Does The Antifactory Need a Factory?

I promise that I will not ride the "anti" wave forever.

But, after I've posted Antidisciplinary on Tuesday, I read more from Joi Ito and his MIT Media Lab. Especially about his suggestion: Don't be a futurist, be a now-ist.
The credo for bottom-up innovation: don't make great plans, just do it.

Lab and factory work

Tuesday was a sunny autumn day and after all that reading I went into a little beer garden nearby, to think a little ... I drank a "Benno", a Trappist beer brewed in the Danube valley at the Engelzell Trappist monastery. The recipe has a speciality: its brewed with honey.

To make and market it, the Trappist monks cooperate with the Brewery Hofstetten that brews craft beers for worldwide markets for years. The head of the Brewery Hofstetten convinced the monks to just do it and to buy the most modern brewing equipment.

This reminded me of how to do lab and factory work simultaneously.

Antifactories

Labs are places for finding a breakthrough, new ways to solve problems and do new things. But with Joi Ito's credo its more: do it everywhere and swiftly. So antifactory is all about non-factory work?

Then Andy Warhol,s  The Factory came to my mind, a meeting place of artists and musicians - in the first view. Warhol collaborated with Lou Reed's "Velvet Underground" and Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger were frequent guests.

An antifactory called "Factory"? No, Velvet's John Cale said
It wasn't called The Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly line for silk screens happened. While one person was making a silk screen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Everyday something new.
And Warhol earned money with the original and prints with alternate colors. But The Factory produced more and Warhol used major parts of the income to finance the lives of Factory friends and resources.

Factories support antifactories

To be honest, we have not seen it immediately. We developed the UnRisk FACTORY (as an automated risk management platform) and UnRisk-Q for individual quant developments. And then we combined them.

It's amazing, how things fit together.

The combination enables the swift creation of tested "originals" and the making and deployment of "prints".