The UK craft sector isn’t a ‘hipster’ economy. It’s sparking innovation | Rosy Greenlees
There is nothing new in the adage that we are no longer a making economy. It's a theme that has been picked up and echoed in most post-industrial economies over the past decade - just look at the last US presidential campaign. In the UK barely 10% of workers are employed within orthodox manufacturing; a generation ago that figure was well over four times as high. It is folly to believe mass manufacturing in its previous form, and at anything close to its previous scale, can return. But this does not have to be the existential problem it is being framed as.
Last weekend in Manchester, the world's first industrialised city, several hundred makers met at the city's Museum of Science and Industry. They were there to take part in Europe's first craft and innovation conference, a forum for craft professionals, scientists, roboticists, designers and tech professionals to discuss collective innovation and making. This is the real future of manufacturing: an atomised but highly networked society of makers servicing an evolving market where consumers no longer want mass-manufactured goods but products that are bespoke and have that golden element all marketeers now crave - provenance. We are becoming a society of curators where consumers want a relationship with a product and its makers, not simply a transaction. Policymakers still see this trend as relatively peripheral - a micro "hipster" economy. This is a mistake.
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