DIY
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Funding DIY Tools for Resilient Communities
Kickstarter : A project to build a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. If you've been reading Global Guerrillas for a while, you will be familiar with my compatriot Marcin Jakubowski's open source hardware development effort on his farm in Maysville Missouri. Marcin -- a return of the farmer, entrepreneur, inventor combo that nearly dissappeared from the American landscape decades ago -- built a great team that is well on its way to achieving its goals. It's worth supporting.
Industrial designer and tinkerer Markus Kayser spent the better part of a year building and experimenting with two fantastic devices that harness the sun’s power in some of the world’s harshest climates. The first he calls a Sun Cutter , a low-tech light cutter that uses a large ball lens to focus the sun’s rays onto a surface that’s moved by a cam-guided system. As the surface moves under the magnified light it cuts 2D components like a laser. The project was tested for the first time in August 2010 in the Egyptian desert and Kayser used thin plywood to create the parts for a few pairs of pretty sweet shades. But he didn’t stop there. Next, Kayser began to examine the process of 3D printing.
Markus Kayser Builds a Solar-Powered 3D Printer that Prints Glass from Sand and a Sun-Powered Cutter
DNA is now DIY: OpenPCR ships worldwide | OpenPCR - Open source, hackable PCR machine
Hi everyone, The eagerly awaited OpenPCR kit is now shipping! UPS picked up the first batch of kits and OpenPCRs are on their way to users in 5 continents and 13 countries around the world. For $512, every OpenPCR kit includes all the parts, tools, and beautiful printed instructions – you ONLY need a set of screwdrivers. A PCR machine is basically a copy machine for DNA.
The Rise of Desktop Manufacturing in the Great Recession
In the last post , we talked about the changing nature of markets and marketing in the Great Recession. This time we'll focus in on one of the results of these changes: Desktop Manufacturing. In the old days, it could cost upwards of $10,000 to $20,000 just to create the custom molds and dies required to produce an item in a factory. Then you had to cover the costs associated with prepping the manufacturing line to produce your item. As a result, your up-front costs could easily surpass $50,000 before your first item rolled off of the line. To make the effort worthwhile, you needed to produce a large number of items to spread these fixed costs around.
Why is Open Hardware inherently sustainable?
Reflections on the role of Open Hardware and Peer Production in insuring a sustainable world In this article, I want to list the reasons why I believe that the trend towards open and distributed manufacturing is a vital part of ensuring a sustainable society. For those that are not familiar with it, open hardware is a practice where designs are shared through open licenses in a community, and those designs can then be used by manufacturers, who can make and sell the product, eventually making a profit, but they cannot rely on any rents deriving from intellectual property.
Be Your Own Souvenir by blablabLAB
*rugenius in design , 06:31 Rapid 3d printing in the real world! Love this video that Justine found… i’ll let her fill you in on the rest! Souvenirs are way more fun when you make them yourself.Maker Movement
This Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention by Michael Erard pushed a lot of my buttons, and I reckon it’ll be of some considerable interest to other art creators and consumers (writers and readers, for example, which is most of you lot): I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets.
The attention economy: curation by duration
The paper describes the Public Design Library and first appeared in Peoplenomics , an economics newsletter. Used by permission: Micropreneuring and the Future of Mass Customization
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A manifesto on Peer-to-Peer energy production
This essay, written in a manifesto form, addresses some crucial issues related to the timely topic of the distributed or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy production. It uses the emerging mode of the P2P production in the immaterial field of production (information, culture, knowledge) as a point of departure to realize the dynamics of this new energy technology and shed light on its socio-economic aspects. Source: Papanikolaou, G., and Kostakis, V. (2011) “ An Essay on P2P Energy Policy ”, in Acoustic Space No. 8: ENERGY, Ed. by Smite, R., Medosch, A., Mey, K., Smits, R., Riga: RIXC; Liepaja: LiepU MPLab, 26-30.
Web Sites
Kreiss, D., M. Finn, and F. Turner. 2010. “ The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society. ” New Media & Societ y 13:243-259. http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/2/243 (Accessed December 14, 2010). A new article in New Media and Society proposes that we go back to our Weber for a fresh wake-up call concerning the heady promises of peer production. It’s a good article for one good reason: it characterizes some of the basic features of what they call the “consensus view” of peer production. The consensus view includes claims that 1) peer production is psychologically gratifying labor (which is good), 2) it leads to egalitarianism and efficiency 3) it realizes ethical relationships between collaborators (?)
Grilling Peer Production with Weber « Part.Public.Part.Lab
In some ways the injunction to return to Weber is refreshing, but it puts us in a sticky spot. Weber’s analysis is about the *success* of rationalization. The rest of the 20th century has been about its rather catastrophic failures. Despite the promise of a procedural rationality governing democracy, the fact remains that procedures are co-opted, that money trumps politics and that bureaucracies have pathological characteristics that produce inefficiency, inequality and psychological and physical harm, just not everywhere or always. Perhaps the issue is more with the all or none thinking involved in hypostasizing either “bureaucracy” or “peer production” than it is with forgetting one or celebrating the other. by Apr 15
Business Models
3D Printer
Designing Products to be Shared Kevin Carson 15th April 2011