This week, I interviewed the designer and maker Brendan Dawes for my podcast, Looking Sideways. I wrote up some of the interview here.

Brendan’s known for early interactive web projects like Psycho Studio, that allows users to remix Hitchcock’s famous shower scene themselves. He’s also known for his physical projects, such as the Moviepeg and Popa phone accessories, and devices that cross the digital/physical divide, such as the Happiness machine, an internet-connected printer that prints random happy thoughts from people across the web.

I was particularly interested in his motivations for making physical things:

“I think we should be embracing digital a lot more than we currently do. Digital is hard to touch. It exists in this space that you never actually see. Creating physical things for me has always been about trying to manifest that,” he says.

“One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a physical box for your Twitter archive. It’s got a little display and a rotary control, and you can quickly scroll backwards and forwards and view past tweets. It’s totally self-contained. You can put it on a shelf and turn it on, and you might look at stuff in the past. Otherwise, what are you going to do with that Twitter archive. You’ve got it, so what? You’re never going to look at it.

“That’s what’s great about physical things. They can be on a shelf, or at home, and they can interrupt your day, and remind you of something just because they’re a physical thing. When they’re on your hard drive, or your phone, or a server somewhere, then you don’t bump into them.”

We also spoke about how makers can get their work out there, and in particular, turn personal maker projects into calling cards for client commissions or other collaborations:

“Cinema Redux is a really good example of publishing your stuff even though you might not think it’s perfect. When is it ever perfect?” he says.

“I just published it on my site in 2004. A few blogs picked up on it. John Walters, who’s the editor of Eye magazine, wrote a piece for the Guardian about it.

“Over the years, it got noticed occasionally, and people would link to it. It would be on Digg, and bring my server down. And then in 2007, I got an email from MoMA in New York. They were putting this exhibition together called Design and the Elastic Mind, and they wanted to feature 2 pieces that I’d made. And I was completely blown away. I don’t even have an art qualification. I still remember that email.

“We went to New York, we went to the opening night, there were several thousand people there, and it continues to be ‘a thing’. When people refer to that kind of aesthetic, they call it cinema redux. I did a solo show last year. So it’s been an amazing thing for me, and that’s just come out of playing, and publishing it.

“I’m always surprised at who’s watching this stuff. You just never know. And it wasn’t an instant thing, it took 3 years.

“My remit to myself is to put stuff out there that gets talked about. It’s not just about getting clients, far from it, but it’s stuff that gets attention, and hopefully attracts the right kind of people to work with.

“The data visualisation thing I did for EE – they had seen some of my other visualisation work, and just approached me to do what turned out to be a really great project. But when I started on that, I didn’t know what I was going to make, and they had to trust me.

“Instagram is interesting. If you’re someone making stuff, trying to get work — the other day, I just posted something on Instagram. Within 5 minutes, someone commissioned that design for a book. Now I haven’t got hundreds of thousands of followers. It was just that this guy who was following me, he runs a festival – he just happened to see it. And it was literally just a photograph of a screen. That was just something I was just playing around with for myself. It shows, you just do not know where this stuff’s going to come from. So push it out there. Use all those channels. They’re all channels for possibilities.”

Listen to the full interview here, or get the podcast in iTunes.

We talk about making digital stuff tangible, design, art and simplicity, remixes and supercuts, and how makers can get their work out into the world for people to see.

I’ve written up some of the podcast on the blog. You can hear the full interview here.

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Links for this episode

• BrendanDawes.com
• Antirom
• Programming languages: Processing and Squirrel
• Mbed
• Project: FIDO (Frugal Internet Data Object)
• Armin Hofmann: Graphic Design Manual (secondhand)
• Project: Psycho Studio
• Project: Cinema Redux (and original Guardian article, and MoMA exhibition)
• Vitamin Beat, Brendan’s one-time musical alter ego
• Coldcut and Steinski
• Everything is a Remix
• Supercuts, in particular Three point landing and Let’s enhance (and my favourite scene from Blade Runner), and Just the breathing
• Project: Popa
• Project: EE – Digital city portraits
• Brendan on Twitter and Instagram

I’m sharing my slides up here, along with an audio track I recorded this morning.

Download it here.

You can also see it on Slideshare here.

