Virtual Design Jams Were a Hit!

We hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend, celebrating Thanksgiving and/or participating in the National Day of Mourning. The time we spent this past weekend reminded us of the deep value of connection within communities, the need to understand history and context while pushing for new ideas, and taking time to reflect on our own work. After weekend of recharging, we are looking to the end of 2020, building momentum and growing programs with an eye towards developing new ideas and projects for 2021 that center racial equity and community economic development through urban manufacturing strategies.

But before the year ends, we’d also like to invite you to our next webinar from our Industry & Inclusion cohort, “Advancing Equity and Inclusion in Manufacturing through Credentialing and Technology” on Tuesday, December 15th from 11am-12:30pmEST. Attendees will hear from LIFT and MxD, two National Manufacturing USA Institutes, as well as Dr. Keenan Grenell, executive director of the Manufacturing Diversity Institute (MDI), and Montez King, executive director of NIMS. Read more and register below.

Looking back at November, UMA hosted our first two virtual Design Jams, one in Detroit in partnership with Design Core Detroit and one in New York City in partnership with the Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Council (MaiiC). Each event brought together nearly 50 participants from design and manufacturing communities to develop new product ideas — all in under three hours! Read more below and see some of the attendees’ work!

We also want to share:

• A new toolkit that UMA developed with our long-standing partner, SFMade, for their Bay Area Urban Manufacturing (BAUM) initiative. We co-authored “What’s Next: Transition strategies for your manufacturing business” to help manufacturers (and the practitioners that serve them) think about the future of their companies through succession planning.
• What We’re Reading: A report about the importance of and opportunity to build stronger regional manufacturing ecosystems, through the lens of the sewn trades.

As always, we want to reinforce our appreciation to our community who, day-in and day-out, is doing the work to build new systems to promote wealth creation, inclusive communities, and racial equity through urban manufacturing.

In partnership,
The UMA TeamNext Industry & Inclusion Webinar

Advancing Equity and Inclusion in Manufacturing Credentialing and Technology
Registration: https://bit.ly/credtechmfg
Tuesday, December 15th, 11:00am-12:30pmEST

Advances in technology, such as automation, 3-D printing, and artificial intelligence are changing the skill requirements for living-wage careers in manufacturing. The good news is that blue-collar jobs in manufacturing can still be in reach for diverse communities without requiring a college degree, but it will mean providing the right education, training, and support for communities.

Join us on Tuesday, December 15th, 11:00am–12:30pmEST for the third installment of our Industry and Inclusion webinar series. Experts and practitioners will come together to explore trends and best practices for ensuring opportunities for all workers, especially historically marginalized workers like people of color and women.

Featuring:

• Dr. Keenan Grenell (I&I advisory board), executive director of the Manufacturing Diversity Institute (MDI), president & CEO of the Grenell Group, LLC
• Montez King (I&I advisory board), executive director of NIMS
• Jacqui Mieksztyn, talent strategist, LIFT (Manufacturing USA; I&I cohort member)
• TBC, MxD (Manufacturing USA; I&I cohort member)
• Moderator: Dr. Ron Williams, assistant professor, Coppin State University

About Industry and Inclusion
Together, The Century Foundation and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance have assembled a cohort of eight leading urban workforce development organizations forging diversity, equity, and inclusion in manufacturing — an effort we’re calling Industry and Inclusion. The cohort includes groups from Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo, Baltimore, and Cleveland, with half serving youth and half serving adults. All the organizations have deep partnerships with industry, and all have a commitment to equity and inclusion. Our cohort members are seizing on seismic changes in technology and manufacturing, and advancing an inclusive future for the production economy.

Registration: https://bit.ly/credtechmfg

UMA’s Virtual Design Jams

UMA and our thought partners have recognized through research and in our communities of practice discussions that there is a disconnect between the design and manufacturing communities. This gap is creating missed opportunities in the “innovation economy” and the promise of employment and economic activity up and down the value chain. In regions across the country there are robust ecosystems of production businesses and designers, but they rarely speak to one another. This is partly because they’re rarely in the same room (virtually or physically).

This is the motivation behind UMA’s Design Jam programs.

