I've touched on this before, but something deeply important to me about art and, things in general, is the presence of a human touch. Flaws and design choices made about something not to necessarily improve it as a work, but that highlight the fact that this thing passed through human hands at some point. Someone, in some cases more literally than others, touched it.
With the scale of global manufacturing nowadays, a lot of things feel very impersonal. An iPhone is a machine that gets churned out en mass by the hundreds, they're all the same, and that's that. But the very little I've looked into the world of manufacturing and how these sorts of things get made is immensely humbling when you realize the sheer scale of operations needed to make literally anything we own nowadays.
And it's not just nice things. Something I was thinking about the other day is how much work goes into making cheap e-waste. Like... I dunno, a cheap USB power bank, let's say. Someone - even if it's a rebranded white label product - had to sit down and design the thing, have it broken into manufactureable parts, create toolpaths for cnc machines and tools for injection molds, have an assembly line to put all the components together, package it, ship it- All to arrive in a store somewhere and be deemed junk.
I'm not trying to say just because someone put the bare minimum effort into something, that suddenly makes it worth anything - that power bank could be the worst product ever. But the point is, from the bottom of the barrel garbage to the top of the line enterprise products, people touched these things. I feel like that's important to acknowledge. There's something humbling about it.