Hey guys!

After turbulent times before Christmas and (in the end) quiet Christmas holidays we are ready and waiting here in Graz/Austria for 2009.

There is a lot of experts saying that due to this year’s financial crisis 2009 will be a though year for a lot of branches worldwide. Objectively we go along with their opinion but we do not agree with the ones predicting the end of the world.

Although true innovation and an entrepreneurial mindset can’t work like a 100% vaccine against all the pessimism and fear which seem to have rained down on us over the last weeks, we at Fluid Forms think that both, (open) innovation and smart entrepreneurship, can strengthen us and make us more resistant to find a way through difficult months…

We hope that there’s a lot of people (among our competitors, prosumers, partners and not to forget the media) out there sharing a similar point of view.

Something was (obviously!) going wrong in the economy the past few years. Maybe there is space for (at least) some tiny changes now. Changes the whole mass customization industry can influence…

We like to wish you all the best for 2009!

The Fluid Forms Crew

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You want to know what open innovation guru Eric von Hippel thinks about the next steps in open innovation and the future of fabbing?

Here we go.

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Last week we posted the first part of Matt Sinclair’s guest article treating the question if anyone can be a designer. A (pretty controversial) question mass customizers and user co-creation enablers are facing regularly…

Part 2:

This opinion, that design isn’t actually that difficult, is one that understandably raises the hackles of design professionals. On a recent thread on Core77, a website and forum for industrial designers, one poster insisted that most design is much, much simpler than gourmet cooking. That sparked off a whole debate, much of it quite disparaging, about consumers who ‘self-design’ products. Some of the comments included:

 A small percentage of consumers may want to choose colors on their sneakers, or push and pull a few points on a nurb surface for a cell phone, but you comment comes off as pretty ignorant as to what design actually is.

The rapid prototyping machine in many ways is no different than the hot glue gun, it allows crafters to exercise their wimsy and their perspective, some of which is good, most horrid.

Myspace is a perfect example of what happens when you put design into the hands of everyone. A huge percentage of the pages on myspace are unusable/unreadable. Personal fabrication will be no different… on balance… a big, ugly mess.

It comes down to this, 75% of people are herd beasts, and buy what others in their social groups have/want.

The way these comments are so dismissive of consumers-as-designers to a large extent demonstrates the degree to which professional designers feel their work is misunderstood. In the field of mass customisation this is also very common, sites such as NikeID (‘toolkits’ in the mass customisation jargon), are regularly referred to as offering consumers the opportunity to design their own products. Andrew Keen picks up on this in his arguments in the Fast Company article:

The consequence of this design democracy is an ugly spectacle of deep purples and electric oranges. It’s a culture of me-me-me: my hideously personalized car, my hideously personalized sofa, my hideously personalized house. It’s that fat woman in the tight dress that only exaggerates her obesity. It’s that loud pick-up truck with the tinted windows and the tastelessly sexualized exhaust pipe.

An ugly spectacle or a design classic? Phantasy Landscape
by Verner Panton

I sense some faux outrage here. But anyway, the question is, whose ugliness? If Wallpaper magazine was insisting deep purple and electric orange were cool, would Keen pick another example? What’s being described here is quite clearly taste, not design. And those who are most disturbed by consumers exhibiting their own choices are always those who consider themselves arbiters of ‘good’ taste, the people who see their own influence waning as consumers increasingly make decisions for themselves.

In the end, the question of whether anyone can be a designer comes down to the way in which design is defined. Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. Consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb – something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it.

New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping.

About the Author:
Matt Sinclair graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1995 with a Masters Degree in Industrial Design Engineering. He worked as part of Nokia’s design team for eight years, first in the UK and later in Finland, before leaving to set up his own consultancy at the end of 2003. Matt Sinclair Design specialises in consumer electronics design and past clients include Benefon, EADS, Nokia, Nordic ID and Siemens. In 2007 Matt began a PhD at Loughborough University, researching how rapid manufacturing technologies will redefine the industrial design process, and the future role of the consumer within product creation; he writes about this work at http://no-retro.com/.

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Frank Piller interviewed Scott Killian, Co-Founder of Yerzies (apparel customization) and got some interesting answers.

Read the interview on Busy Code.

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Designing an individual table with my cell phone, get it milled and sent to
my home sounds a little bit crazy. But mShape makes it real now.

via Core77

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Today we start a two part guest contribution series. Matt Sinclair, founder of Matt Sinclair Design, shares with us his thoughts about a question we and other user co-creation enablers are confronted regularly: ‘Can anyone be a designer?’ A question which often raises the hackles of design professionals…
(more about the author at the end of the article)

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In 2006, Fast Company published a debate article entitled Can Anyone be a Designer? Andrew Keen and Joe Duffy argued the pros and cons and in the end neither one managed to convince the other, but the article raised some interesting questions which services such as those offered by Fluid Forms are increasingly bringing to the attention of professional designers. Questions not only about who has the right to call themselves a ‘designer’, but also about how design itself is defined.

