Thanks for your insights, and book recommendations. I will definitely have a look!
Maybe I should have referred to Detroit specifically… anyway you seem to understand my concern, which is proximity.
The way I see it, it could go two ways:
“Western” (I wonder if there’s a better description?) design culture will continue on its increasingly, service and market based path, displacing know-how of physical product development to where ever it is seemingly more profitable. I say seemingly, because I assume proximity does have an impact on the bottom line. But these expenses are much more unpredictable and harder to evaluate.
From a pragmatic point of view, things like quality control become much more complex the further you go. This may not be such a big deal for bigger companies who can have one or more engineers on-site at all times. But for smaller businesses, all the “small things” like travel expenses can quickly mount up to unsustainable numbers. Even still, very simple things like language barriers can lead to tremendous $$$ mistakes.
As Mr-914 said, our knowledge will become more market based. That, in turn, will drive physical product development and product designers to where ever production is happening.
On the other hand, our design disciplines may (and probably will) split even more distinctly.
There will be even bigger demand for sourcing knowledge, and this will become an integral part of a product designers skills. Likewise, product design will become an integral part of sourcing companies skills. Sourcing and product design will blend progressively and these businesses will become very profitable.
Mind you, I have absolutely no experience in how the big world really works. I just believe that good product design will always require production knowledge, which requires intense collaboration, which requires proximity. So will product designers have to choose to pivot to market based design work or move to the other side of the world to practice their skills?
And returning to the Finnish furniture industry. We have not been able to truly innovate anything since the greats like Aalto, Kukkapuro and Tapiovaara to name a few. There’s now a very unhealthy polarisation between designers and makers. Neither one really understands what the others skills are and this has lead to sad, generic work. And this is all happening within 50-mile vicinities.
Aalto got most of the credit of his iconic works, but really they were the result of a very close-knit collaboration with woodworker Otto Korhonen. Same goes for the others. They had a very hands on approach to their work and I believe that skill lead to superior products.