The Open Source Object

The term "planned obsolescence" was supposedly coined by Milwaukee-based industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1954 for a presentation in Minneapolis. However, a search onGoogle's Ngram tool, which tracks the prevalence of phrases in books over time, traces the first appearance of the expression to 1929. Stevens couched its use in different terms than it has come to be understood today: “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” He thought of planned obsolescence not as a set of design flaws time-delayed into the infrastructure of a product, but more of a marketing ploy meant to make the old versions look out-of-date. Car companies, with their yearly model changeovers, are masters at this; phone companies have aped their success at a cheaper price point.

In the era of software, executing planned obsolescence has become easier than ever. An operating system update pushed out to devices with little or no choice from users can savage functionality. The practice of "instilling desire in the buyer a little sooner than necessary" is now a centralized, push-button operation. These software manipulations are inextricably linked into a whole ecosystem of difficult-to-repair hardware built with proprietary fasteners, edge-to-edge screens, and finicky, expensive batteries. Recently, I wrote a post on this sad back-and-forth, as illustrated through designer Thomas Thwaites' attempt to build a toaster from scratch.

The Toaster Paradox

For the past few months, I have been engaged in the (stupidly) ambitious project of reading Sigfried Giedion's 1948 tome Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Much like my last self-assigned homework reading, The Prodigious Builders, the author's non-native English and the age of the book makes for some unconventional prose. Gideon traces the history of manufacturing from the earliest rumblings of the Industrial Revolution on through World War II, covering every conceivable process along the way. For instance, he goes into not only mechanized reaping, but grain milling and bread-baking and packaging and preservatives and so on. The detail is exhaustive, well-illustrated with patent drawings.

Giedion was born in 1888, and his lifetime spanned many of the great leaps in manufacturing technology that have made modern life possible. He was able to document many of those changes in real time, writing and lecturing extensively on the growth of modern design, the Bauhaus, and architects of the International Style. Since his death, in 1968, technology has continued its relentless march forward, but many of the processes he chronicled in Mechanization Takes Command have remained archaic. Minerals still must be wrenched from the earth and refined into something useful with great heat and pressure. Today, we've replaced some of that brutal labor with machines, or even robots, but the basic story is unchanging.

Foxfire

I am conflicted about the great American mishmash of traditions around this time of year now colloquially termed "The Holidays." On the one hand, I love a good feast, hanging with family, and some time off as much as anyone. On the other, I am depressed by the raw consumerist havoc represented by Black Friday and the gift-wrapped garbage aftermath of Christmas Day. To deal, I sometimes veer off into ranting. More constructively, I like to retreat into the comforting arms of anti-consumptive media.

My family, on both sides, has some roots in Appalachia. My paternal grandfather grew up hard in Memphis and went to college in North Carolina; my maternal grandfather grew up hard on a small farm in eastern Tennessee. I grew up pretty easy in the suburbs of Baltimore, but my mother's cooking, taste in music, and at times, her accent, retained a strong affinity for the South. We had a book on the shelf growing up, Foxfire, with an all-text cover promising coverage of topics including "hog dressing, log cabin building, moonshining . . . and other affairs of plain living." It was one of the first editions, with big type and grainy black-and-white photos. I probably read it a dozen times.

William HolmanDecember 2, 2014foxfire, eliot wigginton, DIY, Black FridayComment

The Prodigious Builders

When I was a kid, I was a prodigious fort builder. It started indoors, as it always does, with pillows and couch cushions. Once a little older, I headed into the badlands of the backyard. I shot passages through clusters of boxwoods by clearing out undergrowth and strategically snapping branches. I dug trenches with a shovel I could barely handle and roofed them with sticks, crawling into the little hollows and listening to the traffic eroding down the road. Eventually, with much help from my father, I put up a treehouse that survived a decade in a half-rotten mulberry, complete with rope ladder and rickety rail.

Even as a teenager, I found occasion for constructing a temporary refuge. As a Boy Scout, for my Wilderness Survival badge, I built a lean-to and spent a miserable, sweaty night inside, warding off the rain wrapped in a poncho. The next day, my left eye was swelled shut with poison ivy contracted while I foraged for materials. I put all of these together before I had any formal training in architecture or building. The term of art for this practice is "vernacular" -- of or pertaining to the common style of a time or place, especially the common building style of a time or place.

