Professor Tim Minshall studies how ideas become things. With Your Life is Manufactured, he took that work beyond academia and made the invisible systems around us the story.
Look around the room. Almost everything in it is the endpoint of a manufacturing system most of us will never see.
That invisibility has occupied Tim Minshall for more than two decades.
At Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, his research has explored the connections between innovation, manufacturing, skills and commercialisation – the complicated process through which ideas become products and industries.
But Your Life is Manufactured took that work somewhere different.
Instead of writing primarily for specialists, Minshall turned his attention to the objects people encounter every day and the extraordinary networks behind them: materials, factories, workers, logistics, technologies and accumulated knowledge stretching across continents.
He did not leave manufacturing. He widened the audience for it.
The argument is that understanding where things come from changes the decisions we make about resilience, sustainability, industry and the future.
Once you see the system, it becomes difficult to stop seeing it.
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