Precarious printers : labour, technology & material culture at the NSW Government Printing Office 1959-1989

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.From 1959 to 1989 the NSW Government Printing Office (hereafter ‘the Gov’) was a government-run printing establishment that operated from a centralised factory in Ultimo, Sydney. Over a 30-year period marked by dramatic technological change and political transitions, the Gov was pulled in conflicting directions by traditionalists, unionists, economic rationalists and those somewhere in between. It was also one of the first Australian factories to open printing apprenticeships to women. This combination – technological change, the rising influence of neo-liberal economics and gender-labour tensions – made for an unsettled institution. In mid-1989 the state government abruptly closed down the Gov and 700 people lost their jobs. This thesis operates on two levels: it offers both an historical and a methodological contribution to knowledge. At an historical level Precarious Printers is an exploration of how the Gov’s workers – from labourers to managers – coped with technological, social and political change. This has brought to light many aspects of the Gov’s culture of working life (everyday practices and unofficial stories) and it indicates the important presence of objects, technologies and spaces as they exist in memories of working life. Two central coping practices are identified: building alliances and unofficial creative production. Firstly, the Gov’s employees came to grips with their circumstances by developing alliances with people and/or technologies. This involved staking out territories spatially or by developing their skills. Some workers clung to their skills, traditional tools and collective practices. Others enthusiastically embraced new technologies with an individualistic drive for self-improvement. Secondly, many of the Gov’s employees enacted their own narratives – of resilience, belonging and of industrial decline – through unsanctioned creative practices. This came in the form of photographs, film, pranks and the unofficial production of printed materials (foreign orders). The key theoretical and methodological contribution of this dissertation is a demonstration of how labour history can be effectively drawn together with considerations of material culture. As a case study, the Gov reveals how the politics of work is intertwined with the physical and designed world. This dissertation provides a method for analysing labour, technology and industrial history that retains the voices of the workers and adds a relevant consideration of spaces, objects and embodied experience. Correspondingly, this research draws upon a number of disciplines: labour history, sociology, the history of technology and studies of material culture and design. Primary source materials include oral history, photographs and archives. Rather than simply aestheticising past technologies and industrial spaces, Precarious Printers finds that material culture, technology and spatial dynamics are significant elements in an analysis of working life and in developing an understanding of people’s adaptive responses to technological change and workplace upheaval

The Political Imaginaries of 3D Printing: Prompting Mainstream Awareness of Design and Making

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 3D printing is not only a diverse set of developing technologies, it is also a social phenomenon operating within the political imaginary. The past half-decade has seen a surge of “futuring” activity and widespread public attention devoted to 3D printing, which is typically represented as a harbinger of economic revival and political transformation. This article explores how 3D-printed futures are imagined across a broad political spectrum, by undertaking a multidisciplinary analysis of academic and popular literature. Three influential political imaginaries of 3D printing are identified: the maker-as-entrepreneur; the economic revival of the nation state; and commons-based utopias. In spite of stark contrasts in political alignment, these imagined futures share one important thing: an increasing awareness of design, making, and production. This insertion of design into mainstream discourse is an important development for design history and theory, as it potentially enables an increasing public comprehension of the profound significance of design in the world, in both historical and contemporary terms

In the post-Holden era, we can be a nation of clever designers

https://www.smh.com.au/national/in-the-post-holden-era-we-can-be-a-nation-of-clever-designers-20200220-p542lp.htm

Hidden between Craft and Industry: Engineering Patternmakers' Design Knowledge

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. Craft is currently experiencing an academic and popular revival, as evidenced by increasing interest in 'makers' and artisanal practices, both within and beyond design history. Yet, in this moment of craft's resurgence, some aspects are regularly overlooked. Industrial craft in manufacturing, for instance, is a field ripe for closer analysis. Engineering patternmaking is an industrial craft that remains almost invisible in design history, despite the design-related nature of patternmaking, and its centrality to many industrial manufacturing processes. Drawing on oral histories with Australian patternmakers, this article emphasizes that patternmaking is both a manual and intellectual practice that requires thorough knowledge of drawing, materials, geometry, three-dimensional visuality and manufacturing processes planning. Accordingly, I argue that patternmakers possess and enact a specific type of design knowledge, a form of expertise that has thus far been undervalued in both design and craft histories. Making use of Nigel Cross' influential theorization of 'designerly ways of knowing', this article explores the connections and divergences between design and patternmaking knowledge sets, reminding us that the making of manufactured objects is deeply collaborative across professional and class formations. In doing so, I highlight the significance of industrial craft knowledge in the actualization of design. This example has broader historical implications for how design history frames and values the knowledge, skills and influence of those engaged in industrial production

Making 'foreign orders': Australian print-workers and clandestine creative production in the 1980s

© 2015 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. A 'foreign order' is an Australian industrial colloquialism referring to a practice whereby workers produce objects at work - using factory materials and work time - without authorization. This is an under-explored but global phenomenon with many names, including 'homers', 'side productions', 'government jobs' and la perruque. This article examines the unofficial creative activities of Australian print-workers through a case study of a Sydney printing factory in the 1980s, when the printing industry was rapidly computerizing and manual skills were increasingly seen as redundant. Using oral and archival sources, the article explores how the making of foreign orders became more overt and politicized, as workers sensed their insecurity. The practice of making 'on the side' gave print-workers a degree of agency and the ability to narrativize their own plight. Design history tends to examine 'officially' produced items, potentially leaving out whole swathes of design practice taking place on the factory floor. This study operates within what has been defined as the 'expanded field' of Australian design history, including considerations of the material culture of labour and manufacturing history within the design historian's reach. It also engages with recent calls for an increased awareness of amateur practices and 'unsanctioned knowledge' in design history

Landscape context mediates the relationship between plant functional traits and decomposition

Aims: It has been well demonstrated that several interacting endogenous and exogenous factors influence decomposition. However, teasing apart the direct and indirect effects of these factors to predict decomposition patterns in heterogenous landscapes remains a key challenge. Methods: At 157 locations in a temperate forest, we measured decomposition of a standard substrate (filter paper) over two years, the landscape context in which decomposition took place, and the functional composition of the woody species that contributed leaf litter to the forest floor where litter bags were placed. We tested for direct and indirect effects of landscape context and direct effects of forest functional composition on decay using structural equation modelling. Results: We found that landscape context had direct effects on decay and indirect effects on decay via its influence on the functional composition of the surrounding forest. Forest functional composition also had direct effects on decay, but these effects decreased or disappeared completely over time. Moreover, community weighted mean trait values were better predictors of decay than functional dispersion of leaf traits, and leaf nitrogen content and carbon content were better predictors of decay than leaf dry matter content or leaf toughness. Conclusions: Our results highlight the importance of an integrative approach that examines the direct and indirect effects of multiple factors for understanding and predicting decomposition patterns across heterogenous landscapes