Blogs have their limits and there are tight limitations on your ability to get your feelings and philosophy out there, if you are limited to 11 or 12 timely news focused posts per day.
The decision to open a store would make a logical sense from a business perspective, it's easy to do especially online and it seems like an obvious extension for people who write about cool design to sell the objects that these cool designers make.
However, given the lack of opportunity to influence on the blog and the rise of making as a phenomenon in the US, they wanted to do something different and create a store dedicated to the act of making.
As they explain..
"Over the past 15 years we've watched and cheered and done our part to help push design to the prominence it enjoyed in that earlier era. With the zealotry of converts we spread the word. And then with similar visceral emotion we watched as culture and commerce and design entwined...
The annotation of the design process and its spread to the board-room
and the business-book aisle for the purpose of improving market
capitalization. The reduction and division of design's complex and
mysterious core into silos of formulaic practice: user-centered design,
sustainable design, "design thinking". Media exaltation of the
designer as author - defining creative work as genius self-expression
and cordoning off the creative act from the public with a velvet rope.
The heart of design - of making things - was simultaneously diminished and aggrandized; made explicit for the business community, moved to the distance for the average person. It is this heart that we wish to gently massage back to a healthy beat. DIY and crafting have done their part to spread the "making meme" out in the general public, and the time is right to see it restored to the practice of design."
This makes sense for many reasons; there's a need to connect back to the fundamentals of design. It seems with CAD systems and Chinese factories, design has become a button-pushing game; far removed from the physicality of objects. This foundational idea to get "making" back on the designer's agenda is a good thing.
But is there more at stake?
Clearly, the value of making and tinkering has been going through something of a resurgence in various parts of culture. This tends to be personal and home-based and we've seen it rise to a large scalable business in the craft world with Etsy, but it's still small. Maybe this is what manufacturing in the US has become; a craft project, but if anyone has serious designs about keeping what manufacturing exists in this country and bringing some scalable manufacture back; it's going to take some kind of infrastructure, skilled workers and a public who's willing to pay a premium for US made. This is going to take more than a store and something like a $200 million global brand Made-in-the USA effort.
Posted by Ed Cotton
