I happened across a new project to me while browsing the archives: Chumby was mentioned alongside Ponoko in an article in the New York Times back in November.

As the website says:

“The chumby is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, weather, celebrity gossip, webcams, sports scores — using your wireless internet connection”

The interesting thing to me is the extent of its open design: This section of their site is devoted to developers and offers resources for four areas of development: Hardware, software, widgets and crafts. The crafts page offers such delights as the patterns for the fabric elements of the housing, plus IGES files (that is, 3D CAD models) and engineering drawings for all the plastic moulded and metal parts used in the housing. Developers are encouraged and facilitated to modify the design as they wish. All you need is a 3D rapid prototyper! However there is some interesting discussion of more feasible options for creating your own casings on their forum here.

Interestingly, you don’t have to agree to anything to make use of the craft resources, but must click an agreement for access to their hardware (electronics) resources, such as schematics and PCB layouts. This agreement limits you from manufacturing and selling Chumby branded devices, but states; “Our goal is to give our Licensees latitude to modify their Chumby Devices and the Chumby software that runs on them, while preserving our business of running the Chumby Service”. Which seems fair enough.

Still, great opportunity here for any crafters/makers to get involved. Would be cool to see a laser cut variant!

Images from Chumbyfriends on Flickr

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Boingboingtv has a good video up in which Phil Torrone, editor of Make magazine, shows us some of his favourite projects from Maker Faire 2008 last weekend. These include soft toy electronics, ‘fablabs’ and the “brain machine”. Phil comments a little on the links between the maker movement, the affordablilty of digital fabrication, and the future of product personalisation.

Its good to get a little insight into the goings on at Maker Faire when I’m stuck over on this side of the atlantic - there’s such a vibrant network of makers out there, hopefully one day I’ll be able to attend a Maker faire myself!

Update:

There’s also an interesting perspective from the businessmen at Forbes.com here. Some chat with Make magazine, Bleep Labs and Mitch Altman on the reasoning behind DIY product success stories. The emphasis on the need for building a product community and sharing (and thus flexible licensing I surmise) is interesting.

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Mobile phones aren’t an area of great interest to me, but this Business Week article (via Core77) led me to an interesting slideshow: Responses to a Nokia design probe that went to Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and Accra. Its a great testament to the value of co-design with users. And maybe a preview of how phones might look when we all have means of personal fabrication, and can have our customised dream phone. Nokia already have a site for enabling users to test drive beta versions of phone software: Nokia Beta Labs involves users in specifying and developing their phones’ software functions - it would be good to see a similar site allowing users and industrial designers to evolve physical phone design further from these probes.

One of my favourite responses is the phone that is also a water bottle, with the accompanying comment from its author: “It’s my style of phone because is helps you and others to survive. I would like to help others with my phone.” You don’t hear that in the UK …

There is, incidentally, a great quote in the Business Week article from a Nokia researcher, commenting on the use of a GPS program from their Beta Labs site; “People were misusing the application in creative ways.” Surely ‘misuse’ is a rather negative term when your users are doing such valuable work!

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It’s interesting how the indie design community respond so well to competitions: Clearly, we need briefs to flourish, we need constraints. The response to last month’s Ponoko competition is a case in point. So it’s no surprise that brands keep hurling them at us.
Doc Marten’s is one of the latest with their Freedm campaign, a website that allows you to decorate your own Doc Marten’s boot with the chance of having your design made up for sale (via Core77). This is one of many similarly enticing yet constrictive competitions in which getting your entry manufactured is still ultimately down to chance. At least customisation frameworks such as those offered by Nike, Etnies, and Timbuk2 guarantee some return on your investment of design time and effort, and some offer more freedom.

The cynical side of me sees these competitions as, at worst, simply an attempt by brands to get a lot of ideas for virtually no effort or cost. At best, they might be a means of gaining publicity by jumping on the DIY/open design bandwagon. But maybe they’re genuinely part of the movement and a necessary framework for indie designers to work within. However, if this is the case, it would still be nice to have more opportunity to recover some expenses than relying on the chance that one is going to win. How can we stop ourselves being exploited like this?

