From the Era of Mass Production to Mass Customization

From the theoretical standpoint of the academics at my school, the passage from an era to another in history is marked by a decisive switch in the mentality and world view, enabled by the development in new techne. According to this definition and in contrary to other theoretical positions, the transition from the Medieval Age to the Modern epoch happened way earlier than 1900s, when the people's conception of the world changes from an external transcendetal viewpoint to an internal humanistic one. Thus the start of modern era refers to the Humanistic Rennaisance Age, marked by the invention of Brunelleschi's dome, and not Corbusier's time when Mass-production and Industrialization became a norm. The Mass-production mecahnism nonetheless became the main defining trait of the Modern ara.

The series of blogs to come attempt to study yet another milestone in history where the Mass-Production mentality is in the process of transforming into the Mass- Customization one, enabled by the arrival of digital technologies.