ABSTRACT
It is all too easy to distance ourselves from the effects of our decisions and our actions when design and manufacturing are carried out within a globalized system. When head offices are located in North American or European cities but resources are extracted, processed, formed and assembled ‘somewhere else’, decision makers inevitably lack a full appreciation of the consequences of their actions. Within this system, information becomes filtered down to the essential but abstracted data of production performance, unit costs and profits. A more holistic understanding of the meaning of decisions and their impacts is lacking because there is little direct connection with people and place.
