Mobile Micro-Factory:Exploring Post-Growth Design Practices through Design Fiction

Industrial designers play an important role in fuelling unsustainable consumption by continuously developing new (versions of) technologies that are presented as necessary for a good life. One way of addressing this issue lies in reshaping how designers work. This research explored alternative design practices through a Design Fiction grounded in Post-Growth ideas. Post-Growth groups together research that explores alternatives to the dominant economic growth paradigm by centralizing a pursuit for collective wellbeing within ecological limits. Design Fiction (Bleeker 2009) is a design research approach that uses design propositions combined with fictional narrative to stimulate reflection on possible futures. Rather than presenting solutions, design fictions explore alternative design spaces by posing questions.<br/><br/>The Design Fiction central to this study was a Mobile Micro-Factory that explored what roles designers might have in a post-growth society. Current industrial design processes rely on globalized processes involving mass manufacturing. While able to achieve high efficiencies through economies of scale, this arrangement has several risks such as exploitation of distant workers and ecosystems, and incentives for overproduction that fuel overconsumption (Dubuisson-Quellier 2022). Inspired by Illich’s concept of conviviality and trends towards local repair communities, the Mobile Micro-Factory fiction envisions mainstream production to become ultra-local by offering design and production services at people’s doorstep. The fiction includes a designer on a cargo bike equipped with tools such as a 3D printer, or sewing machine. Users of the service can call upon the Micro-Factory for their immediate needs, such as a broken part or device or an upcoming birthday, and, if available, provide waste materials, such as plastic bottles or pieces of fabric that can be used to produce the design.<br/><br/>Besides reflections on the process of making a Mobile Micro-Factory by the first author – an Industrial Design master student – the Mobile Micro-Factory was exhibited to a general audience in the city centre of Eindhoven, and to Industrial Design students during a student event, each time collecting responses through semi-structured conversations. Moreover, the prototype formed the foundation of a role-play study (Kuijer 2023) in which an alternative design practice was explored through acting out and reflecting on possible scenarios with four Industrial Design master students. In each exploration, inquiries were structured around the roles of designers, users, products, and production in the alternative scenario.<br/><br/>Insights emerging from the study show that this post-growth inspired form of production reshapes users into co-developers, enabling ultimate personalisation. The direct material engagement improves user’s understanding of their products and how they are made, which places the designer and their tools into the role of educator. Direct material engagement, moreover, turns the (abundant) stuff users own into a resource of materials, and the designer into a connector between these resources and local needs. This requires the designer to adopt a different aesthetic in which imperfection and improvisation are integral elements of products. The next step in this research is to envision how these insights could be translated to the training of a next generation of Industrial Designers.