Creativity | Uneven Distribution.Uneven Distribution.

The beginning of chair piracy.

27-01-2012

Creativity, Data, Personalisation, The future

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

And with that, The Pirate Bay created a new category on one of the world’s largest piracy outlets – a category for physical objects. 3D Printers are now under $1000. And while the resolution, size and materials still leave a lot to be desired, it’s worth casting your mind back to your amazement at first seeing a domestic printer spit-out a colour printout that sort of resembled a photograph. Because that was likely less than 20 years ago. A few quick points on this:

This is the future. I love it when the future actually arrives.
Any (likely) arguments or discussions around IP are completely pointless. The piracy of objects is well an truly established across the world already. It’s not just fake handbags either, the Chinese have pirated a Rolls Royce. That Eames chair your sitting on is more than likely pirated.
This will eventually change how we look at products – the free availability of almost any design we want will ultimately lead to people thinking about their needs rather than their wants. Instead just buying what we are told too from the limited range available, we will consider what we need and how that need could be fulfilled through the infinite possibility of design customisation.
This won’t be a huge challenge for brands – firstly because multi-material 3D printing is still at least 10 years off, so you’ll be waiting a while to print out those Nikes. Secondly because even in a world of downloadable (and piratable) objects, the same fundamentals remain – brands are a heuristic, a shortcut to something we know and are comfortable with. If brands are providing good service, customer-centric customisation, and simplicity, the world of 3D printing is far more of an opportunity than a threat.

In the meantime, if you really can’t wait, your 3D printed shoes are available here.

Less architects, more gardeners.

By: nichodges

22-11-2011

Art, Creativity, Music

“What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say. And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece. And they turned into a different version of that piece every time. So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.” – Brian Eno, on Edge

Brian Eno is talking here about a musical movement that happened in the last couple decades of last century. He talks about himself (and others such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and John Cage) as gardeners, not as architects. These guys wrote some amazing music back then (and still do), but they created it not through trying to control every single piece of their work. They created a system, and stood back and watched what grew out of those systems.

I think the vast majority of creative people working in this industry are architects. And yet in an age where you have absolutely no control over your idea once it’s out in the wild, we all need to be thinking a lot more like gardeners.

— Uneven Distribution.

The beginning of chair piracy.

Less architects, more gardeners.

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