Future Makespaces and redistributed manufacturing

This paper sets out some of our vision of future makespaces and redistributed manufacture, a pragmatic future vision, that reflects the state of makespaces now, tests ideas and aspirations of education and circular economy, and uses insights from those studies to imagine a future and its implications. The context for this future scoping is the Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacture (FMs RdM) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project at the Royal College of Art. Over two years, we will be hosting symposia, funding feasibility studies and undertaking cross cutting research to understand the potential relationship of makespaces to redistributed manufacture and sustainability. ‘Re-Distributed Manufacturing’, is a term which aims to encapsulate the rapidly changing geographies, organizational structures, value chains and distribution networks associated with new advances in materials sciences, engineering, digital and enabling technologies. It is akin to ‘on shoring’, but recognizes that the future of manufacturing will operate on a variety of scales according to specialism and material flows. We consider that redistributed manufacture is a term that should not apply simply to the inevitable future of business as usual. Our framing of redistributed manufacture, taking advantage of ubiquitous computation and distributed infrastructure has the potential to apply to a different future state of production, one which is desirable not inevitable, which responds to the imperatives of our time and builds a production system fit for humans. As Sloan (2015) emphasises in his recent reflection on the sharing economy: We are alive at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic…to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans? (Sloan 2015

Materials Democracy: An action plan for realising a redistributed materials economy

Human activities within the industrial economy are now the main and most significant drivers of change to the Earth System. These changes, driven by both the scale of human population and the magnifying effects of human technologies “are multiple, complex, interacting, often exponential in rate and globally significant in magnitude” (Steffen et al. 2004: 81). The years since the 1950s “have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind” (Steffen et al. 2004: 131). Over approximately the same period, the use of manufactured materials has increased by 4 to 15 times (Allwood et al. 2012: 7) and correlates with a rapid rise in global GDP. The expansion of the global economy is directly linked to the rise in land, sea and atmospheric pollution, natural habitat loss and the extraction and consumption of resources. Creating a future free of these destructive patterns will require the abandonment of the ‘take, make and throw away’ culture, moving toward a circular economy in which human wants and needs are met by managing resources at their highest utility for the longest time within biological and technical cycles. Without a wholesale recalibration of the global materials economy to factor in both immediate and long-term implications of all material decisions, inclusive of extraction to processing and transference to recapture, aspirations for a 21st-century circular economy will stall. This paper sets out a proposal for the development of an underlying common architecture and set of protocols for the generation, aggregation, and tracking of materials information in ways that are open, interoperable, and incorruptible. As such, materials information is envisioned as an open web of interconnected databases. The authors propose that such a materials information commons could empower stakeholders at all levels to make more effective decisions. For such an infrastructure to be operable and effective, a concerted and coordinated effort across all scales and sectors would need to be incentivised. This paper lays out the overarching context and need for such an undertaking and highlights both the opportunities and challenges therein. It surveys existing sources of materials information in order to expand upon and characterise recommended criteria for key material, technological, and behavioural functionalities. Lastly, this paper poses a number of areas of focus for future research

Designing for active engagement, enabling resilience and fostering environmental change

Contemporary societies are increasingly distancing themselves from nature; driven by rapid urbanisation, biodiversity loss, lack of connection, industrialisation, loss of green space and parental fear… all factors are reducing our care/empathy for nature. Conservation and grass roots reporting highlight nature’s wellbeing, requires impactful citizen led responses. Youth leaders of our time are holding up a mirror to adult humankind, stating ‘our world is on fire’, and demanding action. It is well known that interactions with the natural world provide health benefits, resilience, and prove transformative to our attitude, values and behaviour. The My Naturewatch project facilitates people’s engagement with their local environment, and by doing so, helps its comprehension. Observations of nature help connect, engage, and foster custodians, at a time where growing separation from wildlife necessitates active engagement. The work specifically challenges our understanding of ‘designed engagement(s)’, not as passive activities but as impactful active engagements, open to all. This article proposes criteria encouraging public participation within the natural world. It presents value to NGOs, change makers, design agents, individual agents and funding bodies. Thirty experts from design, ecology, conservation, museology, engagement, rewilding, wildlife and community work, were interviewed, informing ‘design for environmental change through active engagement’. The work identifies design’s role, in creating interventions that better engage people with the surrounding natural world, yielding long-term mutual benefits. The objective fosters active public nature engagement, identifying barriers, opportunities, and pitfalls, leading to nature engaged interaction(s)

Mass Distribution - A conceptual framework for imagining futures of retail

In the context of highly distributed production, material circularity, open design, hyper customisation and low impact products and production SPACE10 and the Exploring Emergent Futures Platform at the Royal College of Art, joined forces to explore a future of retail. The project was titled Mass Distribution, as a counterpoint to mass production and mass consumption, where the distribution of production tools gives rise to the distribution of access, agency, responsibility and management in the design and production of the things a society uses. The project asked designers to explore: what could the future look like when almost anyone could design and make almost anything, anytime and anywhere? How would customers play a role in designing, making and remaking products to their liking? What would retail stores be like if they are no longer places to sell mass produced items but rather new linkages between supply and demand? What would the future look like if things could be made when wanted, close to customers and be low impact? What could new retail experiences be like in a “digital” and “circular” economy? As part of the collaboration, EEF was challenged to develop a conceptual framework to act as a catalyst in imagining futures of retail in the context of highly distributed manufacturing in a circular economy. The framework was developed through dialogue and workshops with EEF students and tutors and influenced by the students individual responses to the overarching context of Mass Distribution. This conceptual framework forms the basis for developing future scenarios and concepts and was tested at SPACE10 in a workshop with IKEA teams and local designers. In December 2016, EEF Design Products students presented original insights and exhibit their personal projects at SPACE10. The SPACE10 community were invited to a special talk called “From customers to collaborators and custodians

