HI Ken,
your post need no apologies. I was particularly interested in the discussion about the continuity between ancient factories and modern ones. you say:
>The factories of the early multinationals showed many of the same
features in 2,000 BC, as did the factories of the industrial
revolution of the Middle Ages. What changed in the industrial
revolution of the 1700s, and in the later industrial revolutions
leading from the first mass manufacturing to Henry Ford's River Rouge
plant, was scale and scope.<
One important distinction between pre-industrial and industrial factories, in my opinion, is the fact that in the new factories, because of the scale of production, knowledge can no longer be transmitted by personal communication, it has to be codified. This introduced an important distinction in the way design was managed: in the pre-industrial factory the designers was planning a series of operation for himself or for a small group of people he/she could directly control, in the industrial factory the people working on the designer's project were out of the designer's direct control, out of sight, in a different location. In other word the designer's knowledge was de-localised and codified.
However the way you talk about the factories in the middle ages seems to suggest that such a form of knowledge codification was already used at that time. Is this correct?
Ciao from Denmark
Associate Professor Nicola Morelli, PhD
School of Architecture and Design
Aalborg University, Denmark
Web: www.aod.aau.dk/staff/nmor
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