Why we are giving our ideas away
Before the industrial revolution, all products were produced by their users or by local artisans, and many products were what we would today call “custom”. Using traditional fabrication processes like blacksmithing, it was pretty easy to produce a single copy of something, unlike many of today’s manufacturing processes, like injection molding, which can only produce everyday objects economically in the hundred-thousands or millions. One blacksmith could not realistically make enough copies of something to supply a nation, and so there was no harm in letting other blacksmiths copy a good design idea, because everyone’s business benefitted. So, in pre-industrial times, peacetime technologies like agricultural implements were based on widely shared designs that were modified and improved over the years by their builders and users. This led to some very highly adapted designs, some that were useful everywhere and others that were tuned to a specific place or task. This was a successful implementation of “open source” ideals that predated computers by many centuries.
Industrial production methods are different; they tend to encourage “one size fits most” designs and make customized products comparitively expensive. However, recent advances in computer controlled manufacturing are making custom high-tech parts substantially cheaper. Powerful yet easy-to-use CAD software has substantially reduced the labor cost of designing and specifying a part, and CNC machining and rapid prototyping are making custom parts ever cheaper and more straightforward to obtain. Perhaps it’s time to bring the practices of pre-industrial blacksmiths into the modern age. With a global communications system and the application of specialized areas of knowledge, we have the potential to make collaborative innovation faster and cheaper than ever before. This can create new classes of problems that it makes sense to solve, for instance filling the needs of niche communities like amputees or developing technologies that are societally beneficial but were previously considered unprofitable. The goal of this project is to make that idea a reality.
The goals of this project:
- Create socially responsible products and technologies that get adopted and used
- Create a network of interested participants, including user/innovators, manufacturers, and donors
- Help further the field of open source design
