MOME: The Museum of Memetic Engineering

The word 'shop' originated as an abbreviation of work'shop' - a small area at the front of an establishment that both manufactured and sold products from a single location. Over time mass production has separated ‘making' from ‘selling' and mass consumption of generic products has become the norm.

Recent advances in computer aided manufacturing technologies have compressed the design to production cycle and are placing the tools of manufacturing within easy reach of the consumer.

Alongside this object oriented software is digitising the design process, codifying plugin components that can interact parametrically to create increasingly complex ‘generative' forms.

MOME is a hypothetical project that predicts the outcome of this shift from ‘design’ to ‘evolution’.

In simple terms consumers visit the building to design and instantly manufacture their own products - a move from mass-consumption to mass-customisation. However, behind this, a process of natural selection is occurring in the digital world.

Design becomes an ecosystem that evolves through the consumer's selection criteria with replicable units of design information (memes) interacting and competing to become physical products (phemotypes).