all want IT businesses and they all want creative industries, because it gives them that young, hip vibe. People take it very seriously, because it creates value.” They are the ultimate lure for investors – but they are only the next victims in the gentrification process, their creativity, energy and youth commodified, before they are then squeezed out of their independent shops and studios by bigger retail and commercial interests, and their homes by richer tenants, when the next phase begins.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: In the dark

Sources & acknowledgments

Tech for an Aging Workforce

Their role in the transformation of an area is summarised in this absolutely perfect cartoon by Grayson Perry. They are the anonymous bogeymen and women of modern urban culture, gentrification’s eccentrically dressed vanguard – the first to arrive, in advance of the main army: but they are not the commanding officers, and they will be the first to be killed off (or moved into new warehouse studios in Zone 3). In medieval England, the vanguard would be accompanied by harbingers, the people responsible for finding lodgings for the full army when they arrived. Sort of medieval estate agents.

Charlemagne 55 mins ago

Reprints

them strong enough for most things, but it is a potential

HR by Algorithm

There is a revealing truth here that bears repeating: no one ever self-identifies as a hipster. Hipsters are an easy target, but often the wrong target; an offloading point for the neuroses of a cultural (and generational) majority within the metropolitan white middle-class. They are a vessel for the resentment of not understanding, not being cool enough, not being young enough to get it. More importantly, they are a short-cut to “the Shaggy defence”, a way of sidestepping the need to acknowledge complicity – it wasn’t me! The hipsters did it!

Nuns and other Christians in Syria: Finally, a little good news

Back to making stuff The boomerang effect

industries, usually when those countries are placing big

deep understanding of materials science and production

The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them

Special report

orders. But some things are not for sharing because they are too important to preserve a product's competitive advantage.

together. Now a product can be designed on a computer and “printed” on a 3D printer,

http://www.economist.com/node/21553017/print

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plastic waste, new battery technology and others.

web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical

Chinese Angst over Uber

The furore was reported on throughout the press. A lot of people announced their anger – but crucially, nobody went on to ask those people who can’t afford Cornflakes how they are surviving. Echoing the wave of solipsistic articles about “why I’m leaving London” earlier this year (executive summary: I’d like a bigger garden), it feels as if much of the gentrification debate is taking place inside a giant zorbing sphere, bouncing around London but to the complete exclusion of the people worst affected. It’s the same divided-city paradigm borne out in the 2011 riots, where two Londons live together, yet entirely separated from each other.

was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry

The Future of Work

he original definition of gentrification, as coined by Ruth Glass in the 1960s, was not about extravagant beards, coffee houses and fixies – it concerned housing opportunities, and the lack of them: an area is being gentrified when the housing options of the middle-classes expand and those of working-class communities diminish, leading them to be displaced elsewhere. There is a cultural dimension to the process too, but it’s an accompaniment to the main event.

The furore over the opening of the cafe in late 2014 exemplified the problem with hipster-hating: that it is often little more than middle-class navel-gazing. The huge backlash to the viral Channel 4 report when it opened seemed to consist largely of white middle-class media workers railing against slightly younger, more fashionable versions of themselves. The premise of the report was: “There are so many poor people in east London, how can you sell boutique cereal for £4 a bowl when people down the road in Bethnal Green can’t afford a box of Cornflakes?”

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Productivity and Inequality

When the organisers of Saturday night’s “fuck parade” against gentrification announced their goal was to reclaim Shoreditch – at this stage, a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has opened an artisan sugar cube pop-up inside – it was little surprise that one of the targets turned out to be the Cereal Killer cafe.

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previously done laboriously by hand in

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Top Tech Jobs Q&A: VC Steve Jurvetson

Monday 28 September 2015 13.05 BST

Don't shoot the messenger One person recommends this.

THE first industrial revolution began in Britain

The Big Question

BUSINESS REPORT

Places like the Cereal Killer cafe are just part of the gentrification process. Developers and councillors will soon exploit them and price them out

Get Barbie One person recommends this.

Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

Never mind the hipsters. It’s the property developers who are ruining our cities Dan Hancox

Gentrification London