I suspect the answer is that these competitions and services are really aimed at facilitating design by the ‘non-designers’ discussed by Dave here. For more experienced designers, brand-led competitions such as the Muji design award, attract a great deal of interest, presumably because the briefs are so much wider open. Still, surely our time would be better spent directed towards projects that have more grassroots social impact, or that we at least have the means of building or marketing ourselves, such as those found on Thinkcycle? Sadly, this repository (and others) of collaborative, appropriate design, that offers the same reward of having one’s designs become reality, has been significantly less subscribed to.

It seems we relish constraints, while demanding a certain minimum of freedom, and the balance between these determines to what extent we are designers or ‘non-designers’. However, whichever we are, it seems that we are ultimately mostly interested in prestige.

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Since we’re talking about puzzles and games, I thought it was worth pointing out Lee Krasnow. Lee is a puzzle-maker from San Francisco, and creates some awesomely perplexing objects! There is a great interview with him over at makezine, in which he talks the viewer through some of his puzzles and introduces us to his method of working.

Lee Krasnow (above, makezine) and one of his puzzles, 2-in-1 (below, pwdbp.com)

Perhaps the most incredible thing is that Lee’s tool of choice is a table-saw. Using a jig of his own design, he manages to cut highly precise and tiny parts – he has posted an instructable describing how to make some jigs and ten of his puzzles here. It’s daunting, but highly inspiring stuff and makes me think that there’s no reason why a laser-cut puzzle should be just a 2D affair.

In fact my favourite Ponoko project of late has been Carbon by ckharnett (a recent product of the week) – a game-like geometric construction of simply hexagons, pentagons and triangular connectors. The constructions possible with this system are endless!

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If you haven’t already, check out ladyada’s website. She’s something of a veteran of open sourcing hardware, having developed several (mainly electronic) projects while at MIT and, indeed, since.

My favourite is the Spoke POV, a persistence of vision toy for your bicycle wheel. I have made up a couple and found her various source documents incredibly well written and helpful (she provides detailed assembly instructions, links to places to source components, schematics of the circuitry, circuit board layouts, source code for software elements. And of course you can download the latest version of the firmware and software and she’ll sell you a hardware kit at her commercial arm, Adafruit Industries (having limited interest in building electronic hardware, but an inexplicable urge to solder, this is what I did). The great thing is, there is a burgeoning community of developers and users on her forums – you can even just chip in with product suggestions if you don’t want to get into detail. And it’s not just for the SpokePOV- there are many more products to help develop.

One development I would love to see, and which I fully intend to get on to with time, is a housing for the SpokePOV – the current trend is for cable tying the circuit board straight onto your spokes. I have in my minds eye a vacuum formed casing, and posting the source for the mould as some kind of 3D CAD file. But maybe I should be thinking of something laser cut, and using Ponoko as the platform.

It’s really exciting to think of what’s possible, developing a product for an already successful opens source software/hardware project. And it would be fun to take on the challenge of doing it with laser cutting, given that a standard platform now exists in Ponoko – that is, until Ponoko starts offering moulding!

The truth is, I haven’t got onto it in about a year, so may never. But have a look at ladyada’s projects and maybe see if there’s anything there that piques your interest!

Incidentally, ladyada also has a very interesting section on Open Hardware, covering her definition, licenses, and a list of projects from across the web.

Images courtesy of Bekathwia and Ladyada

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A while back, the Core 77 blog led me to an archive of the 80’s series The Secret Life of… which beautifully relates the history and design of various household items.

But the real star of the show is the presenter himself, Tim Hunkin. He is one of a few multi-disciplined tinkerers whom I count as a personal hero. Cartoonist, inventor, broadcaster, sculptor – his book Almost Everything There Is to Know was a formative influence in my childhood. He is a great example to any of us who want engage in this new world of designing, adapting and making, embodying as he does both passion for the end product, as well as a broad variety of skills and experience to get there. The great thing is with the enablement of the web, we can all be part time designers, or adapters, or makers, and indulge our multifaceted natures while still holding down a day job. If not making it a day job.

