FreeFormFab

Fabbers, dabblers and microstars

We the people, the untrained majority, are the future of design. We have the tools and we will be masters of our personal environments. Home fabbing with 3D printers, Web 2.0, open-source wikidesign, long tail economics - they’ll make it happen. We’re not dumb consumers, we’re creative consumers. Professional-Amateurs. Pro-Ams. We won’t buy anything that isn’t uniquely specified by ourselves. Click-and-print door handles, baby. Democratised design? You betcha!

That’s the vision, isn’t it? The future, both absurd and inevitable, depending on your point of view.
Could design, like journalism or photography, be overrun by user-generated content? The convergence of internet commerce, mass-customisation and 3D printers leads some scientists and designers to predict a utopia of democratised design. Others laugh at the idea, defending the indispensable skills of the profession and predicting a sea of homemade dross that will be compelling to no one except crazed hobbyists.

Source and whole article: Icon Magazine

Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change

As San Francisco braces itself to be the first major American city to not have a daily newspaper, the canary has sung as the death of print looks eminent. But what new frontiers do new media really offer? Can media democracy be maintained through new forms of citizen media that are more interactive featuring user-generated content?

Now almost anyone can be a media maker, and the whole world is literally watching, recording and listening. The divide between the producer and consumer has begun to dissolve. Crowdsourcing means that news can be created from the people experiencing the situations directly. Instead of producing content in house, aggregated content is the new king, with a whole flood of users openly sharing their photography, writing, and art. 

Dotmocracy is an established facilitation method for collecting and prioritizing ideas among a large number of people. It is an equal opportunity & participatory group decision-making process. Participants write down ideas and apply dots under each idea to show which ones they prefer. The final result is a graph-like visual representation of the groups collective preferences.

Through breakthroughs in Web 2.0 technology a new form of digital democracy has emerged where the divide between media producers and consumers has dissolved and citizen media rules. In this new age of participatory media is transforming the central tenants which make up our democracy, opening up new channels for citizen participation.  While before citizens had to rally for mainstream media attention to catch the ears of politicians, now it is easier ever than before for citizens to launch awareness campaigns and get their message heard by the masses.  Even more importantly, new advances in digital publishing mean that we now have advance systems of filtering and prioritizing data collectively. Instead of the corporations deciding what is important for us to view, it is the power of the crowd that fuels and filters digital content. Online users can choose what news they want to receive through RSS feeds, and can easily forward newsworthy items onto their friends and share them over social networks.

Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change (pdf)
Source: Dotmocraty

Businessweek: The Lesson of Coraline

Coraline, the animated fantasy movie directed by Henry Selick Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and others), has brought in almost $40 million since it opened last week – not bad for an animated feature. With a toddler at home, I don’t get to the theater very often, but this week I did get to see the innovative technology behind the movie: Objet Geometries Connex500. And if the Connex doesn’t count as a disruptive technology yet, it will soon.

The Connex500 is a 3-D printer. It can take an object designed in any CAD software or, in the case of Coraline, an animation program, and “print” a physical copy. Very simply, the software slices the design into microns-thick layers, and gives the printer a footprint for each, so that it can build a model one layer at a time. Because the Connex has multiple printer heads, it can build an object out of any of Objet’s eight basic plastic materials (shown, left) – which range from rigid to flexible, and include clear, white, and black options – or combine them to create an infinite number of composites. Those material options, along with the micron-measured detail, is helping change how companies think about 3-D printing.

Source and more: Objet
Thanks to Shimrit

Utopian Practices: Art, Science and Design REunited

Waag Society, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Virtual Knowledge Studio and The Arts & Genomics Centre of Leiden University have organised the conference Utopian Practices: Science, Art & Design REunited. The Conference takes place in De Balie Amsterdam on March 20th from 09.00-16.30 hrs.

Art, science and design were once closely tied to one another, but in the modern age technological specialisation and other divisions brought about a fragmentation of these fields. Increasingly, however, we have begun noticing a number of cross-pollinations between fine arts, applied arts and the sciences. During the conference Utopian Practices: Science, Art & Design REunited, a number of pioneers in this issue will present some surprising connections between the various disciplines like Susan Kennard, Executive Director of the new media institute BANFF in Canada will talk about the unique way that BANFF brings together researchers, artists and designers. Professor Emeritus Martin Kemp from Oxford University will discuss the similarities between artists and scientists based on what he calls ‘structural intuition’. And artist Beatriz da Costa will tell us how difficult it is to break down the barriers between art and science based on the question ‘when does Art become Science?’

Utopian Practices is the official opening for a programme dealing with the daily practice of art, science and design organised by Waag Society, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Virtual Knowledge Studio and The Arts & Genomics Centre at Leiden University.

Source and Program: De Balie

The Future of Shopping: Custom Everything

The monthly business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio explores what the future holds for shopping now that retailers are hurting and consumers are expected to keep spending tight for 2009. Portfolio.com takes a look at the phenomenon of mass customization -a way of making standard consumer products as customizable as a Facebook page. And Wired.com dives into the DIY subculture, and meets a group of hobbyists who are starting to hack furniture and product design like it was all just Unix code.

Portfolio’s Perspective: Custom Everything
 by Sara Clemence


What happens when you can design your physical world as easily as you can reformat your blog? Bespoke products have always been available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, whether for an individually tailored suit or a customized car. In recent years, one of the big shifts in retail has been giving customers the ability to design their own versions of premium products—like wedding rings, pricey handbags, and Nikes—at prices that are comparable to the regular versions. Now, without most of us realizing it, we’re on the cusp of another big change. Thanks to market demands and developments in technology, we’re going to be living in a user-generated world, where everything we use can (and will) be customizable. It’s already happening, in ways both obvious and not.

