Dear Cigdem,

Reading Gavin's note, it may be I misread your query. As I read Gavin,
you are primarily interested in designer facilitated artisan production
-- generally small scale. Reading your note in the context of the thread
you posted it in, I thought that you were interested in new kinds of
production models crossing different scales.

If I read your query wrong, the sources I proposed probably don't offer
much help. If I understood your note correctly, there is something to be
learned from Deming management and the Toyota Way in creating new
approaches to craft production at a hybrid scale crossing industrial
knowledge with artisan craft production.

Until tonight, I had not given these ideas much thought. I know that
there is exciting work going on at the boundary of design and craft
production -- our library has just received a copy of Handmade in India:
crafts of India by Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan, and that's exactly the
kind of thing they've been working with. But I had not given much
thought to whether (or how) one can apply Deming's work or Toyota Way to
craft production.

What I do know is that one can apply Deming management to human process
at all scales. While statistical quality control for industrial
production is the core of Deming management applied to industry,
statistical quality control is a tool for Deming, not a goal.

For W. Edwards Deming, developing effective management practice was the
goal. As Deming writes, this required us to "institute leadership."
Quality is the outcome. If one were to summarize Deming's view on this,
if we get the process right, quality will be the natural outcome.

What interests me in the context of hybrid scales is that Deming's
Fourteen Points make sense in small companies as well as large. These
point do not involve scale of production. They involve working methods.
These methods are as effective in design firms and design schools as
they are in factories or banks.

Here are the Fourteen Points:

"1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service,
with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to
provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western
management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their
responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need
for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in
the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag.
Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one
item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. 

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service,
to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people
and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is
in need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work productively for the
company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design,
sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of
production sand in use that may be encountered with the product or
service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force
asking for defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations
only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low
quality and low performance belong to the system and thus lie beyond the
power of the work force. 

11. Eliminate work standards and quotas on the factory floor. Substitute
leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by
numbers and numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of
workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed frand in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means,
among other things, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of
management by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for
everyone.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the
transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.” 

(Deming 1986: 23-24)

Since Deming's Fourteen Points focus on leadership rather than
production, they work on all production scales. In contrast, we may ask
whether the Toyota Way can be applied at the scale of artisan craft
production. I'm not sure. The human factors issues certainly can be
applied -- the question of lean production is something else.

What is certain is that many craft production studios operate on a
top-down, dictatorial model, and they have done so since the
master-journeyman-apprentice days of the ancient craft guilds. A
fictional but recognizable account of this system in human terms appears
in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Bluebeard. Robert Darnton's cultural history
of the Great Cat Massacre also examines aspects of the unhappy and often
brutish life of an apprentice in the craft guilds. Pottery shops,
fashion houses, gourmet kitchens all revolve around the master.

At one point, I did a fair amount of investigation on the social and
production context of the design studio. What I observed was that many
design studios are Fordist in tone and style, though not in scale. They
are Fordist because they rely on a push-driven production model with
top-down governance by a master designer. Bryan Byrne and Ed Sands
(2002) examine contemporary design studios as collaborative cultures,
reaching similar conclusions.

What fascinates me is that this production model has remained
effectively the same since Adam Smith described the pin factory in his
Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976: 8-9). 

Looking back at Smith's pin factory, you can see two things. First, this
is push-driven production. Second, it leads to and rests on large stocks
of inventory without regard to other factors. If we write these factors
large, we see warehouses full of anything that divided labor can
produce. In the River Rouge Plant -- or modern Detroit -- that means
warehouses full of auto parts or parking lots full of finished cars.
Spread across the workshops of a hundred thousand artisan craft studios
in the Venetto or Punjab, it means hundreds of millions of units of
whatever artifact the artisan craft studios manufacture.

The interesting opportunity here lies in understand how (or whether) the
Toyota Way and lean production combined with Deming management can
generate hybrid scale enterprise applied to design-facilitated artisan
craft production.

Today's new information technologies allow us to integrate knowledge
activity across scales. The same kinds of just-in-time systems that
drive factory inventory may well allow artisan craft shops to better
meet customer demand while keeping artisan workers more effectively
employed. These kinds of systems combined with organizational learning
make it possible to run better medical practices, better
micro-breweries, and better gourmet ice cream plants. Why not better
artisan craft workshops?

On the one hand, craft workshops make something quite different to
automobiles. On the other, someone who manufactures a clay pot or a
woven reed bag faces many of the same inventory, finance, and production
problems that an automaker might -- or at least the supplier plant that
supplies specific parts to an auto maker.

What we have learned about micro-finance tells us that artisan craft
production can constitute robust, financially sound industrial sectors
with greater profitably for the scale than mass-production industries
do. In the automobile industry, losses are the rule far more often than
profits. And we have long known that small businesses create more jobs
than large businesses do.

Hybrid production models may work well for companies at different
scales. 

Inglass subsidiary that it owned. The company manufacturing model was
push-driven. The firm lost money based on large inventories of too many
old products that were once desirable but no longer interesting to the
export market. There is much more to this story, but that's irrelevant
here.

The company engaged me to develop new products and markets. I did this,
but we had tremendous cultural problems moving the products into
production. The company was structured culturally to manufacture
products that were easy to produce on a push-driven engineering model,
while the designers seemed interested in exhibition space without regard
to markets. There is also much more to this story, but it would take far
too long to offer the subtle differences and understandings that telling
it deserves. What I'd say now is that I recognize problems I did not see
then, and I failed to explain my project well enough to engage the many
stakeholders I should have engaged. I'd know a lot more today about how
to shape a better approach to my project than I did two decades and two
years back.

What would be relevant now is the fact that the company's production
facilities offered a perfect opportunity for hybrid scale production. I
understood that the new product lines I developed were artisan craft
products poised between small-scale mass manufacturing and workshop
production. What I was unable to do was find a way to use company
culture to get it done. I was from a very different culture. And the
Toyota Way only works when the entire company can generate a new culture
based on levels of trust and interaction that did not seem to be present
among different groups in the organization. Here, too, is where Deming's
approach to leadership comes into play.

That doesn't mean this is impossible. Chris Rust gives the exemplary
case of Marcus Crossley working at Kingkraft. Working within his own
culture and working closely with a company where people wanted to work
with him, Marcus made something valuable happen -- or, perhaps better
said, he found a way to co-create value. It's something I wish I had
been able to do. Then again, my project ended when the collapse of the
Russian economy devastated Finland's economy. The economic collapse
destroyed the company that owned my ceramics company. Perhaps if I'd
have been able to keep at it for a year or so longer, I'd have found a
way. For those who want to know more Peter Frank tells part of the story
of my adventures in Finland in a book chapter in Holly Crawford's (2008)
anthology, Artistic Bedfellows.

It may be that you want to focus only on craft. If so, forget the Deming
and Toyota references. If you do want to look into the issue of
production on hybrid scales, though, perhaps this can lead to new ways
of working.

As I noted elsewhere, these conversations shift and turn in different
ways. What is said, unsaid, implied, or overlooked can shape
opportunities as easily as they shape obstacles.

Warm wishes,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

References

Byrne, Bryan and Ed Sands. 2002. 'Designing Collaborative Corporate
Cultures.' In Bryan Byrne and Susan E. Squires (eds), Creating
Breakthrough Ideas, Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 47–69.

Crawford, Holly, Editor. 2008. Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories
and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices. Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America.

Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in
French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books.

Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of the Crisis. Quality, Productivity and
Competitive Position. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. Edited and with an introduction, notes, marginal
summary and index by Edwin Cannan. With a new preface by George J.
Stigler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Vonnegut, Kurt.