Before There Was a Name

Background

The years before this began were spent close enough to the industry to see how it actually worked, and far enough from any decision to change it.

What stood out was not the waste, which everybody already talks about. It was the forgetting. A piece would be made, sold, worn, and then vanish completely from any record — no maker, no owner, no date, nothing to say it had existed at all. The object outlived the memory of it by years.

That seemed like the wrong way round.

The Beginning

There was no launch. There was a notebook, and in the notebook a single question written more times than was reasonable: what would it take for an object to keep its own history?

The first answers were bad. A tag that would be cut off. A card that would be lost in a drawer. A website that would go down and take the record with it.

The useful constraint arrived by elimination rather than insight: whatever held the record had to survive the company that issued it. Everything that failed that test was set aside, and what remained was very small.

Turning Point

The change came from a repair, not a design session.

A piece came back after four years with a request to fix a seam. Nobody could say who had owned it before, when it had been made, or whether it had been repaired already. All of that had happened — it simply had not been written down.

Fixing the seam took an afternoon. Reconstructing the history took three weeks and was still mostly guesswork.

That was the point at which the record stopped being an accessory to the object and became the reason for it.

Lessons Learned

Beginning slowly is not the same as beginning carefully, though the two are easy to confuse from the outside.

What actually mattered was deciding what would never change before deciding what to make. The numbering scheme, the fact that a transfer of ownership adds a line rather than replacing one, the refusal to let a record depend on a server staying online — those were settled first, when they were cheap to settle.

Everything decided after that has been comparatively easy, because there was something to measure it against.