Some links to things I mentioned in the talk:

• DIY meths burner and pot stand/wind shield
• BuildBrighton Hackspace (Brighton’s community workshop – open nights every Thursday, just drop in around 8pm and have a look)
• Brighton Mini Maker Faire
• Photo credit: Barnoid on Flickr
• My circuit-bent Speak & Spell
• Brendan Dawes talking about ‘filling rectangles’ on the Looking Sideways podcast, episode 3 (Check back in a couple of days for this, or subscribe in iTunes)
• Nat Morris’s @feedtoby project
• Glengarry Glen Ross (a stressful workplace). I was surprised by how few people had seen this film. It is stunning. In my top 5. Go watch it now.
• Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh and the Sugru story
• My DIY stove project photos
• My other project write-ups
• Instructables, a community of makers sharing projects
• Cupcake photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

After the talk, someone asked a question about where to find materials, and I mentioned skip diving, but completely forgot about Freecycle, which Lisa James kindly reminded me about today. Definitely worth checking out, though you have to be quick to get the good stuff.

Thanks to David for recommending me, Toby for the invite, Tom and Mark for their great talks, and everyone who came for braving the rain.

You Lookin' At Me? Reflections on Google Glass, by Jan Chipchase at AllThingsD.

I want you to try a little experiment. Find somewhere where you can sit and observe people interact with one another. Pick somewhere just out of the throng — the edge of a cafe looking in, a park bench, a doorway close to a market. It’s easier if you choose somewhere you don’t know so well, you’ll have less to unlearn.
Give yourself 30 minutes to view and reflect upon the scene in front of you: Who visits that space, and why; the differences in ritual greetings, and indeed whether or not a person is greeted; how people project who they are; things that signify status and social hierarchy; where objects are placed; the level of interaction with those objects when not in use. What can you see being documented online or off? What can you imagine being documented? Pay particular attention to things that fit your definition of “technology” and reflect upon the things in front of you that once fit this definition but no longer do (my list of were-once-technologies includes the pencil, the wristwatch and the smartphone).

If you’re close enough to other people, you’ll overhear conversations plus bits of conversations that the speakers will allow you to hear, raised, projected, sotto voce and in whispers, combined with body language all serving to emphasize what is said, and the intent of what is communicated. How much of that conversation is directed at the “listener” and how much of it is directed at others in proximity, including you? This rich social choreography is playing out hundreds of billions of times a day across our planet, and is as subtle and delicate as anything appearing in a BBC2 nature documentary.

Of course, people and systems are already capturing (and channeling) content and data in this space in the form of photos, video, background noise on phone or video calls, who is connected to what, and what they are doing. It is likely that Google, Microsoft and Nokia’s Navteq (to name but three) have already systematically mapped this space and are serving up street views online. The difference with Glass is that it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether it can support sustained recording for long periods or not; what matters is that the form factor supports this, that it could at some point, and that we all know Google is in the business of selling ads against insight drawn from large volume of data. Continuous, indiscriminate recording in this space is the dragnet fishing of data collection — it’s a destructive technology, a conversation- and privacy-killer.

Back to our experiment. Take in the scene in front of you. Who owns this space, both legally and figuratively? Who has the rights to do what? By what authority? Who enforces that authority? How do these rights differ for regulars or a first-time visitor? What are the ways people signal the beginning or the end of an activity? And how does that signalling make something more or less acceptable? The obvious clue to activities people have deemed socially unacceptable are often found on hand-scribbled “do not” signs, as in “staff will refuse to serve customers who are on their mobile phone,” or “do not ask for credit.” The more sustained the infringement, the more official-looking the sign.

Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity.4 Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven.

And he continues to delve much deeper into the possible trajectories of this kind of technology. A great read.

No experience necessary, just polymathematics — GigaOM Pro.

Some highlights for me: Thomas Friedman at the NYT:

I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it. If that’s true, I asked Wagner, what do young people need to know today?

“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”

Stowe Boyd at GigaOM:

I recently wrote about research from the Federal Reserve of New York, which shows that over the past 30 years, the number of workers employed involved in routine occupations — following explicit instructions and obeying well-defined rules — has dropped by 20%, matched almost exactly by the growth of nonroutine work, which flexibility, creativity, and problem solving.

…

So, businesses today and in the future will be hiring folks for their capacity to learn and inhabit the role they are hiring for. The role is becoming more of a hashtag, and less of a definition of scope or the implied resume of the person. It is no longer a slot that a person fills, and not really even an occupation to be occupied. Titles like ‘Product Ethnographer’, ‘Researcher’, or ‘Chief Digital Officer’ now feel more like map headings, indicating the realms we are exploring.

