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Dear Kevin, Thanks for your excellent post. I’d like to add a note on the American system of manufacturing. The American system involved far more than reducing labor costs by a shift from handcraft to mechanization. The British industrial revolution of the 1700s did this for such consumer goods as textiles and ceramics. The decisive advantage of the American system was the use of completely interchangeable parts in complex manufactured equipment. The decisive breakthrough to the American system came in the arms industry as it worked to meet an 1818 order from the War Department for a musket whose component parts were such that any of the parts of a single musket should fit in the corresponding position of any other musket. This would mean that any soldier in the field could replace any part of a rifle at any time. Arms of this kind would confer advantage to an army equipped with such guns as against an army equipped with guns were made by gunsmiths building each gun by hand. This meant a shift from the gunsmith making individual weapons to a factory manufacturing production runs of the exact same weapon. When Henry Ford applied the American system of manufacturing to automobiles, one-at-a-time automobiles hand crafted by carriage makers led the move to mass production in the Ford factories. These changes affected different industries in different ways. Significant changes took place during the American Civil War, the growth of the railroads, and even the adoption of the American system by British and French manufacturers who had themselves pioneered aspects of the system in earlier phases of the industrial revolution. David A Hounshell gives a rich, detailed account of these developments in his 1984 book, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. Yours, Ken Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/ — Kevin Henry wrote: —snip— The reason I find this thread so interesting, aside from the obvious job-related issues in the future, is that we've been down this path before. The English reformers in the late 19th century grappled with the issue of preserving the 'legacy' of handcraft as it gave way to the simplification (nullification might be a better word) of industrialization. And if you are to believe John Heskett, the American system of manufacturing was truly made possible not by skilled workers but rather by unskilled laborers who came largely from the rural parts of Europe and were willing to work as a 'cog in a larger machine' for a much lower wage. Reformers at that time grappled with the impact of the 'machine' which I put in quotes because the machine now is not a table saw or drill press but instead a computer running an algorithmic program that can 'detect' a book jacket and eventually (possibly) replicate to a similarly high caliber a wholly new design. Either way we view it we're still talking about a machine designed by a human to speed things up. —snip— ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------