Susan Mackenzie Andersen

  • Mackenzie Andersen works in the field of product design and handcrafted production. She was raised in a designer-craftsman business in a home. Weston and Brenda Andersen established Andersen Design on the coast of Maine in 1952. The company created a large inventory of slip cast functional forms, wildlife sculptures, original glazes and decorative techniques, made from raw materials sourced in the USA. Andersen Design’s founding mission was to create a handcrafted product affordable to the middle class. Mackenzie’s mission is to reinvent the company as a twenty first century designer craftsmen network, an updated cottage industry, using the Andersen Design brand as a marketing and a common designer-craftsmen community resource. In addition to design and production, Mackenzie is interested in history, philosophy, wealth redistribution, bitcoin, centralization vs complexity theory, and work as a quality of life issue. Part of the ceramic mindset is to understand the world at an interactive molecular level, a perspective that Mackenzie follows through in an independent study of the economic development policy enacted in Maine since 1976, the year Maine became a centralized economy. As with ceramics, Mackenzie analyses the economic development system enacted in Maine as many parts designed to work as a whole.

   



9 Stories by Susan Mackenzie Andersen

The Archaic Life of Fishermen Confronts the Progressives of the Windmill Ecosystem

Quality rural lifestyles threatened by the advancing megalopolis In my hometown of Boothbay, Maine, a consortium of interests, anchored in the public-private state, are...
June 25, 2021 7 min read

What Do Lessons from the Industrial Revolution Have to Tell Us Today?

A historical reversal of direction underway? The nineteenth-century influenced the social-political and economic development of human life on earth in vibrant living color. Not!...
March 22, 2021 5 min read 112

What is the Meaning of “Capitalism” and Other Out-Moded Terms?

The true history of eleventh-century civilization is a source of inspiration for contemporary apocalypse dramas. After five centuries of living in danger and uncertainty, walls...
March 19, 2021 5 min read 156

Lewis Mumford, A Thinker for the Ages Tells a Tale Of Cities Since the Middle Ages

The Medieval Religiously Centered City My Dad often spoke about his admiration for Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 — January 26, 1990) but I...
March 11, 2021 6 min read 208

How I Became an Independent Researcher of The Tangled Net Of Economic Development Funding

Rarely do I find myself in a state of seemingly unattached free-form physical depression of the sort that makes one’s energy lethargic and body...
October 23, 2020 7 min read 155

The Uselessness of Centralized Economic Development and the Hope of UBI

In my home town on the rural coast of Maine, we once had an economic development council, but it was little more than a public-private...
September 11, 2020 13 min read 174

Who Do You Think You Are?

A Voice from the People in Maine’s Pine Tree Zone Debate Who Do you Think You ARE! ? photo by Mackenzie Andersen “Who do...
August 27, 2020 19 min read 153

Yes We Can! The SBIR and STTR Grants for American Small Business

Does economic development rule the people, or serve the people? In the 1980’s when Burton A Weisbrod first published The NonProfit Economy, he wrote that...
August 10, 2020 20 min read 233

I am a Baby Boomer, and this is the story of how my generation let the great wealth divide happen

Featuring The Maine Capital Corporation of 1976 Established in the wake of a newly centralized United States Economy, Legal status disclosure: This is an...
July 13, 2020 27 min read 260

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