The Post-Industrial Factory

In the post-industrial factory, the separation between mental and manual labour evaporates. Instead of bourgeois ideology, autonomating activity of new knowledge creation will prevail as a new form of a new means of production. The meta-capitalist mode of production will be based on the principle of uniting and learning instead of dividing and ruling a characteristic of a mass production economy. The meta-capitalist enterprise will comprise communities of citizens cooperating to produce goods and services of personal value under the general term Mass Customisation and Personalisation (MCP). In this way, knowledge becomes the catalyst in value creation. Such a community is called a value-adding community. Information technology enables digitisation of products and services under the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In this chapter, an integrated way of thinking, as well as the necessary theory, is presented for developing design methods for lean production of mass customised things. Mass customisation reunites mental to manual work and gives the means of production back to users, so-called, prosumers. In the factory of mass customised products and services, capitalist relations are replaced by new meta-capitalist relations supported by knowledge. Knowledge results from the interaction between the user and the topos which will implement the wish. We illustrate the theory via a case study from the furniture industry.