Indie Manufacturing

Indie Manufacturing was a research project undertaken by Andy Goodwin and Adrian McEwen as part of the RCA's Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing project.

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Epilogue

The Indie Manufacturing project has now ended. This website is being kept up to provide an archive of the work done and easier access to the mapping dataset.

The last delivery of the project was the final report, laying out what we hoped to discover; how we went about our research; and what we learned. Pages 24 to 49 detail the lifecycle of development of an IoT product. The key lessons and recommendations start at page 50.

Read the final Indie Manufacturing report »

The map of local factories and suppliers is still live and updated automatically from new data as it's added to OpenStreetMap. We wrote up how you can (still!) contribute to it. We also explained how we built the map (and some of the shortcomings we found).

Latest posts

Final Indie Manufacturing Report Published

At the start of 2017, Andy and I finished writing up our research for the Indie Manufacturing project. We’d planned to tidy up the website and publish the report there...

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A Brief Critique of Ship-Bits-Not-Atoms

Prompted by a mixture of thinking about the wider research that the Indie Manufacturing project falls under, the recent Maker Assembly, and yesterday’s celebration of 40 years since the Lucas...

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Fieldnotes for 2016-10-12

To give a flavour of what we're up to, we'll be tweeting and instagramming notes and points of interest as we go. Then each week we'll collect them together and...

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Lessons In Mapping

We’ve already written about why we wanted to map suppliers, factories and making facilities and also covered the way we’re gathering the data and how we’re storing it in Open...

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2016-10-13 Indie Manufacturing Links

A collection of things that we've encountered over the past week that we think might be of interest... The Fundamentals of Hardware Assembly Design | Fictiv - Hardware Guide Some...

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Indie Manufacturing, a Talk at OSHUG

At the 2016 Open Source Hardware Camp, part of the Wuthering Bytes technology festival, Adrian gave a talk about the Indie Manufacturing project. Here are the slides, and notes on...

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Check out the older posts in the archive