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Design by Web: Everyone an Alessi

In the world of digital design and fabrication there is an interresting development going on. One that has to do with the democratisation of the design and the fabrication process: It is becomming an every body thing -a mass and popular culture thing. Marx would have loved it: the means of design and production back in the hands of the workers at last.

This development is simular to earlier movements as Painting by Number in the 1950s and the famous Bob Ross painting courses on TV in the 1980s. Now at the beginning of the 21 century a third movement is on its way. One that has to do with the democatisation of design and fabrication. So every body is becomming a desinger and a producer by the Web.

But in order to be so the tools must be verry simpel as you can see at the webtools of mass customization websites and webtools that offer you the posibility to design your own product followed by ordering a 3D print or lasercutted version bij post. This must be the case because most people are not educated as designers and engineers. So the tools must be almost stupid and give the user not to much design freedom. See Ponoko, Shapeways, Studio Ludens, Spore, some Mass Customization etc. The “but” is however that, what we see in the end, is a whole new range of smart creative tools that out smart creative people. 

Some Earlier Sentiments

The new Leisure

The decade of the 1950s was one of prosperity. Rising incomes and shorter workweeks gave Americans more leisure and more money to spend. Business was happy to supply this market with leisure-time products-from television sets to barbecue grills to paint-by-number kits. A new mass culture based on consumerism took shape. Writing in Life magazine in the late 1950s, cultural critic Russell Lynes set out to describe the popular pastimes of the new leisure. He observed that the usual markers of class-education, wealth, and breeding-no longer applied. The one thing that mattered was something that everyone had. That something, Lynes explained, was free time. In postwar America, class had become a matter of how one spent his or her free time.

Source: American History

Paint by Number

The simulation of creative experience was a key selling point for paint by number. In this trade-show demonstration, the exhibitor emphasized the point with this believe it or not notice: The lady painting this picture is not a painter. Among its harshest critics, the hobby seemed less a simulation than a violation of art, an attack on the last vestige of personal expression in an increasingly impersonal consumer society.

Paint by number (or painting by numbers) describes kits having a board on which light blue lines indicate areas to paint, each area having a number and a corresponding numbered paint to use. The kits were invented in 1950 by Dan Robbins who was employed by the Palmer Paint Company. The owner, Max S. Kline, asked Robbins for an idea for how to sell more paint. Robbins remembered being taught in high school that Leonardo da Vinci gave his assistants canvasses with numbered sections to paint. From this Robbins developed the kits.

In 1951 Palmer Paint introduced the Craft Master brand of paint-by-number kits. In three years they sold over 12 million kits. This popularity spawned many other companies produce their own versions of paint by number kits. The Craft Master paint-kit box tops proclaimed, Every man a Rembrandt.

Source: Wikipedia

The Joy of Painting 

As millions around the world discovered in the 1980s, you too can learn to paint realistic landscapes in only a short time even if you have never painted before. The Bob Ross Wet-on-Wet Technique leads you, step-by-step, into the wonderful world of art. Find great and almost instant satisfaction in this expressive method of painting.

The public arguably knows Ross best as the host of the public television series The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1995 and still appears in reruns in many broadcast areas. During each half-hour segment, Ross would instruct viewers in the art of oil painting using a quick-study technique that kept colors to a minimum and broke paintings down into simple steps that anyone could follow.

Ross later founded his own successful line of art supplies and how-to books, and also offered painting classes taught by instructors trained in the Bob Ross method. In a 1990 interview, Ross mentioned that all his programs were donated free of charge to the Public Broadcastig Station (PBS) and that his earnings came instead from sales of his 20 books and 100 videotapes (the total to that date), as well as profits from some 150 Bob Ross-trained teachers and a line of art materials sold through a national supplier.

Source: Wikipedia and Bob Ross

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