So it seems that various people have decided that Lego Inc. isn’t fulfilling their Legolian needs, so they’ve started making their own designs.

There’s a litte video from Wired that goes on about the reasons for this… and about the rapid democratisation of manufacturing generally.

There is still quite a long way to go before this becomes a desktop process… or even a “local-key-cutting-shop” process… but talented individuals and small companies are no longer blocked from the game.

So Lego, that started out as a kid’s toy, has now evolved into something else… a platform within which evolution can take place, regardless of whether the originating company likes it. There was a wave of this several years ago – as described by Eric Von Hippel (4th video down).

He describes how when Lego released Mindkits, it was instantly taken up and massively extended by hackers and enthusiasts.. and Lego didn’t really know what to do, so they did nothing… and lo, a whole new area of quite fantastic innovation was born. Search for “lego machine” any time on youtube, and you’ll see a random sample of an incredible array of daftly innovative gadgets… that people are doing for fun. The level of innovation here is absolutely off the scale of anything that a private company could achieve.

(My favourite from today is a domino stacking machine)

Brilliant. And it’s been viewed about 700,000 times… gives TV advertising a fairly serious run for its money. And its free.

So anyway… according to the first video, Lego aren’t in the habit of making weapons, and have to care about things like copyright anality. Small players don’t. Small players can scamper between the dinosaurs legs, chittering to each other in their winter coats.

I think what’s interesting here though is that users/uber-fans have moved from “making things out of lego” to “making the actual lego itself”… doing a twostep around 20th century notions of “idea ownership”… which lego may or may not take exception to at some point, but they seem to be tolerating it for now… and really they ought to, because it all feeds back into the dominance of it as a platform for rapid-prototyping and generally messing about, being a kid.

But the uses can be more serious as well – there is for example, movement afoot to make an open-source printer (and ain’t that an industry that seriously deserves to get the shit kicked out of it) – and I noticed that in the conversation people were talking about rubber lego wheels possibly being ideal for making the paper roll forward.

One of my pet theories is that the killer-app of the hardware revolution will be software – and it will be something that’s a bit like lego – that allows people to design, then make things that they know will fit together because the connecting parts are standardised shapes. I’m starting to entertain nagging notions that this might not just be lego-like, it might actually BE lego.

Personally I would have thought mecano would be a better bet – more flexible and easier to make (the tolerances that go into lego… “stipples” is pretty insane)… but lego’s got this whole cute-fest thing going on, and it doesn’t present such a blank-slate as mecano. People are already doing it… there just isn’t the learning-curve-destroying-DIY software available yet.

So there you go. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

(fae)

A proper artist apparently : Walter Wick. Really good art, like really good hallucinations generally, is quite often instantly recogniseable… a distillation of something you already know. Really, really good art annoys the sort of people I hate. The only way to improve it from there is to make it really, really big.

I don’t think this needs that though. It’s hits closer by being made out of actual toys.

We used to do this when we were kids. Make flimsy castles then use other toys to knock them over. And lo, I have become Nickwit, destroyer of worlds.

ok, ok, it might not actually be proper art – it might just be someone taking the piss… but who’s to know?

Because anything to do with Cellular Automata is cool.

These are one-off light sensitive lights… the change according to their environment… and if you put them together, they change according to each other.

And that is the thing with little automous feedback systems when they get together… the inevitably talk to each other, and inevitably create higher-levels of complexity – and that is why fractals look the way they do, and why you get those repeating triangular patterns on textile cones

From Leiteq, in The Netherlands

I love this stuff.

There’s a whole site for automatons here:

and needless to say there are hundreds of them on youtube.

“I could do that” is the spirit of the age – or one of them at least. It’s what sets us apart from our TV-watching cultural ancestry.

There’s something a bit spooky about these things

Reminds me of Czech stop-motion cult-bloke, Jan Švankmajer who made Alice and Wonderland and Faust among others.

There appears to be a whole community of people making these clocks… the plans are available (at a price) though I’m not sure that they’re CNCable – which is a pity because otherwise you could Ponoko them. (have I just used ponoko as a verb?)

My brother (who is a rocket scientist) occasionally makes things like these. I think they’re amazing.

I’m not sure what this one does – but it reminds me of Edward de Bono’s “Dog Excercising Machine” – except this one’s a “bloke with a red shirt and a moustache exercising machine” – which is even better than a dog exercising machine.

There are loads of these on youtube as well:

Thousands and thousands of hours of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. There’s some obscure irony hiding somewhere in the fact that people are transferring time-wasting from TV watching to time-wasting making time-wasting machines that mark time.

Not that it is actually time-wasting of course. I think these are fucking brilliant – and playing is not a waste of time, it’s experimenting with boundries and reality and whatnot. It’s how we learn.

Edible cloth versions of photographic microplanets:
(from)

Ok, they’re not edible – unless you’re a goat or a baby, which is apparently who they’re designed for. Babies I mean. Kids.

If they were designed for people who might not try to eat them, you could make them even better by making the planet bit out of furry velcro stuff and the trees and cars and whatnot having prickly velcro bits on their bases. Then people could make their own things to stick onto them. Maybe. Alternatively you could have a metal-cored ball and neo-magnets.

Or a lego one. You could play spherical chess. The world’s your oyster, face it. Go forth and multiply and stop wasting my time. I’m busy. Call me back when you need a flood or a plague or something.

Another tiny step for man etc. Home-Made Space Travel – There’s this weird aspect of the Science Fiction Singularity – where every science fiction artefact is eventually created (usually by fans who are also engineers) in real life. I’m not sure how this fits into that, but it’s related.

from gizmodo

… some peeps have built a 1/10 scale Saturn V Rocket (36 ft tall) and are launching it in Maryland US on the 25th of this month.

Which is pretty cool.

I can remember when the first one went up – I was at kindergarten in New Zealand… and the teachers made a giant one that went all the way up to the ceiling. I was incredibly impressed.

This is almost a continuation of “everything comes true in the end”… the thing where every science fiction technology is eventually created… only this one isn’t science fiction… unless you talk to conspiracy theorists etc. It would be quite funny if a load of amateurs did go up to the moon to find that actually, the first time was staged, and actually, they’re the first ones there.

It would be truly tragic on all sorts of levels if someone managed to make a vitamin-free reprap out of lego before the offspring of Darwin et al managed it. Can’t see it happening in a hurry though… or more accurately, if/when we get to a point where a 3D printer or CNC router can produce shiny plastic things to the same engineering tolerances of Lego… then the world will truly have changed. Big time.