Detritus of Industry

                 In Liberty Maine, two unusual establishments flank Main Street. One is a hardware store with every shelf and surface covered in a comprehensive assortment of tools, fasteners, jigs and fixtures. The other is a small museum, dedicated to the tools themselves. The store is unusual for the depth and breadth of the collection, with literally thousands of items with their origins in New England machine shops. The industrial revolution along with the machine shop knowledge and technology that accompanied the movement meant that the roots of management and manufacturing theory were laid down firmly in New England soil. Many of the developments that set the stage for the economic boom of the 20th century through mass production in America were born here, so it is fitting that they be well remembered here as well. Both the store and the museum in Liberty Maine do that quite well.

Browsing at Liberty Tool
(photo: Elisa Hamilton)

                Many of the machine shop items, like fixtures and modified cutting tools, rarely left the shop for anything other than recycling or the landfill. Once a job had run to completion, the specialized and often improvised tooling was no longer needed and so began a downward trajectory. With more and more shops reducing manual machining in part or completely, these objects take on a greater presence as artifacts, both of technological history but also the human history. In a computer controlled machining operation, the rate of travel can be nearly perfectly controlled, resulting in an excellent, even finish.

Machine shop odds and ends purchased at Liberty Tool

                The manually machined part, in comparison, has tell-tale tooling marks where the cutting tool moved along the work piece at anything approaching an uneven rate. These tiny variations impart a (translated) imprint of the human hand, working through a mechanical medium, rather than directly. From these marks we can read into the skill of the machinist, the priorities demanded of the part (whether surface finish was important for its function), and the era of its making. In the quiet corners of these buildings in Liberty, one can get a true sense of the presence and importance of machine shops to New England, rather than relegating the collective memories and bits of metal to the scrap bin of history.

Plastic Fantastic - Part 3

"I just want to say one word to you. Just. One word."

"Yes sir?"

"Are you listening?"

"Yes I am."

"Plastics."

"Exactly how do you mean?"

"There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?"

                This clipped string of dialogue plays out within the first 10 minutes of the film "The Graduate", just after the protagonist speaks of his uncertain future. Mr. Maguire's advice was written to represent the aloof, materialistic qualities of an older generation which seemed captivated by the dull, cold world of corporate capitalism.  While it rang true for its time, with confused youth grappling with the horrors of the Vietnam War and shifting values, plastics today are being embraced in an alternative fashion by DIY makers and artists.

                Plastics are perhaps the most perfectly tailored, malleable materials available to today's small fabricator. With small investments in equipment and a few faltering attempts under one's belt, there are great possibilities in plastic. From entry level 3D printers like MakerBot to cobbled together vacuum forming machines and 2-part liquid resins, few classes of materials offer more while requiring so little capital to be productive. This is a huge inversion of the standards in place when "The Graduate" was released in 1967. Plastics then were still an emerging market, dominated by the hegemony of a few massively successful corporate firms like DuPont and Dow. The amateur was far from being aware of the potential uses of plastics for fabrication, much less having the means to work with them effectively.

MakerBot 3D Printer in operation.
(photo: Andy Dingley)

                While a few early adopters (ambitious architecture students, forward looking artists and inventors) delved into synthetic materials early on, it was decades before plastics as a sculptural or design material became accessible to the average maker. While the plastics most frequently used by DIYers today are far from chemically new, (Delrin in 1960, HDPE in 1953, ABS in the 1950s ) they are only beginning to be viewed as materials native to personalized design and art making; to some degree displacing wood, metal, and gypsum as go-to substances.

                For Ben Braddock, plastics represent the stiff conformity of the older generation he wants no part of, a quietly ominous closing of doors. Walk through a hackerspace, architecture firm or sculptor's studio in 2012 and ask about plastics and you'll likely get a very different  take- one heavy on opportunities while aware of potential consequences, engaged with the pros and cons of the material world, rather than indifferently adrift within it. 

Plastic Fantastic - Part 2

                In the previous post, I presented some of the issues I have with plastic as a material and its role in consumer culture more broadly. Rather than passively, if begrudgingly accepting the shortcomings, I believe we ought to examine the alternative possibilities. As I see it, it is the role of the designer, fabricator, or artist  to optimize the benefits of a given material or circumstance, and minimize the negatives.  It is the responsibility of the consumer to choose more carefully, that is, to be truly selective. After all, the engine of production is an engine based on feedback, from consumer to producer, producer to consumer, and so on and so on. There are examples of great plastic products, objects that are designed with the limitations (and strengths) of plastic in mind.

Plastic Eames Chair from the 1950s
(photo by: Sandstein  ) 

                Plastics fail on the most basic level when they attempt to simulate or rather, impersonate another vastly different material (e.g. wood, stone, leather). From this misguided practice we get the concept of plastic as a phony, or stilted product. Of course, the counterpoint to this is that the imitation of natural materials with synthetics can be an effective and even powerful device in fine art and high design, where the limitations are intentionally underscored for their conceptual richness.

                A real design challenge of plastics is how to create an object which ages well, which becomes richer and storied by its use, rather than diminished by it. This starts with selecting the best materials. We should demand the most stable, durable plastics to use in manufacturing, rather than the quick, cheap and dirty disposable materials we have come to associate with plastics. We make furniture with walnut rather than basswood, for sculpture we specify bronze over pewter,  it should be the same with plastics. "Engineering" plastics (acetal, polycarbonate, HDPE) already exist in fairly common use, for more critical and demanding applications. We should not be content with the existing options however- there are surely more ideal configurations of polymers yet to be made, ones that privilege longevity and resiliency over basic cost . I believe these simple choices start the ball rolling in the right direction: creating plastics which overcome the problems of their material origins, and become objects worthy of heirloom status. 

Plastic Fantastic - Part 1

                Increasingly, plastic makes up the material world we live in and the objects we interact with on a daily basis. Injection molding is responsible for the bulk of these objects, where the plastic compound is heated to a liquid state and forced into a cavity, typically a rigid mold made of a durable metal like steel or aluminum. The thermoformed plastics that make up these injection molded parts are carefully engineered to have the kind of traits that make them perfect for mass production. They are widely available, generally cheap, and re-usable- compared to thermoset plastics (relatively expensive, less variety in formulations, no possibility of reuse), they are a natural fit for consumer goods.

                The consumer object emerges from this process and with every fresh casting, the cost per unit drops; the high water line of market saturation is redrawn. This curve of cheapness can encourage overproduction, where units are cranked out en masse and the mold retired. The delays created by a production run below market demand (re-instating the mold, shifting other projects to other machines or off the schedule, shipping, etc.) frequently leads to a higher overall cost. Put plainly, the cost of producing too few units is potentially greater than the cost of producing too many. The sometimes counterintuitive arithmetic of mass production is partially to blame for the constant glut of consumable products. The real, literal cheapness of these objects, the ease of replacement (low cost, high availability) along with the seamless duplicity- (each copy is an exact copy) means an increasing comfort in discarding  the objects  derived from these mass production methods, reducing an already slim likelihood of any emerging sentimental value. 

A potential consumer browsing a plastic menagerie at a flea market.
(photo: Lionel Allorge)

                There is little appreciable human "wear" factor on plastics, the object is not imbued with any human presence through its use. It has little past, less history, and no maker's mark spare the odd ejection dent or parting line. It could be made anywhere in the world, by any number of interchangeable factories. It belongs to no region, no culture, no land.  Our end experience as a consumer is as uniform as the process that created it.