Crapjects

My last post, on the World Maker Faire (alas, too long ago, but many a project beckon), was largely commentary-free. In the intervening weeks, a number of articles have aligned into a constellation of push-back against the maker movement. Most center around the rise of 3-D printing: seductive as additive manufacturing may be, it is currently crippled by an inability to do much real work. ABS and PLA, the dominant printing materials, coupled with current common build volumes, represent real physical limits to what 3D printing can accomplish right now. These limits, coupled with radical open access to both software and print files, has slashed the brake lines that limit consumption. We are living in the dawn of the age of The Crapject.

Coined by Scott Smith, of the Changeist, the term crapject refers to the uniquely useless stuff spawned by the rise of 3D printing. One of my favorite design writers, Allison Arieff, recently wrote an eloquent piece on this phenomenon on Medium, entitled Yes We Can. But Should We? Both Smith and Arieff question whether "desktop manufacturing" is a good thing, and with good reason. The history of manufacturing is a dirty, dark, dangerous thing. Raw materials were wrenched from the earth under great duress and transformed, often crudely, into consumables. Progress had a cost. That cost has fallen exponentially over the last five hundred years, and now we can summon object from the ether with the press of a button.

World Maker Faire 2014

This past weekend I got a chance to go to the World Maker Faire in New York for work, researching makerspaces and their citizens. I was unprepared for the sheer size of the event: if last year's event is any predictor, it was tens of thousands of people. It helped that the weather was great and they were inhabiting the site of the 1964 World's Fair. A V-2 rocket loomed over the exhibits just as it did when my father visited as a 15-year old. Supposed to be Robert Moses' crowning achievement, it was instead crippled by his intransigence, and has now been converted into the New York Hall of Science. SITU Studio has built out some Design Labs in the museum as permanent exhibits.

The Maker Faire could be seen as a revival of that spirit, but honed in on a narrower audience. This year continued long-standing exhibits such as the Power Racing series and 3D Printing Row, as well expanded into new ones, like a group of Kickstartered small businesses. Following are some pictures and videos of my favorites.

William HolmanSeptember 24, 2014world maker faire, maker faire 2014, new york maker faire 2014Comment

Bar Cart

Cocktail "culture". The general revival of all things handmade, especially in the food world, has brought us this linguistic gem. It enters the hipster lexicon right alongside artisanal, farm-to-table, and single-bean origin, a signifier of accessible sophistication with the ability to inspire endless un-winnable arguments about doing it right. Ordering a beer at certain bars guarantees sloppy service from hirsute, inked barmen, convinced you are an unredeemable philistine.

I myself have always been more of a beer man. Beer is a little easier to comprehend, cheaper to get into, and requires no work. But it has fallen prey to the general tides of taste -- for the better, I agree -- and is now a treacherous minefield of choices. I have a few favorites, and beyond that, I fall back on my design education and pick the ones with the best labels. But even that tried-and-true method has come under attack, as label quality has become superlative across the craft beer world. What is a simple man to do?

William HolmanSeptember 15, 2014bar cart, cocktail cart, cocktail, portlandia, mad men, don draper, drinking, whiskeyComment

10 x 10

Recently, browsing the unremitting, unceasing id of the internet that is Twitter, I stumbled across an interesting gem posted by the good folks over at Houslets. It was a link to an obscure 13th-century Japanese text by a Bhuddist ascetic, Kamo no Chōmei. Once a successful and wealthy poet for the imperial court, a series of political setbacks and natural disasters gradually pushed Chōmei into seclusion. The essay, The Ten Foot Square Hut (Hōjōki), describes his sequential downsizing, from his father's house, to a cabin by the river, and, eventually, at the age of sixty, a hut just ten feet to a side.

Often described as an Eastern analogue to Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Hōjōki is similarly famous for its opening lines:

"Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing."

William HolmanAugust 15, 2014hojoki, shigeru ban, tiny house, tiny houses, thoreau, jack kerouac, gary snyder, japhy ryderComment

JFX

I can see the Jones Falls Expressway from my living room. As I write this, tail lights streak through the trees, accompanied by the whine of motorcycles ripping up the road. During rush hour, the noise kind of blurs together into an approximation of flowing water. The sound of the actual river running between building and road is drowned out by the traffic. In between the river and the road runs the Light Rail, zipping back and forth rather indifferently.

Each morning I take the JFX out of the city to my suburban office. On the other side, heading into the city, traffic backs up all the way to the Beltway. The road, originally designed for 200,000 cars a day, can barely handle 120,000, due to various design flaws and spikes in usage. Largely elevated, the highway cuts a twisted path, making for tight turns, narrow shoulders, and complex exits. This, in turn, slows down traffic, lowers visibility, and increases accidents. For much of its ten-mile route, the JFX buries or shades the river it's named for, making for a grim, post-apocalyptic corridor that I've described before.

