Gaku Nakagawa is Great

Illustrator for Monocle and others just kills it for me.

US Manufacturing News

The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article (paywall) today on the disparity between manufacturers’ needs and the skilled labor force available. It points to three effects that have created the trouble:

1. Growth in manufacturing business. Manufacturing has added 14,000 jobs this month and shown growth for the seventh month in a row. Most of my conversations these days have something to do with this fact. Go USA.

2. Retiring skilled labor boomers. The average age of skilled laborers is beginning to surpass 50 years old nationally. There is an undercurrent in industry that is fearful of permanently losing specific skills, particularly using and repairing older machinery. People tend to think that manufacturing has been reduced to programming robots. However a lot of producers rely on non-repetitive productive tasks done by human beings. And some of these tasks require skill and craft, sometimes on machines that are no longer in production. The challenge is twofold here. How do we train enough young people to do these jobs AND who will teach them?

3. US education system. We are not turning out enough strong math and science students. For years there have been reports that US students have trailed our counterparts in the world. Apparently manufacturers are beginning to feel the pain of an educational system where only 5% of degrees are in engineering. There is also an anecdote that guidance counselors would tend to dissuade bright students from vocational paths. A note here: my guidance counselor actually told me that I should think about alternatives to college. Up to now I had mocked that. Now I feel like perhaps she was half right.

Related: I am looking forward to attending Mass Made sponsored by DIGMA in a couple of weeks.

Banjo Maker

My friend Lance made a couple of banjos and I shot them yesterday afternoon. Lovely.

An Afternoon with LX-5

Went on a walk and took Bec’s camera. It is easy to get nice focal length shots, but at high apertures photos look decidedly pedestrian. The camera at default jpeg settings seems to over-saturate a bit and focusing is a challenge. For a point and shoot it snaps quickly, but I think I will stick with my old trusty D80. Note: all of these are straight out the camera.

Built By Baltimore

Central Baltimore and New Work

Thesis is coming into focus and this is the working map of the site. Central Baltimore is going to be my neighborhood for the next couple of months (and beyond). What can we do with so many vacant row houses? So much more to come.

Billykirk Visit

Photo Tunnel

My friend Anne happened to snap me snapping in Baltimore. Thought it was neat-o.

Small Batch Manufacturing in the USA

An article in the Wilson Quarterly makes an argument for the importance of urban manufacturing in the USA. I am getting excited about my thesis for the GSD which is just warming up while my advisor is globetrotting. My argument is around the regeneration of small scale American manufacturing and the way that urban design and architecture can support it. It is less here is what a factory should look like and more here is what the urban typology of this manufacturing could look like. I am headed to NYC this weekend to meet up with a couple of experts in this field. More to come.

Simple Table

Snapped some photos of my friend M. Prado’s crafty work tonight.