[huetius]

Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc.

I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely, nor on their own.

My background is in networks, so I tend to think about things from that perspective (e.g., a private U-LTE network for communication with neighbors, mesh nets of sensors to make home food production more manageable and efficient). It’s a very fruitful area for anyone interested in a more communal and family-oriented future.

Obvious difficulties are: Is the efficiency hit one gets from decentralization practically viable, long term? In which cases? How do you get your silicon? Other materials? Are those suppliers going to let you do this? How do you do this in the existing regulatory and political climate? Can this work for the poor? Does it open, unintentionally, new frontiers of technological domination?

All interesting questions; only some have technical solution.

EDIT: Adding also that I am interested in new or revived applications for “low-tech,” if that’s something anybody else knows about and wants to share.

[the_d3f4ult]

I'm a physician and I've thought a lot about this in the context of the US healthcare system. Step foot in a hospital and the first thing you notice is that everything is single-use, thousand-dollar widgets. I've been into the idea of open-source medical hardware and software for a while. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the obscene cost of getting FDA approval for even the simplest medical device makes these types of initiatives a non-starter.

The way the marketplace is organizing, most local hospitals are being purchased and re-organized into large regional state-wide networks. At this scale I wonder if it might become economically feasible for a hospital system (or systems) to invest in getting open-source designs through the approval process and then have an in-house engineering department that could manufacture parts for the regional system.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

At least in OSH for Medical Devices, the limiting factor under current 21CFR regulations would probably be Manufacturing and the associated support operations. Design & Development is tedious but doable in an OSH/OSS fashion, and getting through 510k could probably be solved by people donating skills (and someone else donating cash). Don't quote me, but I don't think that the actual fees that the FDA charges to do a 510-k submission are not particularly high, it's just that the work that goes along with it is burdensome and people want to be paid. In an Open Source approach, this could largely go away as long as someone donates the fees.

That gives you a design that the FDA is happy with.

Now you have to build, distribute, service and support that device and no matter how you slice it, you're looking at substantial costs to comply with 21CFR across all these tasks. So this is where the creativity really has to come in: can we spread those costs across a "community" to make it worthwhile, or will we just end up right back at Square One with single use, $1,000 devices?

I don't think there's a path forward (at least in the US) without change to regulations.

[derbOac]

Some larger hospitals already have this, or had something like this. I know personally of one that had an in-house engineering team and it was slowly dismantled in a process of outsourcing, until the remainder of the team resigned as a group. It caused a certain amount of chaos.

EHR is sort of similar. To me, the roll-out of that was a disaster, and pushed what was in-house in most cases to being managed by EPIC and other EHRs out of the hospital. The mandates were a big mistake in my opinion, as it forced hospitals to scramble to use something being offered by outsiders, instead of collaborating to produce something open-source, or growing EHRs more organically from within the organization.

I personally blame the rise of hostageware in hospital settings partially on this trend.

My broader point is that although I think there's a lot of potential with open source hardware, software, and things like 3D printers, prevailing economic forces are pushing in the opposite direction. Consolidation and mergers, streamlining everything that doesn't contribute to increasingly dense profits as you go up the administrative chain. In this schema, better to outsource everything you can to trim costs. I don't agree with it, as I think it leads to a lot of hidden costs and hidden but lost benefits, but that's the idea.

Unfortunately, the combination of overregulation and profit-driven hierarchical management is creating pressures against in-house, from the bottom up creation of goods and medical services. The talent is there, it's just pushed out from the top.

Sometimes I feel like healthcare and the biomedical area is today driven more by the interests of profiteers than patients/clients/customers.

[wnkrshm]

This immediately made me think of a cyberpunk dystopia where there are shiny, pre-packaged widgets for the elite and open-source medicine for the poor masses. But then I immediately remembered that there may just be no medicine for the masses instead.

Open source tools could be a boon to civilization though, especially in developing countries - one problem is materials though. Some optics projects are really clever, like that visual microscope malaria diagnostic kit with the glass ball lens. But then again, you think: hey, are real microscopes really that unaffordable? I really have to read up on how that was financed and why that road was taken.

[nostrademons]

I've been thinking along similar lines - I'd term it "the rise of the micromarket". There are a bunch of technology trends that I think may be converging long-term to erase the era of mass production and mass market consumer goods.

One is that advances in personalization on the Internet haven't carried through to physical goods. When I want to curate my Facebook or Reddit feed, I can very tightly control the information I consume so it fits my lifestyle perfectly. When I want to buy a piece of furniture or shelf on Amazon, I get stuck in this uncanny valley where there are millions of products available but none is exactly the size, shape, color, and material that I want. Why can't I say "I want a double corner wall shelf, 23" on one side and 29" on the other, 8" deep, filigreed supports, made out of pine and painted to match my walls"?

Another is that manufacturing is increasingly labor-free and computer-controlled anyway. In a factory, there's going to be a bunch of CNC machines, computer-controlled sawmills, maybe some injection molds, 3D-printers for prototyping, pick-n-place machines, etc. Most of these are computer-controlled anyway, with humans only needed to feed & adjust the machines. Could you computer-control a home or neighborhood machine instead, so that people only need to download a blueprint from the Internet or make it themselves? Why do we need such big production runs, if computers can reconfigure the manufacturing without any human labor? Why not have people buy plastic filament, scrap aluminum, scrap stainless steel, OSB or plywood or 2x4s, and then just feed the machine with a pre-built software blueprint?

A third is improved new manufacturing technologies, particularly 3D printing and pick & place machines. It feels like these are still stuck in existing paradigms, trying to fit into the mass-market industrial production system rather than experimenting with novel combinations on their own. For example, what if instead of P&Ping just electronic components on a circuit board, you used it to assemble individual plastic, metal, and wood parts that had previously been 3D-printed, and then 3D-printed joints to hold them in place? Could you use miniaturized CnC lathes to smooth down the surface of a 3D-printed part, which has traditionally been one of the big problems with 3D-printing?

Then there are environmental problems with supply chains being fragile and globalization potentially unwinding. That could provide an extra kick to hyper-localize manufacturing again.

Micro-manufacturing is the real Amazon killer, potentially. I can't see them being displaced in retail now. But if we just stop buying manufactured products and start making them ourselves, all of their advantages in supply chain management, bargaining, product selection, and logistics go away.