Seems like every week there is some new type of punk steering aesthetics or technology. From punk rock, to post-punk, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, even Biopunk, these gritty ways of life have tried to gain your interest and allegiance. Humblefacture, thought also an ethos which could result in a distinctive styling of product, will hopefully escape the fadish fadings of these movements. But in order to imagine what Humblefacture might become, it might help to compare it to the latest crowd of punks onto the scene -- the Bushpunks.
Make magazine is the Jefferson or Lenin of the open hardware movement, and this week, they didn't disappoint with an end-of-year roundup of open source hardware projects. Make has always emphasized the fun side of making, so as you can imagine, the list is more about blinkeys and videogames than real marketplace game-changers, but there are some gems in the mix. Perhaps the most exciting of the bunch is the Elphel open ethernet camera for sheer brawny real-world competitive chops. Be sure to check out the medical devices and digital fabricators. I know there are more great project out there than Make had a chance to post, so be sure to share your tips in the comments here or on the original make post.
What can a puzzle that is not really a puzzle teach us about the future of product design? Actually, maybe a lot. The above image shows a Jigazo puzzle -- like so many things, only available in Japan -- which has been assembled to display the face of a child. This isn't anything special, since puzzles already are able to faithfully depict any face, or any other image, for that matter. What makes Jigazo unique is that its single set of pieces can be arranged to display any face. The company even offers the option to run your image through software which will generate build instructions for a unique puzzle. In fact, this un-puzzle is more like a paint-by-number: reconfigurable, generic parts which derive function through their structure. This shift in thinking will have far-reaching impacts as it continues to be applied to product design.
Maybe it's the smell of pencils and college-ruled paper in the air, but politicians in the U.S. are going positively education-crazy. Arne Duncan, education secretary, gave an interview and speech disclosing radical overhauls of our current "No Child Left Behind" policy. President Obama urged students to stay in school, and work hard to learn the skills that would help them compete in a global market. There is good reason that these important people are spending time and effort looking into the affairs of children. Simply put, we have problems to large, numerous, and long-term to be dealt with by the current generation of workers. The question is, how can you train a generation to fabricate a new future without giving them the tools of fabrication?
You may have read that Dr. Norman Borlaug passed away over the weekend. He was an incredible scientist, and gave modern agriculture (and society) the core of technologies that allowed it to grow into what it is today. This afternoon, I was emailed this message from the Breakthrough Institute, to who's newsletter I subscribe. I thought that this email demonstrated a number of key errors and assumptions that business leaders make about what sustainability means, and I thought it might be useful to publish my reply here, as well as on their site. I would love to hear reactions, or additional suggestions in the comments. Below is my response email.
Michael-
Thanks for the kind words for Dr. Borlaug's work. Certainly, there is little doubt that he is a hero when you tally all the human lives that the green revolution bettered, and weigh them against the consequences of changing our direction of development toward modern assisted, monocultural agriculture. And it is at the very least, naive for the environmental movement to demonize modern technology (on the internet, and in offset printed books, no less!)
But the real issue that your email -- and frankly, the entire platform that you and Ted stand on -- neglect to mention that while individual technologies never remain standard for very long, they tend to build on one another.
Posts
