Factories Are Just Rooms

Factories are just rooms 15.33, Friday 3 Jul 2026 Link to this post I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing. Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year. It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers). I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing around, and how it’s neat to learn new techniques that you can combine together. I talked about prototyping and design – and was sure to use the words “prototyping” and “design”. I showed exploratory sketches and what CAD looks like. I handed round various iterations of e-paper screens, and electronics from breadboard to PCB, and various iterations of plastic parts. It’s interesting to see how a plastic enclosure comes apart, and to connect that to what an injection moulding machine is doing. (A lot of the kids are familiar with 3D printers, so I showed a timelapse of a 3D print – it would take a year to print all my clocks! And then a real-time video of injection moulding, and how that would only take a day.) And then photos of factory floors, and here’s the team, and assembly lines and what a page from an assembly procedure looks like, and packaging too. 7 year olds have great questions. Like: how does it not break in the post? Well here’s a vibration machine in action and that’s how we test it. And, look, in this cardboard packaging, here’s a cradle, and this was made by a packaging designer – you could be a packaging designer too if you want. Like: how does the button work? Well you’re right I didn’t pass round the separate button piece, good spot, it’s small and I didn’t want to lose it. So now let’s talk about assembly and about industrial designers… I don’t like those videos of factories that are supposed to inspire awe. You know the ones I mean: you see a thousand products a second whizzing by on 20 parallel belts. You come away saying wow. When they showed manufacturing on kid’s TV when I was growing up, that was what they showed. “Awe” is the opposite of what I want to convey. Except for a very specific types of person, when you show something with the expectation that “awe” is the appropriate response, you are implicitly saying to your audience: you should step back here and appreciate this from a distance. Like looking at a great work of art. Gasp but do not place yourself in the picture. Whereas! I want to re-home manufacturing. I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world. So my message is: sure this is complicated but it’s fine, we can do complicated. Factories are just rooms. The stuff around us isn’t divine - these chairs we’re sitting on, the TV at the front of the classroom, the pots for the plants - all this stuff was invented and figured out and made by people. p.s. you can be one of those people. So when I heard the class was learning about inventing, I offered to go in and show that scrappy dead ends are cool actually (it was amazing to speak with a class that already knows the word “prototyping”) and this is electronics and this is going from sketching to plastic and this is what it means to make a product and to sell it. I deeply feel this mission to normalise getting our hands dirty with the world – when they’re 7 years old, while their brains are still establishing what’s normal. (This is connected with what I was saying about training for collective efficacy.) And I’m just someone’s dad, you know? So if this guy can do it… If you have the opportunity to go into your local school and talk about making things too, please do. You will be rewarded with wonderful curiosity, engagement and questions from the kids. Hopefully one of them one day will look around them, think “someone should do something about that”, remember back, and say - oh that someone can be ME.