On this episode, I talk with Jude Pullen, a product design engineer, and also the creator of the Design Modelling website, a series of tutorials, techniques and project ideas for working with low cost prototyping materials, mostly cardboard. Jude also runs live workshops where he shows people how to make models to express and share ideas.

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Jude’s Solder Buddy project

Jude helped me compile the links below, roughly in the same order that we covered this ground in the podcast. Loads of good stuff in here, so do check them out. If you’re listening, I strongly recommend you check out the design modelling website first, so you know what the hell we’re talking about.

Links

Design modelling

Design Modelling
The Beginning of Design Modelling:- IDEO’s Stories of Making

Influences

Spencer Nugent – Sketch-A-Day and ID Sketching
Better by Design (Seymour & Powell)
Scott Wilson: Bill’s Design Talks + Tik Tok Watch on Kickstarter
Bitsa (BBC TV): here and here
Thomas Heatherwick & “Making” book

Workshops

Sugru ‘Meet the Makers’ – Video of Design Modelling Workshops
Capital One Workshop (Earth Day)
IDEO Make-a-Thon

Online Projects

Raspberry Pi Case (Cardboard)
(Award-Winning) Solder Buddy (Plastic Sheet): Instructables & YouTube tutorials
Boot Box (mini project)

Previous Work

Design work ranging from fire-fighting robots in California to whisky packaging in Norway, and from assistive devices for the elderly of Hong Kong to new product innovation for Dyson, UK”. Portfolio here.
Pressure Alert for an Endotracheal Tube: Full Design Journal Download (PDF) and journal article (PDF)

Materials

Sugru, and Jane’s story
Design Modelling + Sugru
Bare Conductive paint
Plastazote
Wood’s Metal
Size (Animal Glue)
Institute of Making
The Art of Looking Sideways

I spoke to Eddie Kirkby (of the Manufacturing Institute) and Haydn Insley (fab lab manager) to find out how the fab lab movement is spreading into the UK.

Photo by Urban Splash

Manchester’s fab lab is owned and run by the Manufacturing Institute, a charity that supports manufacturing business in the UK. It opened in 2010 after one of the Institute’s board members met fab lab pioneer Neil Gershenfeld on a visit to the USA, and brought the idea back with him.

It’s safe to assume that most readers of this blog will be familiar with the idea of a fab lab. For those that aren’t, here’s what MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms FAQ has to say:

Fab labs provide widespread access to modern means for invention. They began as an outreach project from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). CBA assembled millions of dollars in machines for research in digital fabrication, ultimately aiming at developing programmable molecular assemblers that will be able to make almost anything. Fab labs fall between these extremes, comprising roughly fifty thousand dollars in equipment and materials that can be used today to do what will be possible with tomorrow’s personal fabricators.

Fab labs have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the North of Norway. Activities in fab labs range from technological empowerment to peer-to-peer project-based technical training to local problem-solving to small-scale high-tech business incubation to grass-roots research. Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.

Future Manufacturing

There has been a long, slow decline in the manufacturing sector in the UK, felt hardest in the once-dominant industrial cities of the North.

The loss of power and relevance (however temporary that may prove to be) has also resulted in a declining interest in manufacturing amongst young people and entrepreneurs. If, in the last couple of decades, you were deciding what to educate yourself in, or where to start a business, chances are you’d not spend too long looking into the manufacturing industry.

The Manufacturing Institute wants to change that, and sees the fab lab movement as a means to that end. With access to tools for rapid prototyping and small-scale fabrication, plus a globally-connected network of customers, suppliers and inventors and expert peers, a new sense of opportunity is emerging:

“We want to create a culture of people who think more about creating and making things, not just going in a shop and buying things. So if we create a culture where people think, I’ve got a problem to solve, I can actually solve it myself, rather than just buying something off the shelf, that starts to create a culture of innovation.

“We’re trying to build a ladder that takes people from a very young age, keep them engaged as they go through, and develop them into young entrepreneurs, who can start new businesses”, says Eddie.

Many of the people sensing this opportunity don’t come from the manufacturing industry. They’re makers, or creatives; people scratching their own itch. The fab lab is introducing new people to manufacturing ‘by stealth’. And the Manufacturing Institute see this kind of engagement as key to changing attitudes, and not just in Manchester:

“We get about 2500 visitors a year. That’s 2500 people engaging with manufacturing – having a positive engagement with manufacturing. So we think, if we had 30 fab labs in the UK, that’s 70,000-80,000 people engaging with manufacturing”, says Eddie.

