Humblefacture

This is fantastic, Dominic! Congratulations! It'...

2010-06-30T09:36:00.329-07:00

This is fantastic, Dominic! Congratulations! It's wonderful that your amazing ideas are getting a BIG stage.

Congratulations Dominic! I back you 100% on your ...

2010-06-21T05:41:08.303-07:00

Congratulations Dominic!

I back you 100% on your mission for "real, modular, open electronics development," good luck!

Nice one Dominic! Will be great to see some higher...

2010-06-17T16:15:32.529-07:00

Nice one Dominic!
Will be great to see some higher profile discussion on open design

I think Alibre Design deserves a mention in the "3...

2010-04-06T13:10:12.622-07:00

I think Alibre Design deserves a mention in the "3D Solid: Proprietary" category. They have a free version, Alibre Design Xpress, and the next level up (Alibre Design Standard) is only $197. And unlike some other free or student editions, it can be used commercially. It's also thousands of dollars cheaper than the ones you have already listed but still very capable. Additionally, they have donated some licenses to at least one open source project I know of: The Open Prosthetics Project (www.openprosthetics.org). I think their company philosophy is in line with your work - their goal is to provide "full parametric CAD technology to anyone that needs it, versus only to those in the relatively unique financial position to afford traditional CAD systems."

Cool! Great post! I met friends of yours recently!...

2010-03-10T00:06:49.879-08:00

Cool! Great post! I met friends of yours recently! Small world!:)

Hi, really liked the article, my modest contributi...

2010-03-01T12:12:08.685-08:00

Hi, really liked the article, my modest contribution to spreading Adrian Bowyers vision of decentralized manufacture assumes that I am not smart enough to redesign manufacturing entirely, so instead I want to modularize what we already do. Please take a look at http://www.cubespawn.com , Your feedback appreciated to data dot pathway at gmail, thanx!

Just wanted to thank you for your part of the fab ...

2010-02-18T00:27:09.636-08:00

Just wanted to thank you for your part of the fab talks. I'm so geeked about all of this stuff. I'm currently working on 3d models for a car mount for my 1956 Chevy Bel Air, as well as an iPhone case that will snap onto the mount and then be rotatable. Once I get a working version in plastic, my intended goal is to be able to get some of these milled out of aluminum to sell.

My 3d program of choice has been Form•Z, which works very well for architecture, as it allows text entry and it allows easily changing the snaps so that I can do 1' accuracy when in a wide view, and then switch down to 1/16" in a zoomed view. Makes it so that I can very quickly model the massing for an object or building facade as well as the more detailed parts of the model.

I don't have the new version yet, but they've added the ability to export files directly for 3d printing. Another cool feature that it's had for a long time is the ability to print out foldable objects, including tabs for the purposes of gluing! Here's an example of the foldable output you can get, although this was modified a bit to make it work a bit better: http://www.flickr.com/photos/v8media/2433412160/

Here's a link to the video from the dorkbot meeting. You are videos 2 & 3. http://vimeo.com/channels/dorkbotsea

Hi Dominic, I like you slides. They cover a lot o...

2010-02-15T13:07:19.163-08:00

Hi Dominic,

I like you slides. They cover a lot of ground and there are many good examples. I think RepTab (Open Source plasma-torch developed at Factor @ Farm) could still be added.

I haven't heard your talk but it would be very interesting to discuss what the effects are of users developing solutions for themselves and sharing the development workload (in communities) allowing more elaborate and complex challenges to be solved by heterogeneous groups of people with the correct understanding of the problem domain and use context.

Contrast this with a traditional model of product development for a market, where common denominator choices are made to suit the scaling charateristics of mass production, moreover the choices are made based on imperfect and limited information. This is a threshold that is often too high for the more radical innovations.

Increasingly, with and emerging open commons and improving means of communications, it becomes cheaper and can be more efficient for people to develop their own solutions or do this in communities. This mode of production becomes viable for more and more products and is becoming more significant over time. The way our products look like can change over time. And of course hybrid modes (which can be especially successful) will emerge.

I hope this was remotely comprehensible?! ;)

"I say let agriculture or whatever process be auto...

2009-10-27T15:25:27.597-07:00

"I say let agriculture or whatever process be automated, as long as there is some educated moral person in the feedback loop."

There is a two-fold problem in this; first, educated moral people are in short supply; and second, this is the scheme that has brought us to where we are today.

