Open Design is Getting More Traction

By 2005, I was a serious old skool photography junky. I had a gorgeous Nikon and loved to play around making my own frankenstein-style cameras. I loved to take crazy mashup photos on film and then go into the photo lab and hand print giant c-prints on actual paper. I made them, sold them and saw every piece of art on every wall of every gallery in Seattle. I was in the cult of beautiful objects. I loved them and I loved making them.

Then I got ahold of a really old 10D as a hand-me-down from my grandpa. I got a 15mm lens for it and promptly fell in love with Flickr. I gave up the cult of beautiful objects cold turkey and joined a new cult, the cult of sharing.

It's part of my DNA to develop infrastructure for creativity and share it with others. I did this as a puppeteer, leading puppet workshops in schools in community centers and then as a teacher. For 7 years I taught art with the goal of giving young people as many tools for self expression as possible. I took that momentum and rolled it into a video show that shared infrastructure for making things and gave people the tools to take that infrastructure farther. Then I worked at Etsy for a second before starting MakerBot and Thingiverse with my friends Adam and Zach to democratize manufacturing and bring 3D printing to the masses.

Ok, that's a bit of a history tangent... what's this have to do with open design?

Open design is in a wonderful place. Today on Thingiverse, someone posted Syvwlch's clock. Syvwlch doesn't have a MakerBot, but for the last few weeks, he's been learning OpenSCAD to design a 3D printable grandfather-clock-style gear system for telling time. It's still got a ways to go, but he's had great support from the community that continues to test his designs and offer feedback.

And that's just one thing that's happened. Physical mashups are a super awesome meme that's emerging on Thingiverse as people take designs and smoosh them into other designs to make new things.

Event's like WeFab are showing up and a culture of sharing is emerging. Folks are finding ways to get together and make things happen in the now rather than waiting for an education or waiting for permission or waiting for funding.

It's nice to see. Sharing is something that has to be intentional as an adult. Many people have been taught to keep things to themselves and sharing really opens us up as a worldwide culture to build on each others work and make wonderful things happen.

Comments

[syvwlch]

The community response on Thingiverse has been not just supportive, but constructive and pragmatic. It's been crucial to moving from concept to something that could actually be printed and fit together in the physical world. :-)