I've been working hard in the last few months to get Humblefacture.com off the ground. Humblefacture is an advocate for and a manifesto of the evolution toward a new way of making things. Its aims are to lower per person energy use, increase economic stability, enhance social equality, encourage environmental resilience, and amplify the spirit of human innovation and problem solving.
Humblefacture does this in a few ways:
1) Create complexity in objects through subtle design methods, not high-energy manufacturing methods.
2) Recognize and preserve the information already contained in raw materials and semi-processed materials
3) Develop and refine appropriate, human scale methods for manufacturing complex things.
4) Take inspiration from nature, but recognize that a purely natural system is not what we are designing for; Humblefacture is not neoludditism.
5) Above all things, embrace humility (in the fact that our designs influence, and are influenced by the world around us) and elegance (in the act of introducing information into matter in order to produce a function) in every design. These seemingly moral or artistic judgments say more about what is wrong with current product development than perhaps any other two words.
Watch the movement build (and add your two cents!!) at Humblefacture.com.
