Appreciating How Things Are Made

I have just spent the past two weeks in China watching how things are made on a scale that is almost incomprehensible.

Making things has been an intimate part of human existence, making shelter, tools - and now things you could never imagine.  Who knew we needed a Hello Kitty shaped laser pointer for kitties?  But we did and we make it.

Interestingly in the USA there is an attention being put on the Makers Movement, which draws attention to the craft of how things are made.  When we understand all the details of how to make something, we appreciate it at such a different level than we would if we just bought the finished product.

cut fabric ready to be assembled

More often than not in the USA and Canada, we buy a lot of finished products.  The time to make something from scratch is almost impossible if we look at everything we use in our homes.

Let’s take the shirt you are wearing right now.  If you were going to make your own shirt at your dining room table right now - what would you need?

There are a lot of pieces to a shirt. We need fabric, thread, buttons, and labels, maybe your shirt has a print on it, and maybe it has elastic.  And we need to think where did the material for all of those things come from too?  The plastic in your buttons, the yarn for that fabric - how did it get to be
the color it is?

So why spend time talking about all the details it takes to make something? 

When I watch that shirt in a factory getting made, from receiving the fabric, counting out each button, cutting the fabric, setting it up in the sewing machine, sewing it, adding a pocket, washing it, pressing and then packaging it.

I can’t look at the clothes in my closet the same again.  I saw each part of my shirt, the details and intricacies of each piece and the time it took to build them and the materials that they are made out of and all of a sudden the way I valued my shirt changed.

Seeing the amount of time and care it took, I should know all of this in order to pay the true value of the product.

And the detail of making something also needs to include what is happening on the social and environmental side.  Were those workers paid fairly? Were their working environments safe? Was the water that left the factory treated correctly? That is only to name a few. 

My take away when I am making a purchase - any purchase, from a fork to tissue paper – is ask the questions: “How was this made?”, “What is this made from?, “What could the social or environmental impact be for this product?”, and "how will I value this product?"

Most of the time I am not going to have the answer, but asking the question gets me thinking and talking.  Since everything we buy has an impact and we all have the ability to ask questions and when we learn the answers, we make better decisions.

This is important to making change.