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Resmelting of steel is by far the largest recycling effort in overall mass terms, an achievement made easier by the ubiquitous availability of the material, by the ease of its separation (magnetic sorting), and by its perfect recyclability: resmelted material retains all physical properties of the original metal.

Vaclav Smil • Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches—phrases like “just-in-time manufacturing” or “total quality control”—but the essence was this:

Amy Wallace • Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Work was more finely divided into individual subassemblies to allow increased subcontracting and to have many different people working on portions of the aircraft simultaneously. Manufacturers adopted new, improved high-accuracy machine tools that could automate work and be operated by unskilled labor.

Brian Potter • How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years

The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.

Places Journal

Metal & plastic laser cutting. Get online quote in seconds.

ponoko.com

Many of us, including Apple, continue to have the dream of “the automated factory.” However, even after spending millions of dollars on automating its production, Apple has always reverted back to use humans instead of robots.

Robin Dechant • Issue #24 - The Future of Manufacturing

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that tur... See more

Toby • Life After Lifestyle

Rather than just describing the process in a blog post, Apple released a video describing the philosophy and process behind the unibody MacBook Pro’s design, featuring interviews with Jony Ive, Apple’s famous design head, and Dan Riccio, the company’s VP of product design, as well as footage of the unibody being precision-crafted from a huge alumin

Pat Flynn • Superfans

Toyota couldn’t afford those luxuries. In fact, during the postwar years, they couldn’t afford much of anything. They had to find ways to turn Toyota into a lean, mean, automaking machine with little margin for error.‡ Kiichirō, Eiji, and Ohno made three important decisions—three concepts that have become staples of successful manufacturing for ove