Mesoporous tertiary oxides via a novel amphiphilic approach

We report a facile biomimetic sol-gel synthesis using the sponge phase formed by the lipid monoolein as a structure-directing template, resulting in high phase purity, mesoporous dysprosium- and gadolinium titanates. The stability of monoolein in a 1,4-butanediol and water mixture complements the use of a simple sol-gel metal oxide synthesis route. By judicious control of the lipid/solvent concentration, the sponge phase of monoolein can be directly realised in the pyrochlore material, leading to a porous metal oxide network with an average pore diameter of 10 nm

Design dematerialisation: Opportunities through reduction

UN reports state that the 2020 pandemic caused little impact to ‘slow climate change’ as Covid-19 was woefully ‘inadequate at transforming our behaviour’. Given the societal and infrastructural stresses Covid has wrought, coupled with the cataclysmic inter-related ecological warnings, evidenced by a succession of devastating ‘once-in-a-thousand-year events’, the Post-Covid era constitutes a new paradigm, providing unique environmental and social challenges for designers to address. While aspirations for a ‘green recovery’ from the pandemic are yet to materialise as suitably radical policy. Extractive industries and voracious supply chains continue to drive international ecological collapse. Design in all its guises pervasively intervenes materially, culturally, economically and ultimately ecologically. In order to course-correct from a path of ecological collapse, it is imperative that the practices of design are reimagined and overhauled so that designers are able to pursue prospective ecological endeavours (not solely solution driven methods). Design Dematerialisation can be viewed from a degrowth perspective, as an act to remove material things from the world; a shift in focus from static, material things, to dynamic, living experiences. This is a massive pivot from two centuries of cultural and economic norms that encouraged the transformation of the natural world into human commodities and unwanted by-products back into the natural world as pollution. This one-directional mode of worldmaking can be characterised as a straight line, with social and environmental destruction built-in at either end

Open Design: Contributions, Solutions, Processes and Projects

Open design is a catchall term for various on- and offline design and making activities. It can be used to describe a type of design process that allows for (is open to) the participation of anybody (novice or professional) in the collaborative development of something. As well as this, it can mean the distribution and unrestricted use of design blueprints and documentation for the use by others. In this paper, the authors highlight various aspects of open and collaborative design and argue for the use of new terms that address what is open and when. A range of design projects and online platforms that have open attributes are then explored, whereby these terms are applied. In terms of design, the focus is specifically on the design of physical things rather than graphical, software or system design

Glucose transporter (GLUT-4) is targeted to secretory granules in rat atrial cardiomyocytes

The insulin-responsive glucose transporter GLUT-4 is found in muscle and fat cells in the trans-Golgi reticulum (TGR) and in an intracellular tubulovesicular compartment, from where it undergoes insulin-dependent movement to the cell surface. To examine the relationship between these GLUT-4-containing compartments and the regulated secretory pathway we have localized GLUT-4 in atrial cardiomyocytes. This cell type secretes an antihypertensive hormone, referred to as the atrial natriuretic factor (ANF), in response to elevated blood pressure. We show that GLUT-4 is targeted in the atrial cell to the TGR and a tubulo-vesicular compartment, which is morphologically and functionally indistinguishable from the intracellular GLUT-4 compartment found in other types of myocytes and in fat cells, and in addition to the ANF secretory granules. Forming ANF granules are present throughout all Golgi cisternae but only become GLUT-4 positive in the TGR. The inability of cyclohexamide treatment to effect the TGR localization of GLUT-4 indicates that GLUT-4 enters the ANF secretory granules at the TGR via the recycling pathway and not via the biosynthetic pathway. These data suggest that a large proportion of GLUT-4 must recycle via the TGR in insulin-sensitive cells. It will be important to determine if this is the pathway by which the insulin-regulatable tubulo-vesicular compartment is formed

Depletion of RUNX1/ETO in t(8;21) AML cells leads to genome-wide changes in chromatin structure and transcription factor binding

The t(8;21) translocation fuses the DNA-binding domain of the hematopoietic master regulator RUNX1 to the ETO protein. The resultant RUNX1/ETO fusion protein is a leukemia-initiating transcription factor that interferes with RUNX1 function. The result of this interference is a block in differentiation and, finally, the development of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). To obtain insights into RUNX1/ETO-dependant alterations of the epigenetic landscape, we measured genome-wide RUNX1- and RUNX1/ETO-bound regions in t(8;21) cells and assessed to what extent the effects of RUNX1/ETO on the epigenome depend on its continued expression in established leukemic cells. To this end, we determined dynamic alterations of histone acetylation, RNA Polymerase II binding and RUNX1 occupancy in the presence or absence of RUNX1/ETO using a knockdown approach. Combined global assessments of chromatin accessibility and kinetic gene expression data show that RUNX1/ETO controls the expression of important regulators of hematopoietic differentiation and self-renewal. We show that selective removal of RUNX1/ETO leads to a widespread reversal of epigenetic reprogramming and a genome-wide redistribution of RUNX1 binding, resulting in the inhibition of leukemic proliferation and self-renewal, and the induction of differentiation. This demonstrates that RUNX1/ETO represents a pivotal therapeutic target in AML