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. 

Autographic

                Anyone who has made a physical object from scratch- a clock, a birdhouse, a fixture, has likely constructed a monologue of lines, an autographic conversation of drawings, scribbled notations, and question marks. These esoteric notes that emerge from the process of fabrication are emblematic of the author, the maker.

                They provide information, but only for the initiated. Whereas the blueprint or machine shop schematic is crucially, intentionally, clear-cut and subscribing to industry standards, the maker's scrawl is personal and confounding to the outsider. This is because only the information outside of the creator's head needs to be worked out.

Notes to myself for machining a quick part

                When one is skilled in a given craft or trade, a great deal of the process is absorbed in tacit knowledge. Hardly a conscious thought is required, much less a written phrase or diagram. For the most seasoned maker, the details may only amount to a jotted line or two, more for reassurance than necessity.  For the newcomer, the notations may be extensive- crossed out, revised, underlined and boldfaced.  In this extensive if slapdash script, one can read the rough outlines of what it means to grapple with a spatial problem. I find these notations fascinating both for their unmodified honesty and their incidentally captured history. They are the fabricator's equivalent of a diary, capturing their fleeting thought process as well as the technological/theoretical milieu of their time.

                By showing the human element of invention, the struggle, we see more clearly the connections between our past and present. 

The Skeleton Revealed

                 As I stated in the previous post, the process of design and fabrication that leads up to a final 'skeletonized' form is a costly exercise with questionable gains on all but large parts. So what about the large parts?

                In art, architecture and engineering, skeletal forms on a large scale are commonplace because they offer the potential for greatly reduced costs, reduced material usage, and shorter fabrication times. On a larger scale, the skeletal structure or form can be created through the assembly of smaller elements (bones, if you will) integrated into a larger system complete with the ample negative spaces that indicate a skeletonized form. Compare this to the relatively small forms of knives or watches in the previous post- these objects are small enough that attempting to assemble a skeletal structure from components would compromise design, create a need for many small fasteners or welds, and very likely lead to a device that is structurally weaker overall.

                Skeletal forms in contemporary sculpture and architecture have their origins in modernism and material science. Once the ornamental facades and unnecessary elements were removed, the fundamental forms that remained indicated structure and functionality more than anything else. The 'bones' of the building became the focus, with final shapes looking very much like the construction elements of wood or metal framing, before sheathing, siding, etc. is added.

Open Cubes (1991) by Sol Lewitt

(photo: Lauren Manning)

                Advances in design and engineering theory over the centuries meant that construction could move away from heavy, stacked, solid forms and toward lightweight, tensile, open forms. Gains in manufacturing processes of steel, glass, and plastics simultaneously allowed for and encouraged skeletal structures as architects developed new visual language, partly growing out of a fascination with newly available material technologies. Technology, as much as aesthetic philosophy, set the stage for modern design principles. 

Eiffel Tower under construction, 1888

When Less Costs More

               On a per part basis, the practice of subtracting material and carving out the most minimal form is sometimes referred to as skeletonizing. That is, anything non-essential to the most basic functionality of the object is removed. This is done ostensibly to save weight, to save cost, and boost performance. In instances where those gains are true, the 'skeletonized' form becomes no longer remarkable for its skeletal appearance. Rather it finds broad if not complete adoption within the category, becoming the standard: a bicycle frame, a spoke wheel, the wooden framing of a house. Rarely do we look at such structures and see them as minimalist statements of engineering or design. They have become too common to be remarkable.

An example of a form becoming skeletonized 

                Where the skeletonized form IS remarkable, is often where it is least necessary and most costly in production. These instances stand out in their rarity, precisely because they are economically and practically less viable than alternative forms, preventing widespread adoption. To create the internal cavities of a skeletonized part for instance, voids must be built into or machined out of the envelope of the part.  In all but very large parts, this provides minor weight reduction and frequently requires additional finishing work which raises the cost of the product.

                This cost/benefit equation tends to be the right decision in very specific set of circumstances, rather than the broad market. As of 2011, a U.S. soldier carries loads in excess of 80-120 lbs. depending on the specifics of the mission, according to ArmyTimes. When every additional pound creates fatigue leading to consequences of life and death, the additional fabrication costs of skeletonizing are more than warranted. As a result, utilitarian, survivalist, and military objects are the first to be carved out and skeletonized (knives, rifles, etc). These skeletonized forms become translated into the consumer market, in more extreme forms that loudly signify their 'tactical' importance more than they necessarily functioning as such. In short, skeletonizing loses its original impetus for existing and becomes (primarily) an aesthetic fetish for the consumer market. 

Google Image Search results for 'skeletonized design' returns 
mostly exotic knives, polymer rifle stocks, and designer watches

Subtract and Simplify

         Subtractive processes in industry are usually the domain of two shop practices: the woodworker's shop and the machinist's shop. In each, a project or product is created through the careful manipulation and cutting of (generally) oversized parts, reducing them down, one operation at a time, until they are perfectly fit to the desired dimensions and use. These actions are reductive, peeling or shaving more and more material away. These pieces may be joined, fastened, or bonded, but it is an assembly of reduced parts, rather than a truly additive process.

A small milling machine cutting HDPE

         Efficiency of form is not necessarily efficiency of action- the subtractive shop practices require a great deal of time, energy, and precision to achieve a quality result. When so much is reduced and laid bare, there is little room to conceal the gap or blemish. Surface quality, fit and finish become critical, and all take time. Similarly, the conceptual framework toward a 'subtractive' aesthetic was long in the making. 

        In the middle to late 20th century, the philosophical Venn diagrams of architects, engineers, and artists began to converge around the concept of  'less  is more' minimalism. For architects like Mies van der Rohe, it meant stripping down the forms of buildings themselves, removing the excesses of ornament and superfluous features. From the conceptual building blocks of the past, he was extracting the most meaningful and essential aspects. 

Untitled (1988-1991) by Donald Judd
(photo: Talmoryair)

       Engineers were developing subtractive systems as well, not as aesthetic statements but as practical and ideological aspirations towards optimally efficient and elegant solutions to mechanical problems. Fueled by emerging synthetic materials and the space race, engineering became focused on boosting performance while reducing weight and cost. 

      Finally, artists subtracted the figure (long a standard of Western art), first to more basic representation, and then completely, allowing geometric forms to speak for themselves, rather than as mouthpieces for allegories or metaphor. Just as in shop practices, sculpture's formal language had become more and more about surface quality, fit, and finish. These developments meant that beyond conceptual commonality, the tools and materials of these distinct fields would become shared, part of a new visual and structural language.