Our Jams start conversations and initiate relationships among both emerging and experienced designers, small- to mid-sized makers, and at-scale manufacturers that encourage the exploration of new product possibilities. By working together and grounding ideation and prototyping in the realities of cost, materials, equipment, capabilities, and other constraints, the Design Jam helps manufacturers and designers move new ideas forward faster.

The Design Jam represents a brass-tacks model for what this kind of collaboration can produce: putting industrial designers, engineers, manufacturers, and policymakers in the same space to dream up and actually create solutions to some of our most pressing challenges of the moment. In 2019, UMA hosted Design Jam Cincinnati bringing together about 50 members of the local industrial ecosystem. This year, due to COVID-19 pandemic issues, UMA and partners redesigned the event to explore collaboration in a virtual setting focused on two places.

Design Jam New York City: UMA, MaiiC, and the Pratt Center for Community Development brought together the owners and employees of New York Embroidery Studio and Taxi Cab Products to (virtually) open their facilities, share their manufacturing expertise and insights, and participate in a three-hour design charrette. Design students, design professionals, manufacturing experts, and stakeholders worked together in small teams to develop new product ideas for schools in New York that need new ways to keep students safe and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Solutions ranged from modular dividers that could be used as games and learning materials, to bubbles for students to play inside, to new mask and face shield designs. All proposals leveraged New York Embroidery Studio’s manufacturing capabilities to cut, sew, and embellish fabrics and materials, and Taxi Cab Products’ abilities to cut, form, and assemble polycarbonate and plastic sheeting.

Design Jam Detroit: Design Core Detroit partnered with UMA and the College for Creative Studies to run Design Jam Detroit. Burke Architectural Millwork (BAM) opened their facility as inspiration for the design community. BAM is a woman-owned, custom architectural millwork manufacturer and interior finish contractor based in Metro Detroit. BAM’s technologically-advanced facility is a one-stop shop for all types of wood, metal, plastic, and stone fabrications. Participants developed designs for point of purchase displays for food in hospital settings. With the backdrop of the pandemic in mind, teams created solutions ranging from carts stocked with pre-packaged food and mini cook stands for making food on demand to modular mobile carts that could help deliver food floor by floor.

As always, we’re grateful for our partners who helped make these Virtual Design Jams possible:

New Resources for Manufacturers

The manufacturing sector is facing, now and in the coming decade, major disruptions: economic shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in global supply chains, the retirement of large numbers in the workforce and owners, and the need to invest in new technologies. All of these issues are forcing business owners to think about strategies for dealing with the longevity of their businesses. In places where manufacturers are major employers, the decisions made by individual owners can have lasting impacts on the surrounding community.

The Bay Area Urban Manufacturing Initiative, with research assistance and case studies provided by UMA, created the What’s Next succession planning toolkit to help manufacturing business owners better understand the transition strategies available to them. The toolkit provides definitions of strategies, further resources, and case studies, with interviews of current and previous leaders, to illustrate the process, outcomes, and what to consider when developing a plan that is right for each individual owner.

What We’re Reading

We are consistently inspired by the work taking place at Carolina Textile District and will be highlighting their work around COVID-19 response in an upcoming report ourselves — in the meantime, we’ve been digging into The Maker-Manufacturing Nexus as a Place-Connecting Strategy: Implications for Regions Left Behind, a report by Professors Nichola Lowe and Tara Vinodrai. “The maker movement has been heralded as a place-based strategy to invigorate urban manufacturing — offering the millennial generation access to affordable, high-quality technologies and inclusive marketing platforms through which to design new products and get them into the hands of design-savvy consumers. Yet it also offers significant place-crossing opportunities that have been overlooked, namely, the potential for the production needs of urban-based makers to be a resource for shoring up manufacturing communities beyond the metropolis at growing risk of being left behind. We demonstrate this possibility through an in-depth case study of the Carolina Textile District (CTD), a novel value chain experiment that helps incumbent textile manufacturers in more remote legacy industrial regions connect with and lend support to a new generation of urban-based textile designers and entrepreneurs.” Carolina Textile District is a program of The industrial Commons.