A perfect example of innovation born in fab labs is the Nifty MiniDrive, a simple yet ingenious device that fits into the SD card slot of Apple laptops, but holds a min-SD card inside, invisibly adding up to 64GB of storage to your laptop.

The project was a runaway success on Kickstarter, shooting past its funding target of $11,000 to raise over $380,000. While the project team are now dealing with the challenges Kickstarter success brings, they started design and prototyping in the Manchester Fablab.

“This is what we want to happen in the Fablab. People come in to solve a problem of their own, and then realise it has commercial applications, and they can take it outside the Fablab to a commercial business and create wealth. That’s the real success story that we want to see”, says Eddie.

Accessibility

A lot of thought is given at the fab lab to getting started; removing the obstacles — real or perceived — that stop people from trying things out. One of these is the difficulty of learning how to use the machines. Addressing this fear is at the heart of the fab lab ethos:

“As fablabs have developed, the equipment has evolved to be very robust, and reasonably easy to use. It’s deliberately low-tech; it’s not cutting edge, most of it could be found in universities or schools or colleges. It’s deliberately chosen to be a low barrier to entry.

“Probably the most difficult piece of equipment we’ve got is the large CNC milling machine. We can teach someone to be competent on that in 2 hours. The other equipment, they can learn themselves in an hour or less”, says Eddie.

Haydn adds: “You can get a laser cutter for £2,000 – £3,000. Ours cost £15,000, but it’s more robust, more friendly, you don’t need a water cooler, and so on. The machines have been chosen because they’re fairly robust, and not much — within reason — is going to go wrong with them. So they’re good machines to learn on.”

In contrast to formal education, learning at the fab lab is broken down into the smallest possible units. You learn what you need to get the next job down: it’s a just-in-time approach, that fits the rapid prototyping ethos:

“We’re trying to break down this idea that you go into one particular subject, and you study that subject — learn everything there is to know about it — and then you come out as a mechanical engineer, or a creative artist, etc. We’re trying to help people learn a bit of everything, and learn it when they need it. So rather than do a 4 year course on one subject, and then go out to industry and use 10% of it, we’ll say, ‘What do you want to make now?’ and we’ll teach you how to make it. ‘What do you want to make next?’ and we’ll teach you that too. That way, people build knowledge slowly, and it stays with them. It’s a much more useful way of doing things”, says Eddie.

A global network

While a pioneer in the UK, the Manchester fab lab is part of a global movement that saw its first outpost spring up in Boston, USA, back in 2003. Eddie is quick to acknowledge the opportunity that comes from being part of a global network of labs:

“One Fablab on its own is great, but it’s not going to have that much impact. But if we have 30 labs UK-wide, that are all working closely together, they can do things en masse, with a much bigger impact. If we have 150 labs worldwide, we’ve got a huge global impact, potentially. We’re trying to create a whole new ecosystem around fab labs, and a whole new commerce model as well.

“Historically, ideas were local and and the manufacturing was done globally. Whereas it’s moving to the other way around now. Ideas can go global, through the internet, and the manufacturing can be local”, he says.

A designer can put a product or design file online and a customer can buy that from anywhere in the world. And that purchase can take several different forms, from a fabrication commissioned from the original designer in their local fab lab, to a locally manufactured product, made by the customer or a local fabricator operating from a nearby fab lab.

“If you’re a designer or product developer, you’ve got instant access to a global market of buyers. If you’re a buyer, you can buy things, and you can either make it yourself if you want, or you can have people make it, but it’s made locally.

“You’ve got a social and a sustainable impact locally: local materials, local manufacturers and people working on it. You’ve got the environmental impact, because you’re not shipping things all round the world. And there’s a social impact because people can go and make it themselves, if they want to”, he adds.

And this principle of global ideas / local production also opens up new possibilities for innovation driven by local ingenuity and constraints:

“If you come into the Fablab on an open day, and use it free-of-charge, you share what you’re doing with the Fablab community, so it’s an open design / open innovation principle. That’s what you give back to the community; you document your designs, your machine settings, your materials. The idea being that someone in a Fablab in Ghana, for instance, can use your work. They’ve got the same machines, the same equipment, the same materials, they can reproduce it and maybe improve it, and then share it back”, says Eddie.

