von Busch: P2P Fashion as harbinger of Industry 2.0 models

Ultimately, von Busch’s work does, as yet, not give us a complete set of answers to the many questions of a Post-Industrial production paradigm. This is, so far, tentative exploration on a new frontier. But it’s certainly vital exploration. Clearly, even clothing is going to be designed, made, used used very differently and fashion mean something very different in the cultures of the near future.

I asked Eric Hunting for his commentary on the following interview:

* Interview with Otto von Busch – from We Make Money Not Art –

Eric Hunting:

“Fashion may not be the first thing to come to mind when one thinks of a new industrial revolution -especially for a nerd like myself who is quite satisfied with a minimal wardrobe of sneakers, chinos, T-shirts, and army surplus coats and has never even considered formal wear beyond Arthur C. Clarke’s Nehru suit. But clothing is indeed one of our major industries and paradoxical in that it was host to the origin of machine automation and yet has long resisted its advance, remaining one of the most hand-labor-intensive industries today. Clothing is also an industry long subject to a rapid pace of product change through the evolution of fashion as well as demanding the largest product diversity as the key basis of self-expression. Long before it was observed in the music industry, the clothing industry had to learn to cope with a Long Tail market, and this perhaps is one of the reasons for the resistance to automation. The vast organic variation of the human form coupled to the similar variation in personal taste and a desire for self-expression through this ‘second skin’ greatly challenges the mass production paradigm. One could argue that one of the roles -in a consumer culture context- of a haute couture design culture has been to create a kind of top-down cultural authority for ‘style’ that both imposes planned obsolescence -on a seasonal schedule!- while limiting fashion’s potential demassification from the bottom-up through self-expression, creating a cultural system where style supersede self-expression for the secret purpose of keeping clothing mass production runs high enough to be profitable.

And so there is much relevance in a Post-Industrial context to the work of Otto von Busch that the above noted article well introduces us to. Here we see interventions in the conventional industrial process that put designers on a peer level with fabricators, enabling them to interact in a new way and to produce on-demand for a different production paradigm. Rightly referring to his projects as a form of ‘hacking’ he is indeed getting at the software underlying an industrial production paradigm, short-circuiting its convention hierarchies and letting it explore new possibilities. This is much enabled by the lack of automation in the system, since human labor still has an advantage in flexibility unmatched by large machines with capital costs tied to specific business models and the industry having long established a practice of job-shop production at modest scales. However, the outsourcing of so much of this production at a great distance from the location of designers probably hampers such hacking and von Busch seems to have found a niche in Norway that might be tough to find elsewhere. My only fault with these projects so far that they do not yet incorporate end-users, unless you consider the designers themselves to be prosumers. We are bringing the designers down to the shop but not the end users up to it where the whole cycle is closed.

Another very interesting aspect of von Busch’s work is his recognition of the hobby fields as nexuses of the cultivation of local or independent industrial knowledge. Researchers in Post-Industrial technology largely focus on the re-invention of mass production technology to bring it ‘down’ to the prosumer level and yet there is also another side to this in the hobby culture where a different set of production technologies can be brought ‘up’ out of very-small-scale specialization as well. It’s not all about crochet, bird houses, and model trains. Hobbies, crafts, and arts have become increasingly technically sophisticated -as witnessed by their role in the origin of personal computing and their current involvement in robotics and new digital machine tool engineering. It may come as a surprise to some that such things as modular desktop CNC machines have existed in the hobby sphere for some time. The model aircraft hobby commonly employs materials, engineering, and technology on-par with military fighter aircraft -even jet propulsion! Fine arts weavers now employ digital looms. Much hobby activity transitions to the entrepreneurial, and as von Busch has researched, much of this trade exists on a sub-micro-economic level; informal, personal, neighborly. Here are the foundations of future local industrial networks.

Ultimately, von Busch’s work does, as yet, not give us a complete set of answers to the many questions of a Post-Industrial production paradigm. This is, so far, tentative exploration on a new frontier. But it’s certainly vital exploration. Clearly, even clothing is going to be designed, made, used used very differently and fashion mean something very different in the cultures of the near future.”

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