KAREN TINNEY: TOPICS

My three topics are very closely related to one another, each primarily focusing upon manufacturing in the United States and it's impacts on our everyday lives. To begin with, I created a diagram to try to identify the ways in which these entities (designer, manufacturing communities, and consumers) could interact with one another through a product.

Additionally, as I was looking for expert contacts for each topic I found a lot of overlap - most of them could be used in one or more of the categories.

1. Poverty in rural America (unemployment due to less manufacturing): address this problem through a system or a product to connect industries and promote innovation. 

Main concerns: Are there incentives for keeping manufacturing in America? Are we past manufacturing and should be focusing on innovation/technology? What are the unmined sources within these communites - the people's knowledge, materials, cultural perspectives?

Contacts: 

Chilewich: Sandy Chilewich: experience in American production possible insights to the benefits of localized production.

Alliance of American Manufacturing (americanmanufacturing.org): Scott Paul, Executive Director, Varya Chernova Rislove, Researcher: New opportunities, the problems that factories are faced with to stay competitive.

Ponoko (ponoko.com) David ten Have: Co-Founder: What technological innovations can help the system - use as a business model - how does one go about connecting people and industries?

2. By-Products of post-industrial society: create products ingrained with regional history while mining these alternative resources

Main Concerns: How can these resources, which are being left to rust be manipulated into new objects that stand testament to our industrial past and our innovative future? Perhaps these are the materials that are "uniquely American?" Would these new objecst stand as transitional objects in a time shifting from manufacturing to service based economy?

Contacts:

Factory Workers (actual contacts in progress): material experience, what do the workers want to do? what happens after a factory closes?

Build it Green (nignyc.org): Justin Green, Project Director: How do you gain access to abandoned buildings in order to salvage materials? Material opportunities and possibilities.

EPA Brownfield Project (epa.gov/brownfields): Philip H. Vortsatz: Regional Director for the Southwest: What happens to the materials that are gutted from mill renovations, possible partnership?

3. Interior objects as reflection of culture/the definition of American design: address this problem through the creation of an object which reflects consumption and works to reconnect the user and the maker. 

Main Concerns: What does the interior object say about the contemporary American? Does the disposable furniture of IKEA, or the couch manufactured in China speak of our culture of consumption or simply build on the idea that there is nothing "American" about our objects except that we consume them in a capitalistic way? When these objects are not made in America how does that change things - what are the effects on unemployment as well as our understanding of the world? Are we less connected to our objects because we do not know or care about their origins? Is the object less meaningful? 

American Anthropological Association (aaanet.org): How has American culture shaped our views on consumption, what are our personal/emotional ties to artifacts

United States Department of Commerce (commerce.gov): What we buy, what are the biggest imports and exports, where are the holes, where are the opportunities. 

American Craft Council (craftcouncil.org): How to incorporate the hand of the worker. What is people's personal relationships to handmade objects versus manufactured objects?