Made Right Here

As my profile indicates, I come from West Virginia. lately, I've been wandering the web investigating just how practical the idea of everyone having jobs in little cottage industries might be. I;ve been using key word like "cottage industry" (of course), small-scale, micro-manufacturing (which turns out to have two distinct meanings, one having to do with tiny machines).

Imagine my surprise when I came upon a West Virginia program called "Made Right Here". It was like some kind of circle joining. Here I am, a West Virginian, having come all the way to the UK and joined an organization called "Produced in Norfolk", which might as well be translated "Made Right Here".

Then just the other day, I was watching a how is it made program and realized that filling prescriptions for glasses is a possibility for such a small-scale local manufacturing business.

Now I'm wondering to myself, just what do we really need in our daily lives that is better supplied by a huge enterprise? I'm making myself a medieval-style dress, and finding out how personalized the fitting is. I have one pair of boots handmade to fit me, and they feel SO much better than the best fitting mass market shoes. We're going out of our way to buy from local food producers because fresh tastes better (Yes, I know it saves energy and fuels the local economy as well.) There are just tons of things around this place that I would be perfectly happy to have local sources for. And there are just a few, mostly the eletronic ones, that I want a big company backing up the quality of.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm headed with this aside from the further elaboration of my self-designed life idea to include a more locally centered sourcing of all I can, and how that makes it more possible for others to self-design their lives as well.

Selling Self-Defining

We're all human (I think), with limited resources and energy and time. Taking more thought in the choices we make, looking further ahead than next month's bills and further afield than our own families, or our own city, or our own country in considering the consequences of our decisions soon gets complicated. If we tried to apply all this to each and every decision we made, we would tire out in about 10 minutes and discard the whole idea. Even the prospect of choosing which decisions we will consider more deeply seems the kind of task that tires us out in the mere consideration of it.
There are tools to help us. Investment plans that pre-choose ethical companies for us. Organic food offerings and local farmers' markets. Fair trade stores and fair trade goods. Travel companies that attempt to help us leave light footprints. Things like that.
What set me onto this line of thought was an encounter with someone organizing a gift fair with all these considerations in mind but very little consideration for practicalities. Fair trade companies would be featured, but so would local makers, who, by necessity, must charge more for their work and find great difficulty in competing with buy and sell, which, face it, even fair trade is. The fair trade focus and the objective of trying to get people to think about their choices, but a film crew coming from LA, when there is a good population of local aspiring film makers. And a show that ran till midnight, after which, the booth holders would have the tasks of packing up and getting home. Obviously, the organizer had never experienced such a thing from the booth-holder's view. Grand ideas of four separate areas, but only 12 booths signed up.
It's no wonder that a large proportion of the public just throw up their hands and cut back their considerations to family size when faced with all this at once. I'm trying to think of an strategy that makes sense for the individual to implement life changes one-by-one, the ones that are most practical and make the most difference first.
Let the brainstorm begin.

Technorati tags:
self-defined
fair trade
practicality
strategy
consequences
choices
decisions

Just posted this on Drapers Blog

and realized it worked for here as well. It's a description of a future clothing buying trip.

"Considering how short the fashion cycle (the time between when the trend enters the trade and when it enters the shops) is becoming so short these days, and considering the many new ways in which computers can be used to mechanize the design-to-garment process, and also considering the advantages ecologically, maybe the time of bespoke clothing will come again soon. A shop stocks one each of a range of sizes of each garment (or maybe a few more of particularly popular sizes)(how long would it take to produce just that many garments of a design?), the customer comes in, tries on what she likes and finds the appropriate size, steps into a 3-D scan booth so that the pattern for that design can be customized to her body, the order is entered (perhaps with a few detail options the customer can choose), and a few days later, the customer receives the item customized to her specifications. No waste of materials or transportation costs. Less stock space required. It's already being done for jeans and trainers. Why not for the rest?"
self-designed
individualized clothing
bespoke
customized

And now to Technorati this blog

One more thing to learn about blogging. Thanks to an article in the Guardian, I heard about Technorati and want to get my blogs claimed and into their system.

