The Cobbler Algorithm
This piece was originally written for the Microsoft trends conference 2012. I recently referenced when talking to my team about the possibilities for AI, when applied at a human scale, leveraging a collective understanding of craft skills with the many rather than the few.
Although some of this feels archaic, the central thesis stands. Distributed tools of manufacturing change the consumer into the maker. This, once again allows master crafts people to mentor apprentices through new distributed tools. This becomes a way to capture lost skills that usually die when a craft is no longer commercially viable.
Craft ≠ Hobby
Craft = Livelihood
The Context
A growing scarcity of raw materials, with more effective and thoughtful environmental control, and a greater scrutiny on global energy consumption has lead to an increase in the price of centralized production.
Greater access to more sophisticated, scalable tools, increasingly intuitive user interfaces and the proliferation of relevant knowledge has advanced human ability to manufacture while lowering the costs of local production.
All this, in a context where our consumers and users are becoming more aware of the footprint and socio-environmental price of their purchases.
When we face a scarcity of natural resources & an abundance of population, people become the raw material.
We’re beginning to express who we are by what we can do rather than what we can buy. But one of the most unique problems in hand making, is the scaleability of our own hands.
The Opportunity
There are traditionally no economies of scale within the craft business. No scalability, that’s part of its charm. It is hand-made, often time-consuming, deeply passionate and beautifully inefficient. Craftspeople don't want to run big companies. Most see business as something they have to do rather than something that could empower their craft making ability.
Although, think about what you could do with the economies of scale of a 20 person business, or a 93,163 person organization?
Through accessing economies of scale:
A Jeweler would be able to pay a lower cost for gold when buying with other jewelers.
A Mosaic artist could implement a dimensional garden design like Park Guell in under a month.
A glassblower, who just purchased an expensive over sized furnace could offset the cost through renting it out to coworkers.
If craftspeople could access ‘temporary economies of scale’ by forming ‘Limited Duration Companies’, we would enable the group to trade in commodities and services as a single entity, lowering the per unit overhead for all.
For a craftsperson, this small increase in margin would be enough to sustain business. Through leveraging simple tools of the distributed web we give a single craftsperson access to the greater hive-mind. By connecting makers, to materials, to needs, everybody wins.
The Issues
Sadly we created a generation to consume the excesses of mass production. We taught that generation to define themselves by what they buy, not what they do. We taught them that it was better to buy new, than repair old. We taught them that exponential capitalism could provide even when natural resources become drained.
This generation doesn't know how to fix, mend, tinker, patch or make. And, most importantly the necessary skills and crucial understanding pertaining to any pre-existing tools or craft is trapped in the minds and hands of an older generation that doesn't have access to the digital technology that could lead that knowledge being shared or recorded.
We need to overcome ‘The Craft Gap’
To bridge the craft gap, we need to connect our grandparents to our children before it's too late. We need to create intuitive interfaces and utility that provide access to digital technology for those people with craft know-how but without the technological know-how to share it.
We need to provide platforms that share the knowledge held within the minds of older makers and connect them to the hands that are capable of mastering the new tools of craft.
Bridging the Craft Gap implies: that we must begin to preserve old knowledge through new technology.
Towards a solution
I'm not much of a fortune teller, I generally don't know whats happening tomorrow let alone the future. But when I look for trends I like to observe what has happened in past patterns. If you look at how information has progressed and changed over the last decade, a pattern emerges and it's very familiar.
The ‘technology prophets’ have said that trends in craft and technology are pointing towards a new industrial revolution, but I think they could also be pointing to something rather more spectacular. By connecting tools directly to knowledge, and knowledge directly to tools, we can begin to bridge the craft gap. So, what one craftsperson can learn in their lifetime could become the foundation of learning for the next. (We already see this pattern forming in the developer community around platforms like Github.)
I call this principle The Cobbler Algorithm
Pre industrialization we had a local craftsperson to fix or make a shoe. Post industrialization we just purchased a new shoe. In this new industrial revolution it is more likely that we need a programmer to build a ‘cobbler algorithm’ which could analyze a foot and create custom parts or patches which could be locally manufactured and skillfully applied. This is reintermediation through scalable technology.
With the advent of cheap additive manufacturing there will be less need for centralized factories. Less need for building obsolesce into goods that we have. In the dawn of this industrial revolution, the populous can move from consumer to maker/fixer finding new value in existing objects. They can learn a craft through the tool, a distributed hardware upgrade.
The trend that I'm most fascinated with, is the ability to build smart tools which connect to and learn from the preexisting knowledge, and learn from their own context of making. A data patina. An augmented intelligence. A hammer that learns from each nail it hit and each hand that held it.
With distributed factories, centralization needn't define the method of production any more, centralization could become the collective intelligence or ‘pattern’ that can be applied to the tools that are crafting a solution to a local problem
Taking this a step further, products needn't be standardized, by size, by shape or by material. Purchase could just become the foundation for further modification or adaptation. As a consequence, this kind of ‘cottage industry’ would also begin to educate the mass to become consummate purchasers of the well made. Fashion could become a verb rather than a noun.
Craft has always been the application of technology at the scale of the human hand, whether a stone carving tool, a movable type press or a personal computer. Reuniting craft with technology that can learn at the human scale gives you and I the ability to make only what we need, make with others and augment what we have to match what we desire.