Romain Laval

Department: Man and Well being
Website: romainlaval.com

The Ceramic Blob Factory

What: A fictional scenario that reveals the absurdity of industrial production.

Why: Efficiency was the basic idea behind the Industrial Revolution. It controlled manufacturing processes and materials, time and energy. While efficiency is very practical, the chain of consequences it implies has crushed diversity and reduced life to an endless repetition of the same processes. If everything is identical, Romain Laval believes that we care less.

How: Into his fictional production line, as a parallel reality, Romain introduces inefficiency, randomness and chance. They underline the normality of mistakes, diversity and human error, revealing the absurdity of the industrial process.

“Efficiency is a form of violence”