Answer: something you should really know, and support.

This post describes a very important socioeconomical phenomenon of our age: DGML, or DG-ML, means “Design Globally, Manufacture Locally”.

DGML is just one implementation of a more general phenomenon called Commons-based Peer Production (CBPP), which, in spite of its awkward sound, is quite easy to exaplain.

CBPP is any production of material or immaterial goods, or services, that can be today carried on by large numbers of people thanks to the Internet.

CBPP consists of collective attempts of communities, which utilise technological capacities to produce solutions to their own problems, and then publicly share them.

The sharing, that creates a Commons, is crucial here. It is the sharing that makes it possible for independent communities, each with limited means, to produce and above all sustain over time, those goods and services.

What makes it possible to share immaterial resources like information, software, and designs, at very low costs is obviously the Internet. Then, the actual creation of goods, or delivery of service, can happen locally, almost independently, in each community.

In the last ten or 15 years, the practices of CBPP have reached another level, thanks to a very important phenomenon: the great reduction of costs of many kinds of digitally controlled manufacturing machines. 3D printers are only one, and perhaps not even the most important category of these machines.

The affordability of such machines has enabled even (very) small local communities scattered around the globe to produce, share and use locally even material goods designed globally, by means of new forms of CBPP.

The most general form of this approach is usually called Cosmo-Localization, or cosmo-local production.

DG-ML, that is Design Global, Manufacture Local, is a form of Cosmo-Localization where local manufacturing also becomes economically substainable for some well defined local community that needs some goods.

Summing up:

• DGML is about local production of small volumes of physical goods, not to maximize profit but to fulfil the actual needs of the local community that either designed those goods, or legally acquired their designs from the Internet
• this makes DGML also much more likely to be environmentally sustainable than globalized mass production, and much less open to any form of exploitation of workers

(This post was drafted in May 2020, but only put online in August, because… my coronavirus reports, of course)

Image sources (and further reading!):

• What is Distributed Manufacturing
• Reimagine, don’t seize, the means of production