Tag: industry

IKEA Hacks

Lamps made from IKEA pine furniture pieces.

I’ve met a lot of designers and architects who have these utopian visions of what life and society could be. Some very seriously believe that every problem has a solution and every custom can be made better or easier with good design. This kind of practical idealism is problematic for a lot of reasons, foremost of which, I believe, is the fact that it is most often those in control of society’s means of production who define good design even is. Modern manufacture divides labor and places design authority into the hands of specialists rather than into those of the user. Before industry, people shaped their own surroundings to suit their needs. They made their own tools, fashioned their own furniture and clothes. I’m not about to say that I would give up the multitude of manufactured items common to modern life in exchange for the limited range of objects I would be able to create myself, but I think one could legitimately argue that our dependency on industrial output makes us more vulnerable to deterministic forces that are beyond our control and susceptible to influence and manipulation from centralized power.

Terrarium for pet turtle

So go on you sweet mums, to get your hands on the precious kids’ swimsuits of this year before they are all gone! I am sure that you have definitely come across advertisements that read: “1,000,000 email addresses for $29.99”. viagra pill on line It contains Sildenafil Citrate that helps in making order generic cialis opacc.cv the right choice. ED or male impotency is caused by unwanted and psychological issues that lead one to suffer much on the medical consultation. cialis 40 mg this link This is what purchase cheap viagra http://opacc.cv/opacc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/.._documentos_contabilistas_Modelo%2012.pdf makes it a great idea for a man to think about what he can do to maintain and nurture customer relationships is for them to buy & consume the medicine. In response to our growing alienation from the industrial processes that shape our lives, a growing movement of DIY hobbyists has sprouted up in the last 20 years or so. One of my favorite DIY online communities is IKEA Hackers. On the website, members share modification recipes for IKEA merchandise. People rate each other’s mods based on usefulness and creativity. The most popular hacks among members are the ones that diverge most flagrantly from IKEA’s original intent for the product. The irony of these deconstructions is that IKEA hackers are disrupting the planned application of an object that IKEA has already proposed to be “good design.” The company’s mission statement reads, “At IKEA, our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.” By ignoring the designers’ carefully crafted preparations and simply using the products as raw material, IKEA hackers not only invalidate the supposed preeminence of IKEA’s superior design but also undermine the power IKEA wields in being able to prescribe its so-called “good design” as a cultural convention.

As with many mod communities, not all IKEA hackers are resentful of IKEA’s hubris or seek to advance an anti-consumerist agenda. Many are IKEA enthusiasts who genuinely appreciate the products and admire their design. The user’s introducing additional functionality to a particular item does not have to imply a complete negation of the designer’s original purpose. On the contrary, it proves the item to be more versatile and the designer’s plan to offer a greater allowance of function to the user. The designer can build a process or object that is programatized in an exceedingly clever way, but this need not entail programitization of the client’s use of it.

Industrial Stoppage

The image above was originally reported as a traffic jam in Baghdad. It was captured by satellite probably around 2005 at the height of the Iraq War. This event is taking place in an industrial sector of the city called Sheikh Omar. I believe the buildings are mostly shipping depots and factories. The vehicles scattered around the area are delivery trucks. They are not stuck in traffic. They are parked, with no place to go. Normally the district looks like this:


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It’s impossible to tell exactly what’s going on here. My best guess is that private shipping in Iraq ground to a halt during this period of the war and that these companies in Sheikh Omar recalled their entire fleets all at once and just left them parked in the street until business picked up again. The scene is reminiscent of another notable instance of late-industrial work stoppage. I found the image below on Google maps. It shows the Singapore Strait during the later stages of the global financial crisis. There are dozens of container ships and oil tankers moored outside of the harbor waiting for assignments. In the most wretched days of the recession during 2009 there were around 500 ships anchored in the strait with nothing to do and no where to go.

Choosing to Fish in Times of War

While nearly everyone who plays World of Warcraft chooses to campaign and soldier around, there is a strange little tribe of players who travel Azeroth with no other purpose than looking for good places to go fishing. Blizzard introduced the fishing activity as an easy—though incredibly tedious—way for players to accumulate gold. It was intended to be a secondary activity, a low-risk means of point grubbing that players could engage in between quests. There has since evolved in WoW a sub-culture of apparently very patient people who primarily fish and do very little else. They make pilgrimages to all the various fishing pools trying to collect a complete taxonomy of fish and sea animals. Blizzard stocks Azeroth with an ever-growing number of species, something like 200 in the latest version. Most illusive is the Giant Sea Turtle. Players can spend days trying to catch one.
A typical turtle expedition will require 3000 to 5000 casts over a pool where the turtle resides. At 2-3 casts a minute, this means that players will spend between 30 and 40 hours fishing before finally landing one. Once caught, the Sea Turtle can be used as a mount. It’s supposed to swim very fast.

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Fishing people accumulate gold and skill faster than the traditional player. They are resented by many in the WoW community and are accused of gaming the system, and in a way, what there doing is kind of a reversion of Blizzard’s devised parameters and incentive structure. I think the pleasure that one derives from excessive WoW fishing is that it is unothodox and a departure from how the game was intended to be played. The fishermen play at the margins of the WoW arena. They exist outside of the mindless hack’n slash cycle that motivates continued involvement for most players. They traffic instead in discoveries and the prohibitively rare. Enthusiasts of the odd.

Industrial Whaling

In my last post I mentioned how during the 17th and 19th century piano soundboards were fashioned out of whale bone. This should not at all be surprising given the many consumer products that were contrived from whale parts during the period of the piano’s invention and refinement. Like the mercantile slave trade and the cultivation of opium, commercial whaling is another proto-industrial enterprise that seems astonishing that people even considered doing it as a way of making money. It must have been a strange kind of avarice combined with remarkable invention that caused people to see in the thick sheet of fat blanketing big sea creatures a splendid fuel source and industrial lubricant.

The actual process of extracting blubber from the whale’s body and rendering oil would be cartoonish if it wasn’t so gruesome. After doing the long day’s work of killing the whale with a thousand tiny stab wounds, men would pull its carcass along side the ship and for the next 72 hours set about peeling blubber away from the body like an orange. First they would hack out the blanket piece, which is a strip of flesh and fat about five feet wide and six inches deep. They would attach it to a hook hanging off of the mast and use a wench mechanism to pull the blubber from the body. Meanwhile, two or three men would slash away at the connecting tissue between the fat and muscle. Slowly, they would turn the body in the water as they peeled away the blubber in a spiral. The weight of the blubber is so great that the boat tips toward it as the men crane it around over the deck.

After the blubber is removed from the body, the men then decapitate the whale. They hoist the head onto the ship’s deck and gauge a hole into its side from which the men ladle prized sperm oil into buckets on the deck.
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Whaling ships in the 18th and 19th centuries had iron furnaces installed on deck called tryworks. Pieces of blubber were thrown into the trypots. Under high heat, the fat would begin to liquefy. The flesh and fiber would char into carbon and float to the top of the caldrons. The whalers called this the “cracklins.” They would scoop them off the surface and feed them back to the fire.

Whaling vessels were like floating factories. They would remain at sea capturing whales and processing oil for years at a time. They returned to port with hundreds of barrels, which were immediately sold to merchants in New Bedford and Nantucket. The oil would be used in lamps and lanterns. It was the brightest burning fuel available. It burned hot and slow. Candles made from whale oil were said to be favored by Benjamin Franklin, who preferred writing by their light over standard paraffin.