(18)--V1_08_Museums博物馆学概论.pdfVIP

8 MuseuMs, ecology, citizenship Toby Miller In the northern summer of 2013, I visited London’s Design Museum with Sara Ayech, a climate and oil campaigner for Greenpeace UK.1 The museum featured an exhibit using Digital Europe’s notion of an ecological backpack to illustrate the minerals and labor that make mobile phones. I took a wee photo (Figure 8.1). But, alongside the valuable attention paid by this exhibit to the environmental impact of mobile telephony (though nothing was said of the millions of people killed, enslaved, and raped in struggles over the conflict minerals that enable these gadg- ets), the museum celebrated what it immodestly called “A New Industrial Revolution” – an extraordinary marvel which is, allegedly, already “Here,” accord- ing to an underground station poster (Figure 8.2).2 The “Revolution” has arrived thanks to three‐dimensional (3‐D) printing, sometimes known as “additive manufacturing.” 3‐D offers “mass customization,” individualizing generic commercial designs to consumer needs through computer‐ aided design and manufacture. This innovation promises to alter factory assembly, the global division of labor, and the printing industry. That’s more alterations than the rag trade could manage! Now, you can not only adjust specifications online for home appliances, artworks, or club apparel, but actually make them yourself, whether as a consumer or a distributor. Hospitals use 3-D to tailor hip replacements to patients’ individual bodies, and dentists to fill particular mouths. Material objects can be created from digital files by 3‐D “printing” slices of molten plastic or powder. The purchase price of one of these printers can be as low as US$650 (Li 2013). But there are negative sides to this development. The printers raise anxieties about counterfeit and contraband products and consumer