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The Factory of the Future
The post-industrial model is not an assembly line, but an assembly swarm.
By Bruce Sterling
August/September 2002
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In a traditional factory (below) materials are made into a product calculated
to have the widest possible appeal, which is then warehoused until purchased.
"Mass customization" (right) is the way computer manufacturers
like Dell work: consumers design their own product by choosing from a wide
variety of features; nothing is assembled until payment is received. |
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Damian Chadwick
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Once upon a time, there was "mass production." It happened inside
factories. Iron, coal, tin, lead, ceramic, and glass rolled in. The factory
banged that stuff into identical commodities, which were then hauled on
rail to car lots and dime stores. They were sold to the masses. And when
you bought one, you often found it crude and déclassé. Still,
it was cheaper than almost any product made by hand.
The factory was vast, mechanical, and dauntingly complex. It smoked and
stank. It was hard to build, maintain, finance, and replace. But time
marched on. In the 1970s French car companies discovered the joys of computer
modeling. Decades later desktop spreadsheets turned clumsy vertical monopolies
into flexible supply chains. The new factory model is a universe of
product features choreographed in invisible, dynamic interactive systems
of finance, retail, production, and promotion.
Mass customization is a contradiction in terms, but that's OK, because
the old terms are defunct. It's still hard to retool a factory, but it remains
ever more tempting. Engineers love the technical sweetness; marketers need
those fatter, more colorful sales brochures. The industries that can retool
fastest are the sexiest: consumer electronics, footwear, sporting goods.
The computer is the icon here. It's a flexible factory that makes ones
and zeros. Software is fast, modular, and fluid, so engineers export
the computer's qualities down the great chain of industrial being. Customization
boils off the computer screen into special effects, digital video, digital
music, and digital material reality. Down on the factory floor it's
4-D numeric machinery, injection molding, stereolithography, digital prototyping,
and laser cutting. For companies like Nike, Toyota, Nokia, and Dell, the
process is less like the steam engine and more like bubble gum.
Old-school factory workers looked like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times,
with wrenches and rumpled overalls. Postindustrial factory guys from Dell
wear spotless T-shirts that read "Liquidity, Profitability, Growth,"
as if they were bankers. The objects they produce are still physical, of
course. (Dead computers tend to end up in weird Chinese villages, where
little kids hammer them to pieces.) But there's been a definitive change
in accounting styles. Old-style factories counted their unsold stock as
assets. Real goods were better than the money in the rickety banks of the
1930s. However, as money moves faster, inventory costs more: warehoused
products suck up the interest on funds that might be invested elsewhere;
plus there's the painful overhead for space, insurance, and warehouse administration.
A heap of obsolete inventory can kill a manufacturer.
Dell wisely gets its money before the machine gets made. The consumer
assembles the product with a checklist on an Internet screen. Once the credit
card clears, Dell sticks the product together and ships it. Its customer
does Chaplin's assembly work for free. This labor process is promoted and
sold as consumer choice.
Mass production offered millions of one thing to everybody. Mass customization
offers millions of different models to one guy. Pine and Gilmore, the business
gurus of Customization.com, explain it this way: The key innovation is to
break the assembly line into "modules." Each module is dedicated
to producing some product feature. The finer the grain of these modules,
the more variety you can stuff into the product. It's not an assembly line,
but an assembly swarm. The dazzled customer tries to express to the supplier
what he or she wants. Software translates that plea into an instant game
plan for the factory floor: all the necessary components, plus the
actions required to unite them. The factory modules sail into a production
"flotilla." From the seamless work of this mechanized fleet
comes the customized commodity: a sheet-metal chassis, a plastic console,
chips, a screen, keys, spray paint, and the styro blocks. In theory, each
feature can be just as personal as the delivery address. Then off it goes
by FedEx: all the speed and volume of the old system without the monotony.
There is no standard product, just millions of potential combinations. This
holds fantastic industrial potential, but of course there's a catch. Somebody,
somewhere, has to decide what to make. Decisions are expensive. The burden
of that decision has to be exported outside the company onto somebody else.
