The Democracy of Design

Your lowly and humble correspondent has been sitting on this piece from the Economist for about four and a half months, and realized that it was time to finally write something about it. (Other articles include this one from the NYT.)
In the Economist article, the ever-unnamed journalist discusses the bright and strange future of 3D printing. Having seen one of these clever devices in action at one of the universities here in Brno, it is a fascinating sight (if technology doesn't seem like magic, it's probably obsolete) and even the professors there admit that it's just the beginning of what it might mean for design and manufacturing. We should not particularly be surprised by this. Technology has given us such concepts as print-on-demand publishing as well, so that the investment costs of printing can be greatly reduced, facilitating the spread of niche markets for various publications. And we will continue to find out what options may lie in store for that (assuming people still occasionally want paper books).

In either case, the consensus from both articles is that we seem to be taking our first small steps away from traditional mass-produced industrial design. Where the market will run with this technique is up to the entrepreneurs, but it seems almost inevitable that "mass-customization" will become the norm. One can easily imagine the idea of Ikea having a "home furniture printer" whereby a few basic styles of chair can be displayed, while customers come in with the measurements of a room they would like to create. The sofa frame can be printed to fit any corner of a room in a matter of hours, along with some very tasteful (or tasteless!) plastic or alloy chairs, according to the height and, ahem, width demanded for each family member; fabrics can be calculated and cut accordingly.

What intrigues your writer most about this development is not the possible commercial benefits of mass customization (though they will certainly be numerous and amazing) but the effect we will see on the design of so many of our little plastic objects, and what it might mean for aesthetics. Want more bling or your cell phone, or a different color? Housings for all sorts of household products, from toasters to cell phones, dishes and kitchen goods, all these professionally designed products may one day be limited only by the imagination of the (amateur?) designer. If you desire a vegan black metal kitchen, for example, you would simply buy the "black" granules of plastic required, plug various values into the design software that comes standard with your toaster, and press print.

What would this democracy of design mean for us as a culture? The internet and cable TV have already led to certain splinterings and ever-more-specialized niches for our news and opinions; would we see people customizing their furniture the same way they customize their news? Will we judge our friends based on how good their designs are, or will we give them pre-designed toasters as wedding gifts? (Every married couple must receive at least one toaster at their wedding. It is a rule. I read it somewhere.)

I sincerely doubt that we would see the end of professional design; just because paint is easier for the average person to get now than it was in Michalangelo's day, it does not detract from his abilities, or those of our more modern painters. However, it is also clear that there is probably less consensus on aesthetics now than ever before in the Western world. We will almost certainly be shocked by some of our friends' terrible taste ("Honey, did you see their pink-and-green marbled plastic dishes?!?!") but we will also have more liberty to opt out of some of the more ridiculous design trends.

Perhaps none of this may come to pass, and the majority of us will continue to be content with the factory-made default PC housing, in its drab gray or forgettable silver. But it is also true that 3D printing may make our set of preferences a bit broader, and infuse a little more pluralism into one more aspect of our life. That, of course, is the design of democracy.

Daniel Hannan's observations on Belgium....

are well worth a read.

Short version: Belgium hasn't had a government for a year. And the economy is growing faster than the state. There may be a few correlation/causation issues here (as Hannan himself points out) but all in all, it's not a bad place to be these days.

Ending Medicare, (or Mending It)

This article from Andrew McCarthy is delightful in principle, but I think that I disagree. Here's why.

First off, I'd *love* to end Medicare. McCarthy is absolutely right on that. It's expensive and provides awful service in spite of that fact. And comparing it to a Ponzi scheme is harsh, but not terribly inaccurate. So I suppose my disagreement is more with style than with substance, or maybe more along the lines of what the German Greens talk about when they discuss the "Fundis" and the "Realos" (the fundamentalists and the realists). I think philosophically I'm a Fundi. Frankly, I really don't see a constitutional role for the government here anyway, much less when it's ridiculously wasteful and ineffective. In this respect, the overall irresponsibility of the political class on this is scandalous.

But I think McCarthy misses something when he points out that "'Incremental change,' said Medicare scholar Martha Derthick, 'has less potential for generating conflict than change that involves innovation in principle'" yet he fails to apply that to our side. It's undoubtedly true that if Republicans were to slash Medicare drastically, there would be a great deal of disruption in the health care market. If allowed to work for a couple years, these adjustments, I believe, would eventually even themselves out, and there are certainly things that a more robust plan could do to wean recipients off Medicare and insert them into alternatives. The thing is that they would never be allowed to "work for a couple years" -- Republicans would be absolutely hammered at the polls in subsequent elections, and anything that Democrats would replace it with would resort to the same salami-slicing that got us to this point in the first place. McCarthy's right that it's not courageous, but a few steps in the right direction might at least buy us some time and pave the way for further reforms. Politics sometimes has to be about the art of the possible, and what might be helpful would be someone on the Right offering a truly innovative plan to show just how conservative (insofar as that means "not radical") the Ryan Plan is. The Good Cop-Bad Cap routine is an old standby in politics; it seems like a terrific opportunity to use it here.