A contribution by Eric Hunting:

“There aren’t a lot of good media-based models of a Post-Industrial culture and those that do exist tend to be set in a pretty depressing context. (James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand, for instance) But I also think that the upper-classes no longer represent a model as they once did because the past couple of decades of the Second Gilded Age have really pushed excess into the realm of absurdity. Most marginally intelligent nominally sane people would no more aspire to live in the likes of Donald Trump’s Mara Lago then they would the Mutter Museum. Increasingly, the very wealthy have been demonstrating a sense of aesthetics on par with that of the late Saddam Hussein, so they really aren’t setting any examples for anyone anymore, aside from examples for the tastelessness and stupidity money seems to inspire. The endless parade of idiotic junk like gold Hello Kitty figures, Swarovski crystal lined toilets, and Damien Hirst abominations. It’s almost as if the people designing this stuff are mocking the people they sell it to -like haute couture with rude words in foreign languages embroidered in.

I think there’s an opportunity here to set an alternative example. To craft a Post-Industrial aesthetic. And I see community projects and their architecture particularly important in this role. There is a very distinct aesthetic to Post-Industrial artifacts as a function of the way we re-design them to suit very different approaches to their fabrication. It’s the sort of difference you can see plainly between your typical furniture store offerings and the Flat-Pak furniture from an IKEA store, or the difference between a typical Chinese made radio with a molded plastic case and a Tivoli Model One, or toys made by Mattel and toys made by PlaySam, or a stick frame house in the suburbs of Anywhere USA and a container mod house. Did you ever notice how some of the most expensive things have the simplest designs? There’s a logical reason for this. ‘Designer’ goods have markets too limited to justify the capital investment typical of high-volume mainstream products. Often they are made to order rather than mass-produced. So they are often fabricated by the same means we would tend to employ in the independent fabrication of a Post-Industrial artifact. In a sense, they are Post-Industrial artifacts.

A good example of this is the Super 7; a luxury sports car originally developed by Lotus in the 1960s and made famous by featuring in the opening montage for The Prisoner TV show. This is one of the closest things we have today to an open source car. It’s a manufacture-on-demand automobile. Lotus wanted a way to expand its markets in an era when shipping cars by sea was a real hassle. So they came up with the design for a car that could be reduced to a kit of parts assembled at the car dealership -something futurists now predict all car manufacture may soon employ. Luxury sports car makers simply can’t sell enough cars to cost-justify the production methods typical of mainstream cars. This is why so many such cars today are based on tubular space frame chassis that can be made with jigs and welding in a garage shop facility. Based on exactly this kind of chassis, the 7 is built entirely from retrofit components which could all be easily crated up and shipped by sea or truck without concern for the specialized car carrier transport common with conventional cars. When Lotus decided to discontinue the car, one of the dealerships that had been selling and assembling them in the UK bought the rights to continue manufacturing it -which was easy because they could contract-manufacture the modular parts from different companies. If it wasn’t for the fact that this was deliberately designed to be a rich man’s toy impractical for routine use (and that the people in the company that still makes and sells this are utterly devoid of entrepreneurial imagination), it would be the IBM PC of cars today.

So you see, there already is an aspect of luxury associated with the Post-Industrial aesthetic because of the independent methods of production so many luxury goods tend to require, with this being reflected in their design. This is something we can exploit in the crafting of a Post-Industrial model of the Good Life that can be communicated through media. Sure, the notion of being free from the bonds of salary dependence is compelling by itself, but homeless people are free from that ‘problem’ too and they aren’t exactly living the good life. We need to demonstrate there are, in fact, quality of life benefits at no compromise in standard of living.”