china_manufacturing_riot_ap_photo (by dmuren)
Fellow humility advocate Jamais Cascio at the Institute for the Future has written a great article on future economies of resilience. It got us thinking: what makes for resilient making? Resilience means sacrificing some efficiency in order to have reserves and flexibility so that when circumstances change, instead of collapse, a system can sustain itself long enough so that it can change. In modern manufacturing, we see signs of brittleness in factory riots due to economic downturns, and in indicators like the meteoric rise and crash of world cardboard box markets. Hopefully, humblefacturing and other open-source, small-scale manufacturing paradigms will be able to respond more quickly to changing economies, and transition to making other items, or even transition from growing materials to growing food. Whatever the solution, it seems like more makers, more spread out, with more flexibility has to be part of the answer.