*Not as easy as it sounds in the manifesto, right? But if it ever actually happens in real life, it's not gonna be brought by angel-dust. It'll have to emerge from some structure or system that's already there.
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/eric-hunting-on-defining-post-industrial-design/2009/10/29
(...)
Eric Hunting meditates and strategizes on the way forward from here to there.
“I’ve been thinking more on this lately -particularly as I’ve recently been working on an article on characterizing/defining Post-Industrial design.
This is a topic that seems very prone to spiral into abstraction -especially when the goal is as grandiose as gathering all industrial knowledge into a central repository of some sort. (((Uh, yeah.)))
"Perhaps we can ground the discussion a little by defining how we might represent any artifact in terms of a body of information. (((Gets popcorn.))) For the moment we’ll resign ourselves to a characterization for human use and leave the machine encoding to another level as we need to grasp this in human terms before we can seriously figure out how to work our machines into the knowledge loop.
Any manufactured artifact is -more or less- fully characterized by the following collection of information;
-Design
-annotated design images, digital models, physical models
-samples -in the form of stored examples, photographs
-detailed description
-cultural/historical cross-reference (see science historian James Burke)
-technical/performance specifications
-standardization parameters (technical specifications that are standardized across a collection of artifacts)
-design discussion record (for designs that are group or community projects) -designer/design community (contacts, forums, references, etc.)
-Production Recipe
-drawn plans -CAD, drafted, etc.
-materials and components catalog
-materials source guide
-cross-reference to materials production
-tool catalog (including software tools)
-cross-reference to tool designs
-step-by-step production process instructions
-technique cross-reference
-firmware (here defined as software embedded in or integral to the function of the artifact)
-Use Guide
-optional kit assembly instructions
-user feedback record
-repair guide
-materials and components catalog
-technique cross-reference for artifacts that are tools
-user group community
-Software Family (cross-reference index to software artifacts made to compliment the artifact)
-Post-Use Guide
-disassembly instructions
-disposal/recycling instructions
-recycling technique cross-reference
-upcycling technique cross-reference
-impact analysis record
-Artifact Instance
-package/kit/etc.
-Spime (borrowing the term from Bruce Sterling, here defined as the collective media and information network associated with any product and supporting its feedback channels, knowledge cross-references, interdependencies and ‘prosumer’ communities)
Commentary:
For each set of the above information you have variations and iterations. A variation of a design is an adaptation or modification of a design to suit customization/personalization or some variation in application. An iteration of a design is an improvement of the design. So we might represent the ‘lineage’ of an artifact as a tree where each trunk is a line of iteration and each branch a variation branching off into a line of iteration from a point in the parent line of iteration. In some cases lines of iteration split into competitive parallel branches. At other times divergent variant branches can converge to become future iterations of other variant branches or even the main design branch.
Not also that some of this information flows in time independent of the iteration. For instance, the user feedback records of an iteration grow as long as that iteration remains current, and form part of the reference information used to make subsequent iterations and form part of its ’spime’.
All subcomponents and all processed materials can be characterized as artifacts, interfacing into the hierarchy of other artifacts through the components/materials catalogs. Even things we think of as ‘materials’ like lumber, plywood sheeting, steel sheet, plastic stock, etc. all have ‘designs’ that determine their form factor and have often been standardized. The A4 sheet of paper is a specific design of sheet paper. In some cases components can be specified to be cannibalized to serve as a material. (this is upcycling) In some cases iterative evolution of processed materials and components can force an iterative evolution in the artifacts they are used in.
Raw materials can also be characterized ‘like’ other artifacts with the exception that they have no design, just samples/examples, a range of specifications defining quality, and a range of natural sources. Their ‘recipes’ are about extraction, not fabrication. This is not exclusive to just stuff in the ground. Some raw materials -like lumber- are ‘grown’ and so employ technique in their extraction and management of quality. Basically, you can say that lumber production is a ‘mining’ technique that extracts carbon from the ground and air and turns it into wood. In the old fashioned manner its like strip mining. Fell timber harvesting and tree farming are the more renewable approaches that have different technique.
Now, let’s consider the characterization of a technique. A technique represents a body of knowledge for how to use a spectrum of tools to produce a spectrum of products. An individual technique belongs to a family of technique embodying a roughly common spectrum of fabrication or performance. In some cases there is no product, but rather performance. For instance, instructions for how to dance produce a performance but not a product -unless you’re an anthropologist and consider dancing primarily a courting technique.
The problem we have here is generalization. There are large families of techniques using large families of tools and a large spectrum of possible products. And so to illustrate a technique we must use simple artifacts as models and reference other artifacts as examples. The technique is adapted according to the specifics of recipes for different artifacts. Ultimately, all artifacts that use a technique in their production back-reference to the description of the technique as a potential example. But not all examples of a technique represent good models of a technique to learn it from -which brings us to the other fly in our ointment; skill.
A skill is a learned technique arrived at through practice/performance. Skill is the ultimate goal in the communication of a technique -at least from the human perspective. We have only a rudimentary notion today of how to characterize a skill in the machine sense other than to say that it represents a mechanism for the translation/interpretation of a generalized fabrication process to the design specifics of a particular artifact. I’ve dubbed this ‘Taylorization’. (after Frederick Winslow Taylor) and characterize it as the intermediate representation of a production process relative to the topology of a production system prior to ‘compilation’ into the control language of individual machines. Thus I characterize ‘machine skill’ as a system/network of ‘Taylor programs’. But let’s not get too deep into that dark jungle right now…
For now, let’s speculate on how a human characterization of technique might break down....