The consumer has to do it--but it mustn't look too much like work. This
is where some handy Amazon-style demographic data mining comes in.
People who idly Web surf on Amazon, jumping from page to page, are auto-customizing.
That is their unpaid job. "Hey," Amazon responds, "you'll
love that book, because that's just the kind of book that a guy like you
will like! How about two books discounted, at the same mouse click?"
The customer doesn't exactly "labor" here--he or she engages.
It's auto-seduction. It's shopping as building. It's supposed to be instantaneous,
costless, seamless, and frictionless, but--the world being the world--it
never quite is.
Despite the best efforts of machinery, we can't really have our heart's
unspoken desire. As any designer will tell you, physical objects involve
trade-offs. Every customer must make some kind of sacrifice (not the
least, paying money for the product). In mass production the customer's
sacrifice is sharp and severe: "One size fits all: we make
it, you buy it, shut up." In the flimsy, multivalent world of
mass customization, the tentacles of sacrifice spread throughout the
fabric of society. Any product that's created for a market of one is no
longer a "product." It becomes a service: a lasting intimate entanglement.
From the company's viewpoint, a customized product is the point of entry
into a long-term commitment. Seen through the other end of the telescope,
it's a fine excuse for Three Initial Corporation to sniff at leisure
through your wallet, your closet, and your underwear.
Who among us has not had the creeping awareness that we are being urged
into a demographic we don't like? My God, you think, am I supposed
to buy this stuff? Adult-diaper ads show up; some cunning machine has
predicted our need for girdles. What a heartbreak when we realize from user
comments that our favorite Amazon author has a fandom composed of idiots.
Here mass customization moves from high concept to personal humiliation.
Whenever it arrives in real life, the future is always embarrassing. When
old forms of friction become "frictionless," that innovation reveals
brand-new frictions--the side effects and technical bite-backs we could
never expect. A laser-cut, truly customized, tailored set of jeans fits
you and only you. That's lovely, but don't loan those jeans to your younger
and svelter sister. Even as a loaner from your younger self, those tailored
jeans have painful things to say.
Many consumers don't even want what they want. They don't want unique shoes
that fit only them, for they dislike their own feet. They want the
shoes that Carrie buys on Sex and the City--shoes that pinch and
cost too much, propelling our Carrie from the sour realm of the satisfied
female shopper into the luxe dreamworld of the high-maintenance girl.
Given a factory of the future, you might well demand and create a one-of-a-kind
industrial object, to your own entirely personal specs. But good luck getting
anybody to maintain that thing. Repairmen have never seen anything like
it. And what about the secondhand market? It doesn't exist. That unique
device will hang around your home or business, passé and untouchable,
like nuclear waste.
Lawyers may well be attracted by all this lucrative activity. What if this
unique gizmo breaks and wounds somebody? Soon you're shouting in court:
"You built it! That's your logo on it!" But they counter, "Well,
you're the customer, you designed it. That's exactly what you asked for."
Customer empowerment sounds terrific: people design their own tools
and goods, and use them to their own ends. But hey, people are people. What
a lot of folks really want from the Dell dude's computer is a cool, convenient
way to copy Disney movies. That leads to a heavy exchange of legal fire
in the U.S. Congress. Next time you order a DVD player, you may find
that Mickey Mouse is your personal commissar.
Factories remain powerful devices for transforming matter and energy--wholesale.
People shun the vicinity of a factory, for though factories are improving,
they're a long way from good for us. They're harsh and fearsome structures
whose evil by-products include high voltage, traffic, shipping accidents,
brownfields, grayfields, and lasting toxins in the water table.
The real "consumer sacrifices" from mass production include
scary transformations in the atmosphere and a harsh remaking of the Earth's
surface, including the loss of our ozone layer and even a big chunk of Antarctica.
You may never see carcinogens and mutagens, but you carry them far more
intimately than you ever will carry a Sony Walkman. Someday, sure as your
Visa and MasterCard bills, payment will come due.
Related stories:
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Design and Deep Environmentalism |
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