Incidentally, I constantly have trouble defining what it is I do in my studio/workshop – increasingly I err towards the term ‘tinker’ which is unsatisfactory, evoking activities of a more mischievous nature than they often are. On his personal site, Hunkin goes for ‘engineer/cartoonist’, which gives no indication of his myriad other talents.

We need a term for this new breed of inventors to which I belong and which sites such as Make, Ponoko and Instructables seem to attract. We are changeably referred to as makers, industrial designers, inventors, indie designers, hackers: none of which seem to embody the activity truthfully (the term ‘maker’ really doesn’t cut it as a valid activity amongst some of my peers, who have the benefit of such well established terms as ‘doctor’ or ‘telesales operator’). My favourite has to be ‘post-industrial designers’, as referred to in this discussion on Core77. It would certainly be good to stick to one job-title in the future, and this seems to infer the right amounts of professionalism, independence and irreverance for me!

Anyway, back to Hunkin. Have a look at his site and you will find an Aladdin’s cave of truly joyous objects, thorough explanations of his workshop and methods, all infused with the man’s quiet, considered adoration for mechanical creativity. An inspiration, whatever he is and whatever we are!

The image above is a self portrait by Hunkin, and the images below, a human sewing machine from The Secret Life of the Sewing Machine and a cartoon from Almost Everything There is to Know, used with permission from Tim Hunkin.

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In order to get free delivery back in January, I rather hurriedly had a variation on Dan’s box lamp cut, and was kicking myself when the pieces arrived for not making full use of the hardboard - I’d overlooked the fact that the box lamp only uses one bit of the hardboard, and should have added something useful as Kyokpaesshowroom (bit of a mouthful I know) did: a wee tangram puzzle. Neat.

It would be great if Ponoko alerted the designer when they are about to waste material. But since we already have a ready-made repository of laser cutting template files in Ponoko, could a program be developed that analyses your .eps file and suggests other designs that could be added to make better use of the material? This could even be done in such a way as to add a little chaos to the process, leading to some interesting mashups of designs in unintended materials, or at unforeseen scales. It seems that Ponoko has provided a great opportunity for improved efficiency of materials in this way. A quick search brings up the imaginatively named Sheet Layout but this seems overly powerful for most people’s needs, and I’m unclear as to whether it could automatically place a cutting path in a given space.
Incidentally, the case of Dan’s box lamp seems to be a good example of ‘remixing’ design data on Ponoko: starting with his floral design;

followed by Kyokpaesshowroom’s dragonfly interpretation;

and then my tea-leaf inspired design (a pattern that I pretty much cut and pasted from another of my projects):

As derivatives of a ShareAlike license, all of them are available for free, on attribution and non-commercial terms. Plus there are more lamp designs using similar principles. VodkaandOrange’s Bonsai lamp, below, makes great use of the laser cutter to create an intricate cut-out pattern in the acrylic. Isn’t light brilliant?

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Hi all! Introducing myself as Ponoko’s fifth new blogger: I’m Roy from Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

OK, so I may be 11,427 miles from Ponoko HQ but I take solace in the fact that I’m technically 12 hours younger than any of my antipodean equivalents! I’ll be blogging on collaborative design / personal fabrication / sustainable manufacture news from this island and on any other stuff that catches my eye on the web.

I’m an industrial designer by trade, having graduated in 2005 from the Glasgow School of Art / University of Glasgow joint course in Product Design Engineering. Since then I have been either working freelance under the name of Zero-waste Design or cycle messengering in the beautiful city of Glasgow. Recently I have been working for a local social enterprise called the Coach House Trust helping to design and produce outdoor furniture. I am really interested in developing open source products with them using distributed development tools such as Ponoko to collaborate with other similar projects.

My other great passions are music, particularly playing in bands, as well as flying kites and of course cycling, so doubtless my future posts may be biased in these directions!

I’ve had a bit of an obsession with what I call Open Source Design (basically sharing designs and early design data) for a while. Its really exciting to see how the web (along with new fabbing technology) is enabling designers and users across the globe to collaborate more in order to build increasingly efficient, appropriate and personal products.

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