Manchester fab lab is in the Chips Building in New Islington, Manchester. Fridays or Saturdays are open days, with free access for all. They’re @fablabmcr on twitter.

Andrew Sleigh is a maker, researcher and writer living in Brighton UK. He co-founded Brighton Mini Maker Faire, the UK’s first Mini Maker Faire, and he’s on twitter too.

Links for this episode:

• Stickers on Boxes
• Stuart Bannocks (personal, and Shopwork)
• Paper Camp
• Nick Foster, Near Future Laboratory
• Hopeful monsters (at Wikipedia, and Berg)
• Critical design (at Wikipedia, and Dunne and Raby)
• Vought V-173 “Flying Pancake”
• Archigram
• Liam Young, Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today
• Alessi, the ‘invisible line’
• Anti Design Festival
• Lego Serious Play

I think my favourite line is uttered by Stuart about 45 mins in: “Perhaps everyone should be a paper architect for an hour a day”.

This episode was not sponsored by DuckDuckGo.

This podcast is an experiment (are you noticing a theme round here?), but on the off-chance it becomes a regular gig, you may want to subscribe here: http://andrewsleigh.com/feed/podcast.

If you’d like to be in a future episode, get in touch.

In March last year, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino registered a new limited company in London, and booked a booth at CES, the consumer electronics trade show, taking place 10 months later. She had no team, and only a dated prototype product that she had designed back in 2005.

“I thought what’s the biggest kick in the ass that I can possibly give myself? And that’s paying £8,000 for a booth in Las Vegas.”

The product, which now bears little resemblance to that original design, is called Good Night Lamp. It’s a light in the shape of a house, that connects to your home wi-fi network, and through that to its family of smaller, connected lamps which you can give to friends and family around the world. When you turn your big lamp on, so do the little ones, wherever they are. It’s a simple way of communicating to loved ones living remotely.

Good Night Lamp version 1.0. All photos courtesy Good Night Lamp

A balance between simplicity and hackability

Alexandra is well-known in the UK and abroad as a figure in the internet of things (IoT) community. Her twitter name, @iotwatch, rather gives it away, and she’s taken on a role as an IoTcatalyst and enabler, organising the London Internet of Things meetup, amongst other community-focused activities. And the Good Night Lamp sounds like a classic IoT product. But Alexandra prefers not to talk about it that way:

“I don’t tell the internet of things story to potential customers. Because it’s not essential to an understanding of what the product does. I tend to skip beyond that. I tend to tell stories around the Good Night Lamp that are far more about feeling connected to someone when they’re in a different timezone; feeling connected to someone who doesn’t have as much technology literacy; enabling people to sync up whenever they’re available to talk to each other.

“In a way the technology is boring; what we’re doing isn’t rocket science … People just forget about the magic of how it works, they just go, oh yeah, my mum lives in another country and actually that would be super-handy.”

The stories she tells about Good Night Lamp are shaped by the vision she has for the lamp. It’s a domestic product, rather than a gadget, or a computing device:

“My interest is in bringing something to the mass market, and at mass market price, and in large quantities, to change people’s ideas about what technology can be in their homes, and what technology is about.

“That’s another thing that informed the materials we’re using: wood, plastics; it feels like a very warm product, as opposed to something that’s extremely shiny, like a gadget. It feels closer to Ikea than it does to Apple,” says Alexandra.

That’s not to say she isn’t aware of the benefits of making the device hackable, rather it’s about finding the right balance, focusing on the core customer, while catering to other groups, like geeks and makers.

“If there’s a case for it to do more, I’d rather it came from people who take it apart and do what they want with it. Rather than try to build too much complexity into a product that naturally should just be able to do one thing, and one thing really well.

“We’re going to hide in a whole bunch of things, technological Easter eggs as it were, for someone to just figure out, things like building on top of an RGB LED but just using it on white, and then letting people go, ‘Oh wait, I can do colour signalling; I can connect it up to GitHub so when I get a ticket, or someone forks my code, or something happens I get a little red house,’ say. And an API’s absolutely on the cards.

“Those are things we’ll never talk about on the packaging of the product, but we’ll definitely build in.”

