On LiveWork
The process of writing business plans, “about us” pages, and
“elevator pitches” is all a process of distillation. Until now I have simply been throwing
ingredients into the large pot that will someday become LiveWork Studios,
turning up the heat, and occasionally stirring.
I’ve been trying to engage as
many people as possible in discussion about the focus and structure of this
enterprise, but I always sense a bit of a sideways glance coming back at
me. I know that my thoughts and ideas
sound a little unfocused and bizarre.
This has been one of the few times in my life that I have found myself
at a loss for words. I can “feel” what
it is that I want this place to be, but it’s a synthesis of so many disparate
ideas and influences that my attempts to describe it just sound insane. I’m like the music critic writing about a
band that’s un-classifiable. The good news, I think, is that my inability to
find the right words stems from the fact that this IS an entirely new enterprise.
I don’t want to have to resort to a recitation of more familiar business
models in order to get my point across. “It’s
like IKEA and Etsy built their own Design Within Reach by downloading SketchUp
plans from Wikipedia.” So maybe the best
approach for now is simply to delineate a few key concepts and to expand on
them as we go along. We’ll start with
the “big ones” and work our way down to the specifics.
Democratic
de·moc·ra·tize/diˈmäkrəˌtīz/
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Verb:
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If it hadn’t already been (I think wrongly) attributed to
the Target Corporation, I would just go with the mantra “democratize design”. I like this mantra not in the sense that it
was meant for use by Target as a substitute for “design for the masses”, but in
the double entendre created by the first definition of the word “democratize”. It’s not just design that needs to be “democratized”
in this sense, but the entire workplace centered on this or any other type of manual
production. “Design for the masses by guys who wear
glasses” has a nice ring to it too.
There has lately been a lot of talk about the rise of direct
digital manufacturing (DDM) and its potential to lead us into the next
industrial revolution. As techniques for mass customization and manufacture-on-demand
become more prevalent, we are poised to enter an entirely new phase of human
development. The sci-fi writers and
business boosters see this as the American worker’s chance to come out on top once
again, but few of them address the inherent obstacles created by our present economic
system.
Efficiency is what DDM is all about. The ability to move rapidly back-and-forth between
the phases of design and production makes the DDM process uniquely scalable and
agile. The ease of automation brought
about by machines such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers allows
manufacturers to respond quickly to changes in demand, materials, and
design. All of this bodes well for
owners and entrepreneurs, but it does very little for the average worker. The idea that the current vast expanses of
unemployed Americans will be able to transition easily into new roles as
designer/builders is as far-fetched as hoping the entire high school basketball
team will end up playing for the NBA.
This problem, to me, is what makes the cooperative model of
organization increasingly attractive. Workers cooperatives value innovation and
efficiency as much or more than simple production. In the old corporate model of production,
increased efficiency ultimately only benefits management and is in fact often
detrimental to the rank-and-file.
Witness the current unemployment crisis.
Worker productivity is at an all-time high and yet there are fewer and
fewer jobs available for this most productive of American workforces. How is it that after 200,000 years of human
evolution the average American still works well more than forty hours a week?
The constant boom-and-bust cycle of our current economic
model functions as a simple ratcheting mechanism that sheds jobs and extracts
wealth as productivity increases. With
each contraction in the job market, employers get to see just how few employees
it takes for them to get by, and the efficiency increases realized throughout
the boom years become immediately apparent.
When hiring begins again there are never as many jobs as there were
before. And why would there be? Even the most altruistic of employers is not
going to hire unnecessary workers just to make a dent in the unemployment
numbers.
This is why we need to work for ourselves.
Open Source
Another important aspect of design’s “democratization” (in
its second definition) has to do with the way in which it is distributed to the
masses. Simply making something
inexpensive (or inexspensive-ly) does not make its ownership possible
for all or even most people. People do
not truly own that which they cannot access, understand, maintain, modify,
repair, and reproduce on their own terms.
The open-source model has had great success in the software world and it
is now beginning to gain some traction in the world of manufacturing, sometimes
under the term “open design”. There have
been plenty of articles and opinions written about the failure of the open-source
model, but these all seem to relate to traditional top-down, proprietary
methods of production and marketing. The
workers cooperative, however, is perfectly poised to capitalize (poor word choice as Boots Riley would say) on open
source’s unique set of attributes.
Being a small producer of physical objects, our reach into
the world at large is necessarily limited, but having our designs open and
available to all increases our brand’s exposure and identity at very little
cost to us. In fact, the process of
documentation necessary to present plans, bills of materials, and assembly
instructions through the web or other means can only serve to refine our
designs as well as our production methods.
The dissemination of these designs and methods through workshops, text,
the internet, and other media is vital to the mission of the organization and
to the mission of cooperatives in general.
In many ways, this ethic can be summed up in the old med school mantra
of “see one, do one, teach one”. Nothing
helps us to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of our own methods more
quickly than having to teach them to someone else.
Project Based
The work that we engage in as a cooperative needs to have a
well defined scope. We are not (or we should not be) in the business of
mass-producing a handful of designs over the long term. Our strength lies in our ability to adapt to
changes in market forces through efficient usage of the technologies at our
disposal. Each project undertaken (or “sanctioned”)
by the cooperative must be vetted for the commitments necessary for its
successful completion. These include but
are not limited to: projected time
frame, labor hours and skill levels, shop space, materials, budget, marketing,
and distribution. In a sense, each
potential project should be presented for the member’s consideration with its
own mini business plan. Part of this
plan should describe the “narrative arc” of the project with a clear beginning,
middle, and end. The question of how we
get it out of the shop and move on to the next project is in some ways just as
important as how a project begins. The
members will determine a maximum workflow for the space based on project size
and scope, and projects will be scheduled to maximize the available space
without creating overloads and conflicts.
Equitable
Members will participate equitably in the profits (or losses)
of the cooperative through an as-yet-to-be-determined combination of cash and
labor. “Patronage” will be distributed
based on a combination of project profitability, hours worked, skill level, and
authorship stake. Members may also
choose to buy into “preferred stock” or have it awarded to them based on other
equitable contributions such as materials and equipment donations.
