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Record W4383197098 · doi:10.1093/jdh/epad018

Follow the Boots: A Case Study of Design and Global Value Chains

2023· article· en· W4383197098 on OpenAlex
Elise Hodson

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Design History · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCrafts, Textile, and Design
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFactory (object-oriented programming)Competition (biology)Production (economics)GlobalizationBusinessValue (mathematics)Product (mathematics)Supply chainProduct designFashion designClothingGlobal value chainMeaning (existential)MarketingIndustrial organizationCommerceEconomic geographyComputer scienceEconomicsGeographyMarket economyMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract As manufacturing has become globally fragmented, so too has the work of design. Complex supply chains conceal sources of creativity and innovation, posing new challenges for researching design history. There is little understanding of how the globalization of manufacturing in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has affected design practice or how design authorship might be identified in mass-produced objects. This case study follows a pair of steel-toed boots named Vanessa from concept through design, development, and production, moving from Canada to Italy, Mexico, and beyond. It maps components, equipment, and expertise, making it possible to trace sources and relationships of design. Analysis reveals how the boots reflect shifts in global trade and the concentration of knowledge and resources in new locations. It also shows how the globalization of production has influenced the role of the product designer who acts as intermediary within transnational networks, combining predesigned components and practices from around the world. The manufacturer, Mellow Walk, has experienced the transition from a regional manufacturing economy to one that is globally integrated. The company was founded in the 1990s when most Canadian footwear factories had closed due to global competition. It is unique as the last fully integrated footwear factory in Ontario, meaning that management, design, production, sales, and shipping happen under one roof. Mellow Walk nevertheless depends on international suppliers and, in this sense, represents many other footwear brands around the world.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.066
Threshold uncertainty score0.492

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.124
GPT teacher head0.265
Teacher spread0.141 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it