Tag: manufacturing
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The Landscapes of Gadgets
Stating that modern gizmos (in this example, the iPhone) are no longer just dependent on highly integrated and developed systems for their production, but now also depend upon “a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks” for their operation, Rob Holmes’ “mind-boggling update to I, Pencil“* looks at the landscapes of extraction, assembly…
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Business Schools Failing American Manufacturing
America’s deterioration as a leader in the engineering and manufacturing fields can be attributed largely to the failings of the elite business schools, suggests Noam Scheiber, Rhodes Scholar and senior editor at The New Republic. Business school graduates are now educated toward high paid financial services jobs, leading gradually to an “era of management by…
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I, Toaster and The Economies of Production
Doing away with the division of labour and most other economies of production, Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project is an experiment to “build a toaster, from scratch—beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99”. Many have mentioned this already (Jason Kottke, Tyler Cowen on Margin Revolution, Radley…
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Exporting Poor Work Environments
After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…