The Arduino invasion

This focus on making a simple consumer product may be a little surprising when you consider Alexandra’s background. Born in Canada, but brought up in Europe and the Middle-East, she discovered design while at school in Kuwait:

“I thought this is awesome, I want to do this for the rest of my life. Which is a good thing to get into when you’re 14,” she says.

She moved back to Canada, and took a product design course at the Université de Montréal, but after finishing, decided North America was not for her, and went on to take her Masters at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy. The school, in its short lifetime (between 2001 and 2005), attracted leading academics, designers and researchers, not least of which was Massimo Banzi, who introduced Alexandra to early versions of the prototyping board he and others were developing, called Arduino.

After graduating, and spending a year working in Amsterdam, Alexandra moved to London to set up a business inspired in part by the work she had been doing on connected devices at IDII. Tinker, as it was called, was a studio that researched and made technology bridging the digital-physical divide, taking on work for advertising agencies, big technology brands, retail and cultural clients. But they started off by running the first Arduino workshops in the UK, in early 2007. They were also the first distributors of the boards in the UK:

“I packed Arduinos and shields every day from my flat in Hackney. It was all done so inefficiently it’s almost laughable. I ended up buying envelopes at inflated prices from a corner stationery shop and going to the post office with these massive Ikea bags of stuff, not even printing postage online at that time.”

The practice grew around the Arduino platform, with clients seeing the opportunity, just as makers do, for devices that bridge the digital/physical divide.

“The Arduino was a means to an end. Once you understand the capability of cheap electronics, then you understand how easily you can come up with ideas you can prototype, that then can become products for your company. That side of the business always interested me massively.

“I always knew the Arduino was a stepping stone into a world where people could make things very quickly. The real challenge lies beyond the Arduino, but in our practice, in the studio work, we never really needed to do anything more than that.”

While the work was exciting, the business wasn’t financially viable, and Tinker closed its doors in December 2010.

Going to the end of an idea

With the Tinker team dispersed and working on other projects, Alexandra turned her attention back to the lamp prototype she had designed at IDII.

“When Berg announced they were doing Little Printer, and Alice Taylor announced she was doing Makielab, I thought fuck it, what am I waiting for? Because the Good Night Lamp had been an idea that I always wanted to spend time and energy on. I thought, you know what, I just have to do this now, I just have to try it out and see what happens, because otherwise, it’s going to be one of things that I talk about with really doing anything about it. And I’m not one of those people. I’d rather investigate something to the point of killing it if need be, or making it blossom, ideally. Really going to the end of an idea, rather than just letting it lie.”

Which brings us to the £8,000 booth at CES, a seven year old prototype product and a 10 month window to make it ready for Vegas.

An early priority was redesigning the product to make it easier to manufacture. The tooling for the moulded plastic body of the original design would have cost up to £75,000 in Europe. So working with furniture designer Tom Cecil, the team set about simplifying the idea, the form and the materials.

The current design is based on a single piece of veneered MDF, which is CNC-milled down to the veneer, and then wrapped around the internal components so there is no external glueing needed.

The team’s work to lower manufacturing cost was also driven by a desire to focus on what they considered most important:

“Any design that you make, you have to assume that someone else will get on that bandwagon. So where are you crystallising value? What makes things difficult to copy? In our case, right now, it’s not the product per se, it’s the software infrastructure we’re building around it, and the way in which the lamps are connected,” says Alexandra.

They’re also looking for investment. Like many hardware startups, they turned to Kickstarter, but failed to meet their funding goal. Alexandra is sanguine about it:

“It wasn’t successful, and I don’t mind that too much, because we ended up engaging with the people who had promised us money – 500 or so people, who really cared about what we were doing – extremely enthusiastic. Two days after, we opened up a store, we took pre-orders and gave our backers a 10% discount, because we didn’t have to give Kickstarter 10%, so we thought let’s respect that, and try to look for funding elsewhere.”

Of course, funding is limited, partly because many investors are yet to be convinced there is money in IoT, also because the investment model for hardware is different from software and web services. And for hardware startups coming from an open maker culture, the protection of designs and IP can also be a problem:

“The assumption right now is, once you get to the point of wanting to make a business, that you’ve never told anyone about the idea you’ve been working on, because you’ve saved up £15,000 to write a patent. Are you out of your mind?! I don’t have a patent for Good Night Lamp, and I’m starting to seriously question whether I should find the extra £15,000, because it’s such a part of how the investment community sees value.

“That’s something you don’t get told when you’re tinkering around with an Arduino, but you should probably consider.”

