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Hi Ken,

As Gavin Melles wrote I am exactly interested in "designer facilitated  
artisan production -- generally small scale."

My research is about how a designer's influence resonates for a long  
time in the minds and practice of the makers. One simple example is,  
every single master craftsman that I have worked with so far to get a  
piece made (like the carpenter in the neighborhood) comes up with  
"their design" after working together for while in the workshop. They  
show it to me and ask me what I think about it. Finally, I started to  
think that something is passing from me to them and now I am working  
on it. (not only me but many other friends of mine experienced this)

I wrote about production models crossing different scales as a critique of
conventional models referred in Rod Crudale's email as "craft based"  
or "innovation based" or "industrial".

Thank you for your email.
Cigdem





Alinti Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

> 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.
>
>