How can designers make low-cost products without factories?
Factory-based mass production has given us the lowest economic costs for products in history.
But environmental and social costs of this system are enormous.
During graduate school, I experimented with methods, including vaccuum paper molding (shown here) of producing short runs of mass produced objects without expensive tooling.
This process is low cost, uses recycled material, requires low input energy, generates little waste, and can be operated by a single designer.