Imagine you're in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Behind you is
China, below you are thousands of tons of consumer goods destined for
faraway ports, then stores, then maybe a spot beneath a Christmas tree.
You are part of a vast economy that supplies the things we buy—a galaxy
of cities, systems, and people that is largely unacknowledged and rarely
seen. Unless you know where to look.
Liam Young and Kate Davies,
a pair of designers and researchers based in London, know where to
look, and have done just that. As part of their ongoing design research
studio called Unknown Fields Division, they've been focused on parts of the world that even fewer people have ever visited:
Tracing the supply chain of the global economy in reverse, documenting
the complex systems and spaces that deliver electronics and other
products to stores all over the world.
Imagine their route as the reverse of the path your new
smartphone might take on its way to your door. The crew began by
climbing aboard massive cargo ships bound for Chinese ports, then docked
along with thousands of cargo containers. Then on to the massive
wholesale market where international buyers snap up everything from
Christmas decorations and RC planes; then to the factories and worker
dorms themselves, and then deeper into Inner Mongolia, to the villages
where the rare earth elements used to build electronics are mined.
Like macro-scale detectives, they began at the end and traced the
supply chain back to the very beginning, when the circuitry in your
phone was just dust in an Inner Mongolian mine. In doing so, they
documented the vast landscape of the global economy.
"What we're trying to do is talk about this extraordinary,
planetary-scale infrastructural system that we've put in place that most
of the world doesn't know exists," Young tells me over the phone after
having returned from the second of two trips to Asia. "The scale and
production of infrastructure required to deliver the world that we know
is utterly extraordinary, but it's so big and so ubiquitous that it's
kind of become invisible," he adds. "This project is trying to reveal
the systems behind modern living."
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Scores of workers line the continuously moving conveyor belts of a Microwave oven factory in China. Image © Liam Young/Unknown Fields.
4) The Cargo Ships
Since Young and Davies decided to trace the supply chain in reverse,
the last leg of your average gadget's journey was actually their first
leg: The massive cargo ships themselves.
Hitching a ride on some of the world's most advanced commercial
ships was, as Young tells me, mostly just a matter of asking. They
contacted Maersk, the Danish company that is by far the biggest shipping
corporation in the world, to ask that it allow six of their members
aboard Maersk vessels arriving in Yantian, a port in Shenzhen, around
the same time. After he had assured Maersk's reps that the group wasn't
preparing an expose on international shipping, things fell into place
quickly
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