Things have been fairly quiet on this blog of late, but that’s not to say things have been quiet elsewhere. Far from it!

Our main focus has been on a research project we’re undertaking with Openlabs from LJMU for the Royal College of Art’s Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing project.

We’ve been documenting our work for that on a dedicated microsite - indie.mcqn.com. It’s looking at how individual makers move to become indie manufacturers, and investigating how much the suppliers, factories, makerspaces, etc. in their local area can help.

As part of that we’ve been interviewing people on the journey from maker to manufacturer and hunting down parts of the local supply chain to seed data to share on a map (and elsewhere).

Even more exciting, given the aims of MCQN Ltd, is that we’ll be putting the research into practice and using our findings to make a real product!

We’ll be testing what we’ve learnt by building actual things at a scale where it doesn’t make sense to just book a couple of days in the DoES Liverpool workshop.

There are two blog posts in particular, over on the #indiemfg blog, about the product side of the project: firstly I sketched out the criteria we use in deciding what products to make, and then looked through some of the product ideas that we could develop. All of which resulted in this new catalogue page going live!