In this third epoch of making, making starts to look familiar to most of us. I initially described Making Without People as: mechanized manufacturing and the assembly line place the means of production into the hands of the enterprise, initiating the concept of "the consumer." As these communities, cultures, and societies continued to advance, another significant shift in the process of making took place—a movement toward mass efficiency. When organizations emerged—the enterprise—they took over most...Read on

The second epoch of making, Making For People, is a continuation from my previous post. I initially described this epoch as: division of labor, specialists emerge to focus on key skills, initiating the marketplace for trade. To expand further, as communities, cultures, and societies became more advanced, the making process experienced a shift. This meant different behaviors and expectations from the makers. Specialists began making things for others, choosing to focus on a single discipline....Read on

I wasn't really paying attention to all this Jay Leno prime-time stuff until I stumbled across a blog post by Brian Stelter on the NYTimes.com website (a version of his post was published in the New York print edition of the Times). Brian's article essentially walks through NBC's reasoning for moving Leno into the 10pm time-slot. The article outlines how the 10pm time-slot is dead because viewers are recording programs on their DVRs at 8pm...Read on

As I mentioned in my previous post, Making By People is the first epoch of making. I described it as: an era with no means of production, every individual must make and procure everything they need to survive. In this first epoch, during the early human cultures and before the emergence of specialization and the division of labor, things were made by the people who used them. The building of a hut, the crafting of...Read on

I've been thinking about how the dialogue between institutions and constituents has changed quite a bit over time and how that relates to the concept of making. I think you can break the participants of making down into three categories (keep in mind that when I refer to things, products, or making, I'm referring to what is made--an artifact, service, system, environment, communication, etc., 'product' doesn't necessarily mean a physical object.): The first type of...Read on

Pete and I were chatting the other morning down in Austin and the conversation led down the path of some research I did back in grad-school in the Fall of 2002. I was working on a short research project on emerging trends in products, technology, and entertainment (with two classmates, Carl DiSalvo and Amy Bergvall). I'll write more about that later, but one of the outcomes of that effort led to my thesis work on...Read on