So why was it built? And why might it be taken out?

DIY TV 2.0

I last wrote about DIY TV shows a few months ago and ended that post with a bit about Jimmy DiResta, a craftsman in New York that puts out a YouTube video every week for MAKE magazine. Those videos sent me spinning down a YouTube rabbit hole of vast proportions. Each show I found led somehow to another, until I racked up a dozen subscriptions to various channels.

Most take the form of a tutorial, shot from a tripod by sole proprietors, following a single project from start to finish. However, cheap equipment and new techniques have led to some interesting evolutions of the form. It has also given rise to a new sort of freelance content creator able to make a living off of multiple trickles of income: YouTube ad revenue; tool sponsorships; Amazon Associate tie-ins; site subscriptions; merchandise sales and kit sales on Etsy or Cargo Collective; or straight-up donations through platforms like Patreon.

Here's a quick selection of some YouTube channels I've been watching lately. I've been picking up project ideas, finding interesting new makers to follow, and learning how to evolve my own DIY tutorial game.

How We Read

LeVar Burton, of Roots and Star Trek: Voyager fame, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to to get his kid's show, Reading Rainbow, back on the air. It blew through its funding goal, hitting $1 million in pledges on the first day. One of the rewards available for crowdfunding backers is a free subscription to the new Reading Rainbow app, of course -- the way the kids read these days. It's also, not coincidentally, a business model, sold to classrooms on a subscription model to generate a potentially evergreen revenue source.

I've been absent from this blog for a few weeks because of another app, called Medium. Founded by the guys from Twitter, Medium is a long-form "content creation platform" with a "social dimension." It's a blog, connected to your Twitter account, that allows you to both write pieces and follow writers or topics you like to read. I put up two articles, similar to this blog, that present a case study of my Zip Tie Lounge Chair (Pt. 1, Pt. 2).

William HolmanJune 11, 2014writing, reading, medium, instapaper, longform, twitter, flipboard, oyster, kindle single, pulse, google readerComment

Michael Thonet

Over the last few weeks, I've been up late and wrestling with the roll-out of the Zip Tie Lounger, now available on OpenDesk. Specific design aside, the whole project was an experiment with process, looking into ways to design, distribute, and build physical products by moving around information instead of matter. For most of history, moving around matter wasn't much of an issue, as the limits of horse-drawn transportation limited any practical shipping radius. The clipper ship, then the railroad, then the truck, and now the container ship (or airplane) gradually expanded those radii until they encompassed the whole world.

In the course of my research, I mostly focused on IKEA as the modern extension of all these ideas, as they have brought flat-pack furniture to perhaps its truest expression of form. Along the way, they stole ideas from the best, combining big-box retail and old-fashioned catalog sales to bring their retail model to maximum efficiency. But IKEA, Sears Roebuck, and even OpenDesk have roots that run far deeper, back to the early part of the 19th century.

ELIOOO

Last year, the lady gave me a book for my birthday. At first, I didn't know what to think; it was a small, unassuming paperback with an indecipherable title -- ELIOOO -- written by an author I didn't recognize, Antonio Scarponi. But, as I flipped through the pages, it was clear to me that she had found something that knit together a number of design obsessions I had investigated since childhood, wrapped up in a package straight out of the new maker economy.

In fifth grade, I found the Kid's Whole Future Catalog in the school library and was forever warped by its vision of an integrated green future, where we all lived in arcologies and commuted in velocars. In 7th grade, for Mrs. Mason's geography class, we had to make a 3-foot square diorama of a working farm. Instead of patiently pasting toothpicks to replicate a hundred acres of petrochemically-fed corn, I made a survival pit greenhouse modeled after another library book. James Dekorne's prototype was a solar-heated, self-contained ecosystem that used compost tea to grow plants hydroponically. Rabbits in cages underneath the planters pumped the space full of CO2, which sped photosynthesis. A huge tilapia tank bred fish for eating and worked as thermal mass to store heat after the sun went down. The rabbit crap fed the compost heap, the fish water fed the hydroponic system, and on it went into a meta-hippie version of the Grand Unified Theory.

Shigeru Ban, Pritzker Laureate

About a week ago, Shigeru Ban was announced as the 2014 Pritzker Laureate. Established in 1979 by Jay and Cindy Pritzker, the yearly award honors a living architect for "whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture." The Pritzkers, native Chicagoans, made a fortune at the helm of the Hyatt hotel chain, and modeled the award on the Nobel prizes. Laureates receive a $100,000 cash prize and a bronze medallion.