When we don't have to think about where our goods come from, we give no thought to the true price of those goods. This is exactly what has led to massive over-consumption in the western world. Because everything is in such easy supply, we feel free to be careless in our usage of those things. The greater problem isn't that the people who run and manage industrial agriculture (or other processes) are not educated or moral, it is that the goals of our society center around money and profit. The focus of our economy is on growth, rather than meeting needs.

I found this fascinating. I would take the line ...

2009-08-27T14:15:42.502-07:00

I found this fascinating.

I would take the line that if a job can be automated in a sound way, why would any human want to do that job? I say let agriculture or whatever process be automated, as long as there is some educated moral person in the feedback loop.

Give people more time to attend to things other than work.

Great article - I'm loving Humblefacture. I want ...

2009-08-13T09:45:08.165-07:00

Great article - I'm loving Humblefacture.

I want to delve the idea of extrusion in a bit more detail.

As a biologist who practices biomimicry for a living I can't help but look to nature for 'patterns' that can be applied.

In this case when you look at extruded materials in nature they are primarily lines (or threads).

These threads are high performance composite materials that are extruded (silks, byssal threads) fairly quickly.

Take for example a spider silk. It is extruded into a thread...yet it is the material properties of that thread where it gets a large majority of it's diversity and performance. The weaving of the spider silk into a web is dependent on the material properties of the thread itself.

So, when I consider the maker-bot against natures extrusion I think increasing the diversity and performance of materials used is likely to have large benefits for the technology..

If we can start to merge extrusion with self-assembling (self organizing) materials- it will open up tremendous growth for this technology. Once you can do that- then you can 'grow' complex objects like organic solar cells, or room temperature ceramics.

In the Janet Maslin piece, I think she makes only ...

2009-07-20T13:43:44.362-07:00

In the Janet Maslin piece, I think she makes only a passing connection between the two books (neither of which, I must confess, I have actually read yet).

She mentions the fact that both authors cite an experiment by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely and offer different versions of it.

I did read Ariely's book ("Predictably Irrational") and I thought he did an excellent job of illuminating some very recognizable irrational behaviors that I know I have succumbed to more than once.

in any event, as I recall, Ariely did many variations on the "free" chocolate experiment. Maslin seemed to have more issues with the scholarship and presentation in both "Cheap" and "Free" than with their basic theses.

It seems to me that both topics are worthy of exposition and reflection.

Curiously, yesterday's NY Times Book Review has a much more glowing review of "Cheap" by Laura Shapiro:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Shapiro-t.html

It's interesting that so many people are making th...

2009-07-15T22:12:18.576-07:00

It's interesting that so many people are making the connection between "Cheap" and "Free" -- In reality, the similarity of the titles is very superficial. One of the books (Cheap) is discussing the cultural and social consequences of the economic metric by which we measure products. She may also suggest an alternative decision framework which could have different consequences. The other book (Free) looks at the next logical step for our current economy, particularly our economy of ideas. Anderson is hardly arguing that IKEA will ever be free, or use free as a large part of it's business.

The two concepts can even co-exist. Indeed, Humblefacture advocates the freeing of the technical descriptions of products so that they can be built more locally, more carefully, and therefore, LESS cheaply, from an overall quality standpoint.

There is also a review in the NY Times of her book...

2009-07-15T07:13:12.479-07:00

There is also a review in the NY Times of her book by Janet Maslin:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/books/06maslin.html

She is not so enamored of it, and the review pairs it with Chris (WIRED) Anderson's "Free."

Carole - In fact, that's a big push of Humblefactu...

2009-05-16T00:22:00.000-07:00

Carole - In fact, that's a big push of Humblefacture. The basic idea is to mirror the open source software movement, and discretize manufacturing enough that individually skilled people can work on the parts they know how to work on, and share those creations with everyone else. Compiler-style machines are also important -- fabbers, knitting machines, and other computer-assisted devices for creating parts from sharable files. All these things will play into the first Humblefactured objects, which should be ready for prime-time by the end of the summer. Stay Tuned :)

I really like the idea of "democratizing" design b...

2009-05-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

I really like the idea of "democratizing" design by allowing more people to create and fix their goods. Do you have thoughts on how to educate people so that they have the skills or other human resources to be able to carry this through?

Very exciting talk! A link to an article that has ...

2009-05-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

Very exciting talk!
A link to an article that has some interesting related themes:
http://www.tenonline.org/art/9411.html
(interesting to me because I am a computer dude, not a design/manufacturing dude!)

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