From an interview by Treehugger:

“On your website you ask the question, “How can designers make low-cost products without factories?” Have you found an answer to this yet? Is it something we could accomplish on a large scale?

I’m currently working on around 15 techniques for low-tooling, small-scale manufacturing of durable, beautiful goods with low labor inputs (and thus, makeable anywhere in the world). I’m publishing my results on Humblefactory.com, and on the Humblefactory youtube channel. One of the most promising so far is a method for making bent bamboo furniture – chairs, tables, lamps — with a clean, modern aesthetic, and using only materials grown within my Seattle city block. These same materials – or analogs like them – are available anywhere in the world outside of the arctic.

Another project which is likely to bear some interesting fruit is a student research lab called The 100 Mile Design Challenge. The first two pilot classes are running simultaneously in Seattle and Baltimore (I’m collaborating with Inna Alesina at MICA). Students are required to develop a product that they can manufacture (make two copies of) using only materials and energy which could be sourced from within 100 miles of their city center. We have been awarded an exhibition space by ICFF, and will be exhibiting in New York in May. The initial results are pretty exciting – stay tuned.

In a TED talk you gave last year, you talk about making gadgets modular so that they can be easily hacked, upgraded and repaired. Do you see our electronics manufacturers shifting to this design perspective any time soon?

Well, actually no. Not because it’s not a good idea, but because it doesn’t make sense for these large companies to pursue this strategy. Economies of scale generally encourage production of more units of a given product, so only large market segments are good choices. At the same time, the centralization that comes with this sort of production discourages the high overhead cost of managing a diverse range of products targeted to many small user groups. Therefore, centralized production tends to favor fewer, more broadly appealing product offerings. Managing the thousands of combinations that come from just a few modules would be too much.

But I do think that many coordinated, decentralized, small manufacturers could make this model work. And, if the right infrastructure was in place to share specifications for useful collections of modules, then I suspect this global manufacturing network could produce designs which were better than any large centralized producer — because the local curator/designer of a product would be better able to match the needs of a local customer.

This Humblefactured future needs some development before we can expect it — new materials, new manufacturing methods, and new tools. But the exciting thing is, it can happen one bit at a time, and I think, eventually displace a significant amount of traditional manufacturing. In any case, the Humblefactory will be leading the charge.”

See also the TED talk on the same topic: