A quiet summer evening was spent filling my kitchen with steam and the sweet cereal smell of a boiling batch of beer; an excuse to liquidate 10 ounces of frozen full cone hops straight-from-the-bine, the remainder of last year’s hop crop from the farm.
Backlog Beer, much like it’s namesake is a dry, bitter affair, with hints of brilliant potential.
I spend a lot of time with many of these long, dense, and winding backlogs: lists of items, issues, future work, updates, known and semi-known, that may someday be brought to life into a production build of a given product. They also represent job security in a uncertain global labor market. This little home brew project is a nod to today’s post-industrial workingman and workingwoman who deal in such lists. Those noble, badged employees and contractors in today’s Slack channels and open floor plan trenches operating in similar contemporary digital product design, not unlike past generations in the middle and later decades of the 1900’s.
Today’s digital manufacturing jobs are rising in scope and complexity. As the size of the teams required to design, build, and maintain digital products grow, they are often approached with similar methods and dogma the physical manufacturing economy developed a generation or more ago. It’s often called, with a growing list of sub-genres – “Agile“. Agile has a list of working artifacts and rituals, and the Backlog is a key element. Increasingly however, the factory workers in the United States (as well as in many parts of the world) today are not clocking in to build cars, appliances and consumer goods, but consumer, business, and industiral software. How does beer fit into this idea?
A beautiful and poignant expression of the working class ethos of the 1900’s is the beer can. A quaint and compelling blend of Old and New World aesthetics, this design object packaged a product that was unabashedly made in factories for people who worked in factories. It represented leisure time and disposable income. It was mass produced and prepackaged 12 oz. portions of the American Dream.
If applied today as in earlier eras, what tropes would be used to speak to the new proletariate of the 21st century Digital economy?
Reverence and attention to this genre of design history is growing is a source of delight and reference for me. Putting this medium into a new context for today’s “new collar” worker is interesting to me. A surplus of hops allowed me to spend some time working through this idea of the unchanging nature but radically different subject matter of the working class in today’s economy.
Additional design notes on American beer:
- Beer: A Genuine Collection of Cans, By Dan Becker, and Lance Wilson
- Beer and America
- www.steelcanvas.com
- beercanhistory.com
- A Visual History of the Beer Can