‘Future Factories’: supportive technologies as creative processes

Envisage a future where you could visit a 'Future Factories' website, which would display a range of products in constant metamorphosis. At any given moment you could pause the animation and view a rotatable, three-dimensional computer model of the product. If you wished, you could then order the design, and the product you had selected would be manufactured automatically, exactly as you had seen it on screen, and delivered directly to you. An original. A one-off. A work of art? The outputs from this practice-based research project consist of a number of inspirational products which have been exhibited internationally. This paper addresses the technical, theoretical and contextual issues raised by the content of the project.