See… if a load of… “enthusiasts” get together to design a car, the last thing they come up with is a teapot. What they produce instead is something specifically designed to fight other cars… and they call it The Rally Fighter.
Local Motors, who crowd-source (to an extent) the designs of their output have put together something… and for about $2 million dollars (which is peanuts apparently) made a machine that people will actually want… although by “people” they mean the American Off-Road Rally Market… who can afford $50,000.
These days… undecided… but it’s probably a good thing, because I’m gradually coming to the very definite conclusion that the biggest problem that humanity has is top-down control… and while 2 million/50,000 still looks pretty expensive to me, it does mean that you don’t need to be a corporation the size of GM to do it… and it’s companies like GM and their deliberate sabotage of renewables that have created a large number of the problems we face today – whether they be wars in oily countries, or a sky gone so oily that the ice-caps are melting
Someone pointed out recently that the only types of electric vehicles that seem to get designed are teapots, or supercars. I wonder… if cars are evolving into two different sexes? Not that women necessarily only like teapot cars mind… but… I have noticed that they quite like cars that look like bugs or little (big) animals.
Anyway. The car above is definitely a bloke car… a 15 year-old bloke car – which is to say, it’s designed to impress other boys, rather than women.
It’s like a distributed, mechanical-turk-style application where people can spend a few idle minutes, hours (whatever) doing some small bit of voluntary work… via iPhone
It sucks because it’s via iPhone. Everything else about it is great.
There are a couple of reasons why I find this so interesting….
1) In my experience, people are really reluctant to hand over money, but will volunteer time. Lots of it. I can’t quite figure this one, but it seems to be what happens. Asking for donations (in my experience) is a total waste of time compared to “could anyone help me with”… some actual bit of work
2) I think we need to get away from debt-based currency. Back in the late middle-ages, they had grain/corn-exchanges – grain being a commodity that absolutely everyone needed and used. I don’t think such a thing exists today. I’ve come across a guy trying to design a system based around energy… joules instead of dollars – but he’s so verbose that I can’t figure out what he’s on about. And so it won’t work.
Micro-volunteering offers the distinct possibility of exchanging labour for labour… in an arena which isn’t automatically a zero-sum game. A bit like the Japanese granny-care setup that Douglas Rushkoff occasionally goes on about. This isn’t what this app is set up to do, but it has potential.
3) I think there is huge, powerful potential in one-to-one communication from the walled-world, to the outside.
I think that conscious attention… the knowledge that it’s there, the act of giving it, is going to be a LOT more powerful than simply punting money at charities once a month etc. Eventually, something is going to do to the big global charities, what P2P did to the RIAA et al – and I think that is going to be a real world-changer.
Theoretically, the mechanisms for this already exist – but there’s something about working together that really pulls people together. Social apps doing nothing but chattering doesn’t have quite the same effect.
And I don’t think it’s a one way street. The West is suffering from chronic existential problems and depression. I think value is going to flow both ways. Big time.
And I think this app is an example of how it could start… just someone sitting at a bus stop helping out with a bit of translation… giving some advice, saying “hi, what’s the weather like where you are?”
4) This is also a mechanism that would support the Crowd-Sourced Eco-Monitoring that I was on about earlier. I think there are fairly huge benefits to this as well.
From Halfland – Shelley Noble who appears to be making an entire stop-motion movie out of… stuff. It looks amazing – and you can send in your own fish to make cameo appearances etc.
The Great Work if ever there was one. One of my favorite hobbies is going to film school for no particular reason (I go to film schools a lot). The most I’ve ever managed to pull off is a little 10 minute thing – and the amount of work that went into that was daunting to say the least. Taking on a whole feature-length movie (where you’re creating an entire world from scratch) leaves me feeling slightly faint.
There seems to be a bit of this going on at the moment – open-sourcery of film-making I mean. It’ll be interesting when things start hitting the screen.
I have this nagging doubt about Movies 2.0 though. Having spent about a decade on a stage, standing (with spindly legs) between a Statocaster and a load of massive amplifiers, I’m a believer in chemistry….
…in music. There’s something about music where the sum is almost always greater than the parts – and the parts don’t even need to like each other, or be playing the same song (in their minds). You often need the clash of personalities for it to work.
This (almost) never happens in painting. Writing?… sometimes (the smaller the group the better). Serial-killing?… yup, often happens in pairs; Movies?…
… movies need a lot of people. Robert Rodriguez may have been able to get away with 3 back in the day, but… generally, movies need a lot of spare hands. This isn’t the same thing as crowd-sourcing though. Although movies need a lot of people, you still need insane geniuses driving it, otherwise artwork-by-committee syndrome kicks in, and/or nothing gets done. Another thing I’ve noticed (and this may well be down to the politics of the business) with most of my favorite films the director is also the writer.
I’m not sure that movie making as we currently know it is a democratic process really – in fact I suspect it might be the LEAST democratic process that (in The West at least) we allow.
Web 2.0 it ain’t. There are strong drives (and incentives) though towards… turning this avalanche of innovation and expression that’s currently blossoming all over the place into some sort of conduit for stories which have more cultural/narrative value than a billion people ranting at webcams. It’s starting to happen I think… people are trying things.
