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PHD-DESIGN  May 2007

PHD-DESIGN May 2007

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Subject:

Casting, cutting, and milling -- in the industrial context

From:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 12 May 2007 12:36:45 +0200

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (75 lines)

Friends,

In my note to Karel, I was imprecise in my use of the terms casting 
and milling. I should have been more careful in my usage. We cast 
type (or did), we cut dies, and we mill many kinds of machine parts. 
We use dies and molds for casting, and we use jigs for milling.

Imprecision aside, I hope the principles in my note are clear.

The techniques and methods of industry changed over time. Some kinds 
of mass production or mass craft production go back thousands of 
years, and factories made those artifacts. The pin factory that Adam 
Smith describes in The Wealth of Nations represents division of labor 
in a way that leads to the logic of the assembly line. The modern 
Henry Ford assembly line represents a new kind of scale, just as the 
Rouge represented a new kind of scope. It led to the human ills that 
Charlie Chaplin represented in modern times, and it shaped the 
foundation of a new kind of world that brought good as well as bad.

Ford's goal in life was to get people off the farm and to free them 
from the drudgery of life in the primary sector of the economy. The 
primary sector -- farming, fishing, forestry, basic minerals 
extraction -- employed over 90% of the developed world's workers at 
the end of the 1800s. Today, at the start of the 2100s, they employ 
fewer than 10% of the workers in OECD nations. There is good news 
here as well as bad, for anyone who ever worked on a farm in the era 
before industrialization. But that's a post for another day.

What got people off the farm was the kind of technology that required 
interchangeable parts of mass-produced machinery. This only began in 
the 1800s.

Many technologies began far earlier that we commonly realize. Robert 
Hooke provided the first technical description of a working telegraph 
in the 1680s. In the 1670s, Father Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian 
missionary in China, built a working steam-powered trolley and some 
sources suggest that he built a working steam-powered automobile. 
Hooke's telegraph was far removed from the modern telegraph with 
Edison's repeater that has now been replaced by still more advanced 
systems in the Internet and satellite era. Verbiest's automobile was 
to today's automobile what the 3-toed Eocene horse was to a modern 
horse. For that matter, early modern auto manufacturing was 3-toed 
compared with the Toyota Production System.

These are the things I'm struggling with. But I want to say again 
that Karel's point was well taken -- all these issues evolve from 
human design activity over time, and none of these processes emerged 
full-blown in recent years.

On the confusion of casting, cutting, milling, please forgive a post 
written swiftly while I think and work on something else.

Yours,

Ken




-- 

Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo

Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen

+47 46.41.06.76    Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat

email: [log in to unmask]

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