So this post is mainly to try to accomplish that.

We'll see if this works.
Technorati Profile

The Self-Designed Job

Surely a Self-Designed job is one important part of any Self-Designed life.

Suppose you had a Self-Designed job. As a minimum, let's make it a job that assured the minimum wage to start, with prospects of more depending entirely on your performance.

What else would make it Self-Designed?

How about total freedom in the arrangment of the hours you put into that job. You can work a steady schedule of....let's say 30+ hours per week, on average, averaged over a 10-year career span. Why a 10-year career span? I read somewhere that the average person has five different careers in their life, and I'm assuming they work, more or less, from the age of 20 until 70. (Given a Self-Designed job, you might well keep working longer.) If you choose to go on to your next career earlier than 10 years, you must first make up any shortage of hours. there's no maximum set on how many hours you can work in a week. That's up to you. And actually, probably all our needs and wants could be well-provided for if a lot of paper-pushing jobs were eliminated and we all worked just 20 hours per week.

Now, what do you do? It has really not been that long that people have been doing jobs as narrowly defined as they are today, has it? Up until the industrial revolution, a very large proportion of us had to be farmers, and there's a lot of variety in a farmer's work, particularly the work of a diversified farmer, one who grows both crops and animals. As for the rest of us, another large proportion kept the home going, raising kids, cooking, cleaning. And another large proportion were makers of one sort or another. Hardly anybody had a desk-type job.

But the industial revolution did, after all, happen. There is, however, a way to get around it. You may have already heard of the concept of a "Portfolio career". That's when you set out to equip yourself with a whole set of skills with which to go about earning a living, and you use all of them at once or at least often enough to stay current. You do some of this and some of that, maybe more of this one week and more of that the next, maybe more of this one day and more of that the next. The down side, of course, is the benefits that employers offer in order to induce you to sign up for a full work week doing just one kind of work. Is it worth it?

One more aspect, of course, is doing a job you enjoy doing. And the big question there is, if we all do that, do all the jobs that really need doing get done, and is there enough market for the jobs that people like doing? More on that in another posting.

And as usual, I hope that my readers, assuming I have any (I need to figure out how to add my Statcounter code to the code of my blogsites), will comment and discuss.

What I Mean By This

I have been talking to and reading the posts of folks who try to avoid main stream consumerism on a number of discussion sites and having my own posts read. It seems to me that there is considerable dissatisfaction with the homogenization of modern life. We love the small shops with individual character. When we travel, we don't want to see the same things we could see in the center of our own town. And when we stay home, we yearn, at least a bit, for the old-style village life in which you patronized your neighbors for the goods you needed, and they, in turn, patronized you. We yearn for the kinds of work that is more than paper pushing, that pays us back over and over again as we we see the product of our work used.

But how are we supposed to manage this, especially at the same time as:

We want to save money. Maybe we don't mind at all if our our basic undies, or our toothpaste, or our camera (to throw out a few examples) are made in factories on the other side of the world and are like every body elses. We just want the best price for decent quality.

We want universal immediate communication of a variety of types. Can we have that and not have our various cultures become more and more homogenized?

This is my starting point. What can I possibly do to foster life and work customization for myself and others?

In the last week, I have received several positive comments on my writing on my website and in discussions. I've intended to someday do some serious writing since I first learned to read. And I have published a few bits here and there, even been paid for some of them. At 55, if I'm going to ever do it, now is the time. I've chosen this as my specialization area.

I hope readers will suggest sites and local shops for those of us with such interests to look at and review, ideas for how such ideas might be spread, guerilla marketing ideas. I'm open to all kinds of things. But I am not open to spam or especially to advertising from mass marketeers. Not on this blog.

So, here we go.