Back in the late 1990’s as we began to launch into the Age of Information I wondered if information overload would kick in and shift us towards the Creative Age to help us process, curate, visualize and package all this information in other RIGHT BRAIN formats. And are we not seeing this now (ohhhhh, 14 years later, :-P) with the emergence of DESIGN along with data visualization and gamification crossing over into everything?
Following ‘developing countries’, I then wondered if the Creative Age, along with the rise of the now ’emerging markets’ would shift us back from building for a novelty based virtual world to building for a needs based real world thus resulting in the Age of Micro Manufacturing, where everything would be made to order (locally/regionally) and produced in small volume on a needs basis.
In the U.S. this emerging group of creative-tech inventor types who are the ‘early adopters’ and ‘pioneers’ playing in this micro ecosystem has been affectionately branded ‘Makers’…and damn it, they are so gosh darn special to us and the renaissance of manufacturing in the U.S. that we even gave them their own ‘festival‘!
And maybe in the future we would see the ‘creators’ of these products receive a royalty/licensing fee (for sustainability and intellectual property) every time their product gets resold in the marketplace which would be tracked via an RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tag.
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