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Joe Duffy began the debate by claiming that

“…everyone plays the part of a designer. Design decisions are made by most everyone, everyday – what should I wear today? What kind of car should I buy? What color? Which options? What about the new sofa for the family room? What design style? Which color and fabric? These actually are design decisions...”

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This is an argument I used in an essay early in my design studies. I thought it was insightful, but I was only 17 at the time. Of course, it’s totally wrong. These aren’t design decisions, they’re consumer choices. As Douglas Coupland said in Generation X, shopping is not creating. Arguing that choosing what car to buy is a design decision is like arguing that taking an aspirin is a medical decision, and that therefore I’m playing the part of a doctor, as one designer argued on ProductDesignForums recently.

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Fiat 500 Customisation Toolkit

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Even if there might be a philosophical debate to be had about whether these are design decisions, it doesn’t really help in deciding whether anyone can be a designer. But I don’t believe most consumers see these as design decisions anyway; in my experience most people think of design in terms of taste and aesthetics, and believe that in our post-modern world, everyone is entitled to an opinion on what constitutes good or bad design.

In one sense they are right: one of the things that distinguishes design from art is that design is primarily about solving problems. And so to know whether a particular design is good or bad, you have to ask the people who have used it. But expecting consumers to have an opinion on whether a design is ‘good’, on whether one design solves a problem better than another, is a long way from claiming those consumers are themselves designers.

In Duffy’s definition though, design isn’t about problem solving, it’s about consumer choice, and in his opinion this is a good thing.

As Americans act more like designers, they learn more about the design process, and in exploring it on their own terms, they gain a greater appreciation for the talent that it takes to practice it at the highest levels. They also achieve a better understanding of its importance in their lives.

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Customised PC by Katsuya Matsumura

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If people really were to act more like designers, they might indeed come to a better understanding of why design is important, both aesthetically and functionally. But this is where Fluid Forms, and other companies which offer customisation of products, raise some interesting questions.

By offering tools to consumers which make the unique design of products easier does this raise the consumer’s appreciation of the designer’s skill? After all, people don’t usually come to appreciate things that are easy, they appreciate the skills involved in doing something they themselves find difficult.

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Read the second part of Matt Sinclair’s article

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About the Author:
Matt Sinclair graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1995 with a Masters Degree in Industrial Design Engineering. He worked as part of Nokia’s design team for eight years, first in the UK and later in Finland, before leaving to set up his own consultancy at the end of 2003. Matt Sinclair Design specialises in consumer electronics design and past clients include Benefon, EADS, Nokia, Nordic ID and Siemens. In 2007 Matt began a PhD at Loughborough University, researching how rapid manufacturing technologies will redefine the industrial design process, and the future role of the consumer within product creation; he writes about this work at http://no-retro.com/.

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Sometimes our customers are concerned about the origin of the woods used in our products and even ask us if they support irresponsible deforestation by purchasing products from Fluid Forms.

We are very pleased to tell you that there is no need to be concerned. Our Austrian production facilities are PEFC certified which means that we exclusively use woods from sustainably managed forests.

The PEFC Council (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization,  which promotes sustainably managed forests through independent third party certification. The PEFC provides an assurance mechanism to purchasers of wood and paper products that they are promoting the sustainable management of forests.

To learn more about the PEFC Council please visit the organisation’s website.

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I went to the opening of Facing Nations last night. Facing nations is an exhibition to mark the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 124 people from 124 nations living in Graz were depicted in a 150 meter long portrait. I was representing New Zealand.

I really enjoyed the attention to detail in the artistic concept. The eyes of each person are level placing everyone on the same level, independent of their race, religion or education. No one face was contained on one canvas. By placing faces across two canvases each person became part of the whole work. If any face is removed the work become quite obviously incomplete.

Unfortunately the event did not highlight ways that people can actively help towards attaining human rights for everyone. A while back I did stumble upon a very interesting campaign by Amnesty International.

Amnesty International letter writing campaign

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I stumbled upon another cool approach of implementing projections of shadows into lampshade concepts:

Designer: Marcus Bosch

The picture automatically raises a question in me: What would people think visiting me at home and crossing the sheep in my livingroom?

via Core77

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Some of you using Feed Readers like the Google Reader might have had problems with hyperlinks in our blog entries recently.

The reason was a WordPress update we did some weeks ago. We have now fixed the problem. All the links should work again. Please let us know if you still have any problems with our feeds!

We like to apologize for the inconvenience.

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