Mass Production on a Human Scale

Seeing the People in the Sea of People

Large scale production can be daunting. On my first trip to Asia in 1997, the lead engineer in Indonesia took me to the rafters of the kids soccer shoe factory to give me a sense of what was really happening after I drew my sketch. Eddy pointed down to the 2000 people that were cutting, stitching and gluing together thousands of shoes per day. The news talked about the poor facilities and treatment, but the spectacle I witnessed from a bird’s eye was far from that brutal narrative.

The factory resembled the Ohio shops I toured in high school with uniforms intertwining between stations in a coordinated effort to turn a designer’s drawings into a customer’s footwear. The only visible differences between the Hasi Footwear Group outside of Jakarta and the Delco Moraine Plant outside of Dayton were the product, the people and the scale.

Especially the scale.

In Asia the scale is always daunting. A combination of efficiency and ego lead the companies and governments to develop oversized everything in ways that westerners find overwhelming. Americans see a loss of humanity in a visual of thousands of people. In Asia they see strength and harmony.

And with that unity comes a powerful tool that a designer must carry with…