The beginning of this talk will be about the RepRap, a Replicating Rapid Prototyper. In short, it is a fabricator, or 3D printer, that makes things that YOU want. Besides being able to make products as you like them best, it can make parts to assemble another RepRap machine. Hence, it has a viral distribution model. Besides specifics, we invite you to take a step back, and see what the implications are... we hope you will join us and imagine a future of abundance, creativity and with an emphasis on harmony (beyond sustainability), and translate it into action.
The first real copying machine?
We've heard about, or even experienced, the collaborative power of passionate individuals around the world. When they join hands, contributing their energy, freely sharing their ideas and building on them, this mode of production can be highly productive. It may well outperform the traditionally closed 'institutional' mode of production, like Wikipedia is giving us an abundance of knowledge at no cost.
This creative energy has been unleashed in the worlds of software, graphical arts, music and knowledge, becoming more than just an economical phenomenon to reckon with. It becomes a change in the mind-set of people. The internet is such an effective catalyst by enabling sharing, that it changes our idea of rivalry. People realise that by sharing their ideas, they multiply in value, and that they have lost nothing.
For physical things, this seems to be fundamentally different. If I give you something, I will not have it any more. But what if the power of producing things is given to anyone, with no exceptions. What if production becomes so cheap, that it would be useless and undesirable to account for its costs? We are not there yet, but Siert and I will show you how we might get there... and perhaps sooner than you think.
The fact that YOU can now participate in remaking the physical world, is not just exciting but highly empowering.
The proposed talk by Siert Wijnia ( www.protospace.nl ) and me, Erik de Bruijn ( www.erikdebruijn.nl ), is about extending the collaborative effort to physical product design and fabrication. Let's remake things... let's Reboot.
Collaborative progress is opening the doors to (a) creative (r)evolution.
3 comments
Level playing field
I think you have touched upon an interesting thing there, Ali. I think you can put it in perspective in the way Thomas L. Friedman does in "The world is flat". The work will go where it is done best. If price is the main driver, low-wages are where work will go. I think a lot of the design and manufacturing work will decentralize and alongside of it there will be an emerging distributed network of producers. This is because for many product categories this distributed network can outcompete centralized manufacturing. For creative work, people around the world can start collaborating on designs AND have an actual physical representation for real-world testing. Real-world testing (such as prototyping) is of vital importance to design.
What a democratized production of physical offers is the following. It allows individuals who are in different distinct communities to combine elements. So many different perspectives are brought together in projects that relate to physical products, that they can outperform traditional product development. Which is not even that hard, considering that 74 percent of market introductions fail (for consumer markets, that is).
Different individuals come up with innovations related to a product. With freely revealed (e.g. creative commons) products, a lot of mixing and reusing of ideas can give much better results than companies who restrict reuse of their IP and rely mostly on internal capabilities an creative inputs.
Open design projects, powered by the ability to actually produce and cheaply make design iterations, can outperform traditional product development AND distribution. Added benefit is that each consumed item can be customized to that user's needs.
this is going to change everything
... I think in ways we can't even imagine! Thanks for this talk!
and btw. what I was thinking when seeing this talk was: forget china, we'll see a tectonic shift of production with this over the years, I guess if I'd be china I'd be buying as much IP as I can to ensure I'll still be the one producing (think of an RIAA backed by china for product design, fighting 'product-/ designpirates' etc.).