New Ideas CityHello Museum

Adhocracy

Cover Image:

SolarSinter, a printer that takes sun and sand and converts to glass by Markus Kayser

The world of people who make things is in upheaval. In the last two decades, exponential growth in various technologies—from global communications networks to fast, low-cost digital prototyping—have radically transformed everyday life to the point that many speak of a new industrial revolution. If the last revolution was about making perfect objects—millions of them, absolutely identical, produced to exactingly consistent quality standards—this one is about making just one, or a few. Its birthplace is not the factory but the workshop, and its lifeline is the network. In the place of standardized, industrialized perfection, it embraces imperfection as evidence of an emerging force of identity, individuality, and nonlinearity.

As the theater of a fast-moving debate over society’s future, design is today engaged in a struggle between bureaucracy and improvisation, authority, and the irrepressible force of networks, in search of a new language and a new commons. “Adhocracy” argues, through a diverse selection of objects, films, and artifacts, that,rather than the closed product, the maximum expression of design today is in processes, open systems, tools that shape society by enabling self-organization, platforms of collaboration, and decentralized networks of production.