Wired’s Perspective: In-Home Manufacturing
 by Jennifer Kahn


Some are already designing a future where physical objects can be downloaded,  just as software is today. As computer-aided design has become more accessible, the tools for fabrication have also become cheaper. New desktop 3D printers now cost 5,000 USD, while the price of a water-jet cutter, capable of slicing any material, from glass to marble, to tolerances of a hundredth of an inch, has fallen by half. If everyone has access to computer-controlled machine tools and advanced 3D printers, why ship an item from manufacturing plant to customer? Why not just fabricate the object near home, on demand?

Source: Putting People First

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

NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts

The relationship between the crafts and modernity has long been characterized as difficult and the crafts are often perceived as occupying a marginalized role in the discourses of modernism. NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts seeks to challenge the assumptions surrounding this relationship by introducing a wide range of scholarly essays that explore the historical, contemporary and future positioning of the crafts within the broader scope of visual culture.

The crafts occupy an important role in material, globalized modernity, and as such they must be understood through a multiplicity of gazes. With that in mind NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts unites an international, interdisciplinary range of writers who are actively contextualizing modernity and the crafts. Drawing upon writings in the fields of craft history, art history, philosophy, museum studies, anthropology, fashion theory, history, women’s studies, and design, this book explores in detail the shifting and influential cultural position of the crafts.

NeoCraft is divided into five central themes: Cultural Redundancy or The Genre Under Threat; Global Craft; Crafts and Political Economy; Invention of Tradition: Craft and Utopian Ideals; and Craft, the Senses and New Technologies. Within each of these themes leading scholars, craftspeople and curators including Bruce Metcalf, Larry Shiner, David Howard, Grace Cochrane, John Potvin, Beverly Lemire, Joseph McBrinn, B. Lynne Milgram, Janice Helland, Elizabeth Cumming, Alla Myzelev, David Howes, Tanya Harrod, Love Jönsson, and Mike Press, explore the reality of craft practice that engages with the modernizing world.

NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts
Edited by Dr. Sandra Alfoldy
Publisher: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Des
ISBN-10: 091961647X
ISBN-13: 978-0919616479

Order by Amazon

Interview with Mass Customization guru Frank Piller

Frank Piller is a chair professor of management at the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany, one of Europe’s leading institutes of technology. He is also a founding faculty member of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His recent research focuses on value co-creation between businesses and customers/users, and the interface between innovation management, operations management, and marketing. Go to interview.

Source: Ponoko Blog

Coming soon to a home near you: 3D printing

In a common scene on Star Trek: The Next Generation, captain Jean-Luc Picard would walk up to an impressive, high-tech-looking console set in the wall and sternly say to it: Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

The console would shimmer and sparkle and, after a few seconds, a piping hot serving of tea complete with cup and saucer would materialize, ready for drinking. The technology was known as a replicator because it replicated real things out of thin air. But, as it eventually turns out with much of Star Trek ’s gadgetry, the technology is not so fantastical after all. It’s not Star Trek anymore, says Cathy Lewis, chief executive of Desktop Factory, a company that is making its own version of replicators. It’s reality.

Source: CBC News

University Huddersfield: Project Automake

The term generative system applies to any system in which a few basic rules are repeatedly employed to produce varied, unpredictable and often complex results, with varying degrees of autonomy from the user of the system. Generative systems have been used in many fields in an attempt to model and understand existing natural phenomenon or as a tool to help find solutions to complex problems.

Automake sits within the broad context of the growing interest in the use of generative design processes in theoretical and practice-based research in art, design and architecture. This involves exploring the potential for mathematical algorithms to provide computer generated inputs for the creation of artworks, three-dimensional forms or architectural propositions.

Automake is about combining generative systems with craft knowledge and digital production technologies to create a new way of designing and making objects that blurs the boundaries between maker and consumer, craft and industrial production.

Automake was developed as a research project that aimed to investigate the potentials of using generative systems to digitally design unique one-off works and produce them using a range of rapid prototyping/manufacturing technologies and CNC equipment.

Through this project the University of Huddersfield has been investigating the use of such processes for over five years, focusing on their application within industrial design. 

(Diagram: Automake’s product creation process in relation to traditional craft and industrial processes.)

Home Manufactoring in the Future

This opinion piece entitled Home Manufacturing in the Future by Terry Wohlers, author of the annual Wohler’s Report is about the state of the rapid prototyping / rapid manufacturing industry. Wohler’s view is that the future won’t see consumers printing products (or parts of products) at home because it’s cheaper to go buy a new product, the printer won’t be capable of using the right materials and the 3D data will be too complex to create or download. Instead, Wohlers believes, home manfacturing will see the rise of mini factories, in which start up businesses are able to build low-risk manufacturing plants in their basements or garages.

The example Wohlers uses is perhaps prejudicial to his argument: a toaster, which isn’t likely to be an item consumers see as highly desirable in terms of customisation, and which requires high performance plastics to withstand the heat. But primarily my problem with this viewpoint is that while it may actually be right, it’s for the wrong reasons. Home fabrication will fail to take off if the quality of product it’s possible to produce doesn’t match that of other manufacturing methods. That may be quality in a production sense, but also quality from a design, engineering or branding perspective. And even if that’s the case, it doesn’t exclude the possibility of consumers designing or customising based on existing products, and using these local factories purely as service providers to supply their bespoke parts.

Source: We don’t do retro

Making Prototypes for 3D Printing

3D printing is the conversion of a 3D image-of a toy car or cell phone, say-into a 3D prototype using a special type of printer. It has been used mostly in large industrial companies. But prices are dropping, to 10,000 now and maybe 5,000 dollars next year. 

Podcast: Making Prototypes for 3D Printing