provenance · 2009-09-27 21:05

Last Friday’s This Happened worked well because it let designers explain the thinking around and behind their projects – something not shown when a project’s video get distributed around the Internet. The journey is often the work.

One in particular struck a nerve: Jen-Hui Liao’s Self Portrait Machine. Whilst the end product is quite fun, the wide-ranging discussion that led to it provided more food for thought: who is really in control? the individual, the society, the machine, the system?

Jen-Hui showed the following Youtube clip of Chinese factory workers, as well as photos by Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #16, Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005 by Edward Burtynsky

I’m not going to condemn manufacturing and factories; what I’m interested in is that we’ve come a long way to working out and caring about the provenance of food, but we know or care little for the provenance of all our other goods (apart from maybe making sure it’s not made of something endangered).

We’ve got to the point where major food manufacturers are embracing Fair Trade (the absolute ‘minimum wage’ for agricultural production), but (according to the CIA Factbook) only 4% of people are employed in agriculture, whereas 32% are employed in industry (for China, it’s 43% and 25%).

If you’ve not looked behind the scenes of manufacturing, at first glance, it’s unnerving in scale. A modern mobile phone, as well as being manufactured and assembled itself, is made of many other high technology components, needed in large quantities – often a new factory is also created to produce each part: screens, batteries, memory, speakers, microphones. But factory is a euphemism: it’s a new town of workers, accommodation, and life revolving around the factory.

This has started to happen in other industries, such as clothing, but it seems to have run out of steam, maybe because there really aren’t alternatives presented.

I’d just like some transparency, so I can make a decision about whether I want to purchase a product – not really Fair Trade Electronics (which actually does exist, in a very minor way), but for people to realise what impact there is, in all senses, by purchasing and using products and services.

I feel it will have to happen, as the Internet makes it easier to track and trace provenance from cradle-to-grave: for example, from the shipping label on a pair of trainers I bought, I was able to find the Korean company with a factory in China making the NikeID shoes for Nike. It will also require everyone to understand the realities of production – the factory environments that have all but disappeared from Britain through to the livelihoods such production supports.

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