The reason all this has come tumbling out is that I’ve been trying to get my head around the Purefold thing.
It’s… err…. “Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.”
There’s a video on the link above, which explains it a bit more, but every time I go back, I get more confused about what it actually (once you get past all the brand-speak) “is”. As far as I can tell (through these cynical eyes) right now it’s a Friendfeed group (which covers similar ground to this here blog) which is skimmed by the production company for ideas/scripts or whatever to make product-placement films out of… which are fed back to the subscribers, taking the role of focus-groups.
Personally I think it will work… which is to say, it will work in the way that all this crowd-sourced creativity works, and that is, a small number of insane geniuses float to the top – and the crowd-sourcing of focus-groupery has a much greater chance of picking winners than Hollywood normally does – partly because it’s a type of focus-groupery that also contains its own built-in viral evangelising (which is cheating). The focus group becomes the sales team.
I quite like the idea of a whole world being created as well – not just a set/setting for a story, but a world in which multiple stories can unfold/interweave. This was the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw Shelley’s thing. If you’ve got all these characters, all this scenery, all this material – it seems a shame to limit it to one story. It’s an extension in some way to the increasing immersiveness trend we’re seeing in films… swimming closer and closer to video games.
I mean why should all the Harry Potter stories be about Harry Potter? (the little git) There’s a whole world to play with there.
So anyway, there it is. A handful of thoughts, thrown like straw up into the wind.
So anyway, I’ve been sitting on this idea of electricity-monitoring for about 10 years now, and thought I had it all figured out…
… and a conversation turned up on the open-manufacturing list recently which led to the Internet 0 thing, which is now 5 years old and appears not to have set the world on fire, or at least not yet.
And I always thought that the killer-app for electricity-monitoring would be being able to control your house from the web. This would be the bribe that would get it through the door – and I missed completely the REAL killer-app, which is that with wified home-automation, you don’t need to have wired-in light-switches – which radically reduces the amount of building effort/cost/expertise etc. The driver isn’t novelty-seeking consumerism, it’s the building trade.
Ten years of thinking about this, and I missed what someone with a different perspective saw immediately. This is why crowd-sourced imagination is a killer-app at a higher level. It doesn’t matter if you’re Einstein or Newton or Da-Vinci… you simply cannot compete with imagination coming from a multiplicity of different perspectives.
How does the saying go? 1 point of perspective is worth 80 points of IQ?
Crowd-sourcing doesn’t work for everything, but it’s very good for perspective… and therefore very good for imagination.
Metacycle is a site where people can upload ideas for repurposing old consumables – they feature (and seem to have the same logos as) the Pen-Connectors in the last post – which is a genius idea if you ask me, especially if you could thread wires through the connectors.
There have been a couple of sites like this of late – forums for “new ideas” which look suspiciously like they’re about to devolve into just-another-design-company-spam location. I think the “design challenges” bit is a great idea – kindof like “what are 20 other potential uses for a paper-clip”. The amount of information about each idea/design seems to be a bit sparse though.
A Ferrari Modulo Pininfarina from 1970 – a pinnacle of the art – absolutely beautiful bit of paleo-futurism which makes me think of Clockwork Orange for some reason.
It makes me feel all futuristic and nostalgic at the same time.
Still. That was yesterday.
A while back I went on gushingly about Local Motors – a car-manufacturer that’s adopted the Threadless Approach, and got punters to design their own cars… a couple of days ago, Eric Hunting (who’s a genius) from the Open-Manufacturing group had this to say about it:
Normally I would jump at this topic, but after looking at this site
I’m afraid I couldn’t do it without my rage getting out of control.
I’m unfortunately afflicted with an Eero Saarinen sort of aesthetic
sensibility. Unnecessary design and decoration tends to piss me off
and cause me to start trance-channeling James Lileks.
The premise is great. The idea of crowdsourcing designs and then
producing them through localized manufacture is very significant. I
really-really-really want to like this project. But their
implementation of this concept….
The first thing that leapt into my mind upon going to this web site
was; “what’s with all these Batmobiles, Hot Wheels cars, George Barris
mutants, and Syd Mead rip-offs?” And then I realized, this is what
they are getting as design submissions from, mostly American
apparently, design students and car enthusiasts. And what’s their
first car going into development? A luxury dune buggy? Do they really
think that is going to have any kind of cultural impact? The fatal
flaw in their concept seems to be the nature of the crowd they’re
crowdsourcing design from. Student car designers today are not
educated in the technology of automobile fabrication. It seems they
may not be getting any engineering education whatsoever anymore. They
are trained in fuzzy aesthetic philosophy (the sort of moronic design
theory that says every car should have a ‘nice face’…) and using
computer graphics programs to render glassy-looking pictures that
generate a ‘wow factor’. These are then thrown at engineering teams
that pick out whatever looks remotely feasible to build with some
hacking for the sake of reality adjustment. So there’s been this
growing tendency in car design toward nothing more than Hot Wheels
novelty cars featuring a lot of SciFi nonsense. No one seems to know
the meaning of the word ‘practical’ anymore. When you crowdsource
designs from this community of industrial illiterates and CARtoons
buffs you get a lot of beautifully rendered gobbldigook that is mostly
infeasible to even prototype, let alone ever function as practical
vehicles. This is why I can’t go to car shows anymore. Contemporary
car design just makes me want to go Shonen Bat on everybody.