While Alexandra is intentionally building a business around a mass-market product, this collision of two worlds – the open world of maker culture, and the (to some degree) closed world of commercial product development – can cause problems for any maker with aspirations to move their project from one world to the other:

“The first things that you’re asked about are the things that are completely anti-hobbyist, like, ‘Do you have a patent?’, ‘Of course I don’t have a patent; I’ve got an Arduino board with 4 LEDs, what are you talking about?’

“We’re going to enter into these conversations, with the world of physical DRM as it were. It needs to happen, because they were made for a world that we don’t live in any more. That’s something that policy-makers could look into: are patents a decent way of evaluating a product’s value, when you’re talking about IoT stuff, when you’re talking about maker communities and you’re talking about encouraging entrepreneurs to move ahead with their ideas?”

Retail is another challenge for a novel product like Good Night Lamp, that doesn’t fit into traditional product categories:

“Is the Good Night Lamp a piece of lighting, or is it a gadget? If you had to put it in a department store, would you put it in lighting, or next to the computers?” asks Alexandra.

But the retail landscape is changing, and that also presents opportunities:

“There’s a real shift happening. Because of the failure of the high street to interest people, there might be opportunities for us to come into the traditional retail space, and make an impact, when people figure out how to sell these kinds of things,” she says.

Trailblazers

The maker movement has been enabled by a community of trailblazers: the people who first built accessible prototyping and fabrication tools; the people who thought it would be a great idea to open a community hackspace where anyone could come to work and learn from their peers; even the people who thought it would be interesting to publish a magazine for makers.

As well as supporting a growing movement of hobbyists working on personal projects, these trailblazers have started to clear pathways for makers who are trying to reach commercial markets.

Alexandra is one of these trailblazers, discovering and grappling with the challenges that makers face on this path: making tooling for mass production, finding investment, protecting IP, moving from a one-off prototype to a viable product. Most of all, having the perseverance to keep on blazing.

Right now, in 2013, it’s difficult to say how much of the trail has been cleared. We can’t see the wood for the trees, as it were. But I’m excited to see so many people taking this path, and I’m optimistic that at some point in the future, we’ll look back at this time and see the path that Alexandra and others have cleared, the path that has helped the maker movement become a driving force in innovation and creativity.

Find out more about Good Night Lamp or Alexandra on her website or on Twitter.

Andrew Sleigh thinks, writes and talks about technology in Brighton, UK, and also on Twitter. He also makes things, which, so far haven’t shown any commercial promise, but he shares them on his blog anyway.

I had a conversation with John Willshire about Vine, and how the spread of 4G connectivity is enabling video as a frictionless medium for sharing ideas and content over the network. Much as domestic broadband and 3G enabled the photo and music sharing that we now take for granted. John is playing with video as a format for doing book reviews, amongst other things.

John’s review of Mike Rohde’s Sketchnote handbook:

He also pointed me towards Jude Pullen, who has a great video series on modelling with cardboard, and I was inspired by his beautifully thought-out setups to try and document some of my own projects in the same way.

While I was in Manchester last week, I visited the Fablab, and interviewed Haydn Insley, the manager, and Eddie Kirkby from the Manufacturing Institute. I’ll be posting those interviews in the next week or two, but one of the subjects we talked about was ‘just in time learning’: the idea that rather than trying to learn everything about a subject (whether it’s film making, internet marketing, or mechanical engineering) in one intensive (and expensive) formal chunk of education, you can learn just the bits you need, as and when you need them. There’s lots to love about this idea, not least that it supports a kind of agility in learning and skills development, and an experimental approach to work. I didn’t go to film school, but thanks to the web, and communities of film makers who share their skills, I can pick up enough to get started, and improve as I go.

So in the spirit of all these things, I’ve started recording some simple films. To start with, time-lapse animations and project documentation. I’ve set up a playlist on Vimeo of my photo hack walkthroughs, and I hope to add to this over time.

I should forewarn you – these films are likely to be interesting only to a tiny minority of people. My reasons for doing them were to:

1. Just get started somewhere
2. Try out different technical setups and figure out how to make it look and sound good with the kit I had to hand
3. Figure out how to use the cheap/free video editing software I have access to (iMovie in my case)
4. Start to learn how to edit, and how to shoot footage that is easy to edit

You’ll notice that shooting exciting (or even useful) content is not on this list.

You can see my first 2 efforts below.