In the future (and by that I mean 10-20 years) I think a lot of product design will be free and open sourced, and physical instantiations of these designs will be for sale… but basically anyone will be able to make their own if they want by taking them to their local print shop (which will have aquired 3d fab-lab units) and get the cut/made locally.
Rather than this being the creativity killer that copyright cartels claim it will be, it will lead to an explosion of creativity… a far greater number of people will be able to supplement their income by bridging various mechanical-aptidude gaps than are currently employed in the rarified ivory towers of corporate product design studios.
With that in mind, here’s a designer who makes open-source designs, and sells the products.
The payoff is of course that he gets talked about. I’m talking about him now. People who are involved in the creation of an object are far more likely to become evangelists for the product’s designer.
The Quantum Quality Leap
Distributed Monitoring and Control
In the 21st Century, progress can also go sideways
Million Points of Light
iPhone: The AOL of Cellphones
New Slang : The Unfolding Grammar of Emergent Techs
Memetic Species Jumping
Meta-Memes : Don't Taze Me Bro
Laser-cut Jansen Arduino Walky Thing
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
I’d really love to see the rich collaboration you get on Open Source Software transferred into the design process for physical products, but I don’t see much going on. It’s a real missed opportunity.
To experiment in this space, I’m running a live open design project at http://tacticalendar.co.uk . It’s a design for a laser-cut plywood perpetual-horizon erasable calendar.
Hand-finished Tacticalendars are available for mail order, whilst the laser-cutter files are published under the creative commons for people to experiment making their own derived works. There’s an instructable available if you’re not sure how to fabricate.
Consistent with the open source model, there’s even a github issue tracker! This means feature suggestions and bugs can be recorded, triaged and incorporated into the design as it is iterated.
The product is released through beta versions, release candidates and finally stable versions appear after much user testing. Betas and release candidates are for sale at cost price for people who want to save money and work with us to perfect the ideas.
The v0.1 design was canned early – the first physical prototype immediately suggested a better approach. We’re now at v0.2 release candidate 3, and there’s only one non-functional modification before v0.2 is declared stable and serious shipping will begin. Version 0.3 beta will follow, incorporating fiduciary markers to synchronize the calendar with Google from a camera phone.
Tacticalendar is the first project to be taken to market from the pool of ideas published as part of the public domain invention-a-week project at http://enigmaker.org . I’m hoping someone else will beat me to market with the second :)
Hiya – thanks for getting in touch…
I think your calendar thing has potential to be combined with this
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
Which is a fairly effective habit-keeping device.