OK, I have all these link-threads that I've been saving/collecting for the past week, hoping for time to knit them into some kind of coherent post-sweater at some point. Since it's an idea-yarn that's tangled up in a lot of my regular theme-baskets, I feel like this might end up being just a patchy post-scarf, but hopefully the pattern will be appealing -
FIRST STOP: Virginia Postrel's NYT editorial from last month on the shift towards user innovation:
WHEN most people think about where new or improved products come from, they imagine two kinds of innovators: either engineers and marketers in big companies trying to ''find a need and fill it'' or garage entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich by inventing the next big thing.
But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to figure out what customers may want. They come from the users themselves, who know exactly what they want but cannot get it in existing products.
''A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products,'' Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in ''Democratizing Innovation,'' recently published by MIT Press. (The book can be downloaded at Professor von Hippel's Web site, http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/.)
I just d/led the whole book - viva Creative Commons! - and, from what I've read browsing through it, I recommend that you do the same!
Innovation by users is not new, but it is growing. Thanks to low-cost computer-based design products, innovators do not have to work in a professional organization to have access to high-quality tools. Even home sewing machines have all sorts of computerized abilities. And once a new design is in digital form, the Internet allows users to share their ideas easily.
Because users are often quite different from each other, their innovation, by definition, accommodates variety...
Open-source software like Apache or Linux is an obvious example of users developing and sharing innovations, but it is not the only one. Many of the book's examples come from extreme sports like kite surfing and snowboarding, where enthusiasts often invent their own equipment. Mountain biking, Professor von Hippel noted, grew to about half a million participants before manufacturers started to make bicycles suited for wild rides on rough terrain.
EXTREME!!! Also at the front of my mindspace, of course, is music. Creative power has been flowing steadily downstream for decades at least (any music historians in the house feel free to note how this has actually been happening for centuries, I'm sure it has), but I feel like the pace really picked up significantly in the '90s with the advent of the home studio, widespread amateur remixing, mashups, MP3s, and internet-enabled sharing of sounds and words in general. With the increased penetration of broadband access in recent years, and MP3blogging in just the past year alone really, 'podcasting' (ugh I hope we find a new word for that, I don't have a fucking iPod OK?!), &c, it feels like we're about to be dumped into the ocean of truly global and truly popular pop music, created for, by, and/or under the influence of music listeners (e.g. 'users') who are increasingly indistinguishable from what we used to call artists ('manufacturers').
Before we get too far out, lemme take a sec to pour a few links on you that I've come across in the past week or two about how this process is already well underway and rapidly accelerating in the obvious, easily-hacked realms of software and media:
* Gary Jones notes two new browser tools that allow users to easily 'remix' web pages to suit their own diabolical purposes - the new Google toolbar's Autolink feature, and, even better, Firefox's Greasemonkey.
* Google Maps is not only pretty fucking awesome in its own right, it's spawning a variety of even more incredible hacks combining Google Maps with useful geographical information. Looking for an apartment? Check out HousingMaps, which combines Maps with craigslist apartment listings. Geobloggers lets you add tags to your photos on Flickr that correlates them with geographic locations, allowing you to tour the world through other people's photos. Drivers have hacks that combine Maps with traffic information and a new one that combines maps with gas prices. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface...
* V-Postrel also notes an article suggesting that the ominously-titled Family Movie Act of 2005 may open the door for remixed movies.
* Tecmo recently settled out of court after threatening to sue Xbox hackers who were creating some lascivious mods for their games.
...All super cool and potentially useful as shit and 100% happening today. Let's take it to the next dimension - THE THIRD DIMENSION - back to Postrel/Von Hippel:
To get people exactly what they want, user innovation suggests an alternative to mass customization, the manufacturing process that seeks to tailor products to specific users while maintaining the economies of large-scale production. Mass customization generally entails mixing and matching pre-specified components, which significantly limits its flexibility.
When you order a Dell computer, for instance, ''you can slot in any disk drive you want, but it's still a disk drive,'' Professor von Hippel said. Truly flexible manufacturing technologies, he suggested, would work more like photocopiers, which do not limit what sort of images they can reproduce.
Via the M. Simon post on micro-venture capitalism buried in last week's linkstravaganza, check out how digital fabrication - like 3D printers noted here and elsewhere - will unleash innovation globally, including/especially in the developing world - ladies and gentlemen, MIT Prof Neil Gershenfeld:
The deep idea of digital computation appeared as mainframes, passed through minicomputers and reached everyone in the form of personal computers. And the killer application was the personalization of computation — not inventory and payroll, but computers solving the needs of individuals, rather than just whole organizations. Likewise, digital fabrication will reach individuals in the form of personal fabrication, of machines that make machines...
Sci-fi? Only SOMEwhat:
The real surprise is just how close we are to it. Even in labs at places like CBA [the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT], we are working on universal molecular assemblers — but that is a 20-year road map, for that kind of science-fiction output device. I bought millions of dollars' worth of tools to do that research — focused-ion-beam writers, supersonic water-jet cutters, excimer lasers. These were just the tools to do the research.
Then I was spending a lot of time training students to use them all. So I started a class, "How to Make Almost Anything," which was just that — it was how to use the tools to make almost anything. But I was completely swamped with nontechnical students, who were desperate to take the class — not for research, not as a business model, but just because they had stuff they wanted to make.
Yeah! I definitely have some ideas... Let's turn w/the good professor to the even-more radical implications for development:
The passionate response led me to wonder what would happen if the rest of the world gets access to this. So we started setting up, with National Science Foundation support, field Fab Labs, where the idea was to approximate both what was on campus at MIT and where we are going to be 20 years from now, but using tools available today. And [the program] exploded all around the world in both developed and, most interestingly, developing countries. We found the same response in the field as we found at MIT.
These labs were not meant to be all that useful — this was supposed to be a warmup experiment — but at this point we have labs in India, above the Arctic Circle in Norway, in Ghana, Costa Rica, inner-city Boston.
This summer, we are going to South Africa, and we have demands to take these all over the world — more than we can handle.
THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE THE GAME:
EET: When it comes to the social or economic implications of this, let's suppose that, like the personal computer, these labs just appear everywhere. Won't that be quite disruptive to the economy of the developed world?
Gershenfeld: Absolutely. Some aspects you can predict, and some you can't. There is a tremendous parallel between where we are now with personal fabrication and the PDP [minicomputer]-to-PC transition. Industry didn't take that transition seriously — [PCs] were considered just toys, not real things — until, generally, it was much too late. So in the same sense, I suspect that the extent to which you can create advanced technology with kids in an inner-city community center just sounds ridiculous to serious industry, and they would look at that as a nice toy but not a serious threat. But I really think it is.
YEOW!!! More linx on Fab Labs from Worldchanging, here. That's more than enough to chew on for now, but I'm sure I'll be coming back to this in the days/weeks/months - YEARS?? - ahead. But keep this kind of shit in the back of your mind, and bring it up to the front whenever you hear someone making any kind of predictions about 'unavoidable' resource crises and the other usual catastrophe scenarios in a few decades' time - the approaching onslaught of innovation isn't going to magically solve all our problems (it'll solve some/create others, natch), but it will radically change the tools we will use to solve them in ways that we are only beginning to anticipate.
...and PS, just THINK of how this idea is going to revolutionize biotechnology. You don't have to tax your imagination too hard - the foundations of biohackery are getting LAID...