Building Stuff

I wonder how many people are like me?
Those people with a room full of stuff and buried in there, some random pile full of unfinished business. A half-assed wallet made of duct tape, a partially disassembled ipod they keep meaning to repair or an old craft magazine with plans and diagrams for people who might want to build their own sofa-bed. It embarrasses me to admit, especially coming from a family of artisan types, cabinet makers, electricians and mechanics, the kinds of people that build the stuff all the other people live in. I should be too were it not for the unbridgeable gulf between my hands and my plans. I might dream someday of building my own house, or car, or I-phone app and in my head. In that wonderful magical place I can see all those things waving to me from a warm and fuzzy future that might someday be; a perfect future where I get to unleash this so far untapped potential. So I get sad sometimes when I ponder my next project all the while trying to ignore the pile of unfinished achievements sitting abandoned in the corner. I try hard to forget it and let myself be seduced by some new distraction. I guess that explains my enthusiasm for all these new technologies, all beckoning and inviting me to build and create.
In a roundabout way I guess I am wondering is there a real demand for these technologies in the home. Outside of a dedicated hobbyist market how many people would want a factory in the home, how many homes would need that technology. In a previous post I covered how effective the industrialisation of manufacturing has been to increasing our access to goods and technology has been. It seems a truism, for better or worse, that we will always want more. Something else worth mentioning, one of the many advances we have made as a culture is the seperation of the home from the workplace. For those of us fortunate enough to be born in this particular hemisphere we too easily forget this fundamental change in our lives. Cottage industry, a term we now often take to mean contemporary artisans eaking a romantic living from their crafts, is a historic term predating the eponimous idustrial revolution when cottages and factories were often the same thing. To catch a glimpse of the reality of this, it would make sense to look at the thousands of one room factories in the slums of Mumbai, where workers clean up every night to prepare some space in which to sleep. They do so because it is the only they can earn enough to eat, in a developing nation with very few of the safety nets that protect most citizens of western nations from the true misery of poverty. The welfare state (more on the history of that sometime soon) is a privelege few nations can truly afford. Which brings me back to the point I was making, we benefit hugely from these cheap production centers, it is very likely that most of the cheap goods and consumables originate from these slum factories, sweatshops and maquiladoras (Mexican factories with often harsh employment conditions (relative to european standards) producing goods exclusively for export to the U.S.A. And Europe). Perhaps for the ethical consumer the opportunity to build these items using a liitle machine tucked away in the corner of the utility room might become an attractive proposition. Not that this is without it's own set of ethical problems, and we will discuss those another time.