Using competitions as reality filters, the founders of this venture
cherry-pick the most feasible designs to prototype. But they seem to
be from the ‘blobject’ school of auto engineering that says cars are
disposable sculptural artifacts where everything beyond the engine
block is ‘decor’ that’s OK to custom-fabricate no matter how wasteful
that may be -otherwise that Speedbuggy/Knightrider mashup Rally
Fighter would have never been taken seriously. I doubt you could even
get a serious functional automobile through their selection process.
(I actually saw one real prospect stuck in their portfolio gallery
that apparently didn’t pass muster -probably because it looked too
sensible to be cool) This dooms them to forever produce futuristic
equivalents of the bloody Plymouth Superbird (the mullet of
automobiles and utter epitome of everything that was ever wrong with
car design…) rather than the next world class vehicle like the VW
Bug. They will learn the hard way that this simply cannot work in a
local production model unless you are resigned to producing the
automotive equivalent of customized expensive designer toys -which
means you’re back to the same model as Ferrari. Detroit gets away with
treating cars as especially wasteful blobjects because of the
ridiculous scale of production. But until 3D printers can generate a
whole car chassis on demand, practical cost-effective local production
demands you treat cars as platforms based on a very small assortment
of standardized chassis (motherboards…) that maximize potential
functionality and are supported by a global industrial ecology of
competitive parts makers. A $50,000 car is absolutely culturally
irrelevant except as some kind of silly objet d’art. So all we really
have here is a kind of upper-class art-car club. I can feel it in my
very bones -if this company lasts 5 years they WILL cover a car in
Swarovski crystals…
Someone needs to tell these folks that making toys is for elves…
Which made me fall about laughing. He’s completely right and I was completely wrong – I hope he doesn’t mind me re-printing this. I did ask but he didn’t reply, so I fall back on my defecto behaviour which is somewhere between asking permission and asking forgiveness.
So there you go kids. You hadn’t figured on that had you? That crowd-sourced design IS actually going to make the world look like MySpace rather than Ikea.
The future’s so bright I have to wear shades.
Still… Phoooaaarrr…
AND it’s got bench-seats in the front so your supermodel girlfriend can drape herself all over you and interfere with your driving causing you to ding it on something that looks like this
while you’re trying to find the exit to the Walmart carpark.
It’s a kindof consumer-union for would be solar-buyers. They get to buy in bulk and advise on local conditions / best setups etc.
I’m quite interested in the retrofitting of green-tech into urban environments – and this could well be a good way of going… because as far as I can see, our various governments are utterly in thrall to the existing systems. Which suck.
An idea that’s been kicking around for a while… but which I first came across on the DIYbio mailing list is that of a Bio-Weathermap.
Basically it’s a way of keeping tabs on what’s going on in the world… by means of local bird-watchers uploading their observations to a central location… and by ‘bird-watcher’, I obviously mean train-spotter, or anyone else who has a fascination with a particular niche etc… and there are a surprisingly large number of these, they’re just not coordinated yet.
Which is Joe DeRisi giving a talk on Virus-Hunting in which he talks about automated diagnosis of virii… using a virus library on a chip… and this…
Jamais Cascio talking about “Tools for building a better world”… in which he suggests the possibility of using cell-phones to monitor… well, everything. The Earth-Witness Project he calls it.
These two concepts coming together could be… well, cool… although Jamais is specifically talking about a de-coupling of observation and analysis. There’s more of a viral push to being able to see the results yourself, straight away etc – especially if there’s some chance you might discover gold… or at least a new species that could be named after you etc.
I’ve been noticing the possibility of cell-phone based distributed monitoring more and more – plugins for phones. One that turned up today is this:
To be honest, I was invisaging something a little bit more like this :
Except a lot smaller – fused or plugged into your phone so you forget it’s there… so people strolling round lakes or fishing in rivers or driving a tractor round their farm etc, can take a couple of seconds out to snap a micro-photo and have it auto-uploaded to a central point where people thousands of miles away can analyse, track etc… to be honest, I just have this picture in my head of an absolutely massive website that looks like this:
It always was about the art… but I’m also interested in resilience… and in the areas where we have in-built, inherent, unavoidable single-points-of-failure… because we only have “one system”… eg:, the biosphere, the internet… we really need to keep an eye on things because the waters ahead are likely to be fairly stormy by all accounts.
Or more accurately, cellphones are telephones that have been swallowed from the inside (without anyone noticing) by computers… so they’re basically computers… they’re just a bit lacking on the peripheral front at the moment.
Which is quite remarkable given that this thing (as far as I can gather) started out as a platform for the crowd-sourced creation of cutsey wutsey little fowest cweatures.
As noted by Replicatorinc, imagine what will happen with this level of imagination is connected up to automated fabbing facilities… this is beginning to happen… but it’s still a very labour-intensive process.
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