{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they\u2019re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/702239854815248384/", "html": "

andmaybegayer:

I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they\u2019re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection moulding wacks me out the most. I was looking at the toy keyboard I bought a while back and it got me thinking about how much of what we consider to be the look of The Modern Era is down to injection moulding.

I hold that injection moulding is one of the pillars of modern society and technology. Can you imagine a world where you couldn\u2019t use injection moulding. It\u2019d look completely foreign. Like looking into an alien world. When you consider it you have to conclude that injection moulding has shaped our culture as much as the development of the camera or the invention of the piano or the creation of glassblowing. If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we\u2019d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture.

Injection moulding is how we get, oh, almost every plastic thing you\u2019ve ever seen. The keys on your keyboard are injection moulded. Your phone case is injection moulded. Unless you\u2019ve got a fancy milled metal laptop like a macbook then your laptop\u2019s chassis is mostly injection moulded plastic. Your lightswitches are injection moulded. Plastic water bottles are injection moulded. Injection moulding is how we can produce extremely similar objects at breakneck pace for almost no money.

Now it\u2019s important to rememeber that injection moulding isn\u2019t cheap, or, well, injection moulding is only cheap for mass production. Every single unique piece of plastic needs a mould, and each mould will cost somewhere around thousands to tens of thousands of dollars EACH, depending on how tight the tolerances are and how complex the geometry is. Look at how many unique plastic pieces there are on that keyboard. Each one represents an investment of like $7000 into making this toy that gets sold for about $20, so there\u2019s no way this would get made unless the company had plans to sell literally hundreds of thousands of these things.

(This mould can spit out one chair every 30 seconds and it probably cost twenty thousand dollars to make)

Once you learn to see injection moulding you can\u2019t unsee it. It\u2019s like learning about kerning, or musical intervals, or disability compliant designs, or the pantone colours, or about how many insulator disks are needed on different voltage power lines. You start to see it everywhere, you realise that everything in your life relies upon our ability to jam plastic through a heated screw and into a mould reliably, hundreds of times per day, all day, every day.

Unless you\u2019re wandering alone in the wilderness (and even then, maybe: check your clothing), look around and see if there\u2019s something injection moulded near you. I can tell you the answer, there definitely is. It\u2019s inescapable.

What would a world without injection moulded parts look like? It\u2019d be weird. Everything we think of as cheap and easy to make is suddenly expensive. Complex curves and slopes like you\u2019d find on a one dollar potato peeler now require hours of work to form. Every budget consumer item would be like those cheap sheet metal PC cases that have drawn blood from everyone who build a PC in them. Everything now has the aesthetics of a Sun 3/280 system:

Heck, even this sheet steel cube has a dozen injection moulded parts visible.

All the chunky plastic housing of the 90\u2032s and 2000\u2032s, all the sleek curves of the 2010\u2032s, all the cheap plastic knick-knacks, the plastic toy horses, the snugly-fitting appliance chassis, the stacking plastic chairs. All these things now cost ten times as much and have to be formed from heavy steel, or milled out of chunks of cast plastic, or replaced with formed sheet metal.

Our culture, artistic sensibilities, and sense of value has been irrevocably shaped by our ability to squeeze liquid plastic into a metal die.

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