In the past, the award has mostly honored older (at least in their sixties) architects for producing a solid collection of major buildings, pushing forward the field through form and theory. It's always been a sort of inside-baseball prize, for "architect's architects", those of weighty monographs and leaky roofs. Some, like Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, were better known for their writings and drawings, and used the validation of the prize to win some major commissions. Grumblers referred to them as "paper architects," more famous for unbuildable, extravagant thought experiments than built work. Ban has turned that sly derogative on its head, rising to acclaim because many of his buildings are literally made from paper.

Object Guerilla: The Book II

Some time ago on the OG blog, I was pleased to announce the completion of my first manuscript, a DIY guide to the tao of the guerilla designer. Nine months on, I figured it's about time I offered up a little update on the progress of my toddling manuscript as it navigates its way upstream.

Shortly after mailing off a stack paper representing nearly ten years of my work, me and the lady hopped in the car and lit out from Chicago, taking a 5,500 mile road trip through the Southwest. Upon return, we packed our belongings into a remarkably small cubic volume and moved back east, landing in Baltimore, land of pleasant living (and my birth), in August. And then came the edits.

Made in the U.S.A

Last night, I finally finished Made in the U.S.A: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing, by Vaclav Smil. It is a dense barrage of statistics, marshaled in support of a simple thesis, oft-repeated by politicians: the loss of American manufacturing has gutted the middle class, and, by extension, the economy as a whole in this country. However, unlike the politicians, Smil sees few ways to reverse this trend, and imagines a grim future of ever-expanding sovereign debt, energy shortages, a declining standard of living, and the loss of America's dominance in world affairs.

The book, put out by MIT Press, prominently features a quote from Bill Gates on the cover, who says "There's no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil." His Amazon page is studded with similarly glowing reviews, praising him as a (tending dystopian) futurist oracle. In an interview in Wired out last summer, he comes across as a gleeful contrarian, dismissing technology companies with a shrug. "Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right?" His critique is pointed -- Apple employs 25,000 people in the U.S., the bulk in low-end retail jobs; FoxConn has 250,000 employees making phones in China for (relatively) middle-class wages. He goes on to point out that Germany, supposedly a pioneer of renewable energy, has actually seen its carbon emissions rise since it began heavily subsidizing solar and wind production.

Tudor Farming

Having previously confessed devotion to DIY television shows, mostly on PBS, it should come as no surprise that I also have a touch of a weakness for the BBC. Not Sherlock, not Dr. Who, and definitely not Downton Abbey, but Tales From the Green Valley, a documentary series about a team of historians and archeologists recreating life on an English farm in the 1620s. TFGV dedicates one half-hour to each month in the farming year, explaining the tools, technologies, and processes at work. It came out in 2005, and is available pretty much in full on YouTube.

I stumbled across it via a later spin-off show, Tudor Monastery Farm, discovered through the urban homesteading blog Root Simple. TMF itself is really just one branch of the rabbit hole, however, as TFGV has spun off half-a-dozen shows, including Wartime Farm, Edwardian Farm, and Victorian Farm. The format for each is a kind of modified reality show: what happens when four historians are locked in a thatch-roof stone house, dressed in weird woolen underwear, fed a 17th century diet, and forced to work for their supper? It is unclear the extent to which the participants are actually living the lifestyle 24/7, as the show is edited a series of explanatory segments.

William HolmanFebruary 19, 2014tales from the green valley farm, bbc, diy, tv Comment

Alley Walkin' III

I moved to Baltimore six months ago; time has blurred by in a slurry of work, friends, family, design projects old and new. As previously chronicled, I settled on the banks of the Jones Falls, on the edge of Hampden-Woodberry. I live in, and am surrounded by, renovated textile mills, once responsible for 80% of the world's supply of cotton duck. This rough canvas was used primarily for sailcloth and military equipment. 100 years of booming manufacturing brought in substantial numbers of sold, blue-collar jobs, supporting the independent community of Hampden until it was annexed by the city of Baltimore in 1887.

Hampden is situated at the center of present-day Baltimore, but due to quirks of geography it can seem isolated. It is cut off from the west by both the Jones Falls itself and the Jones Falls Expressway; hemmed in on the north by a series of dead-end streets and Druid Hill Park; and peters out to the south into Wyman Park and an industrial maze of one-ways. These factors contribute to Hampden's greater sense of insularity, relatively low crime, stable property values, and overwhelming whiteness in a majority black city.

William HolmanFebruary 9, 2014alley, walking, ramble, baltimore, hampden, woodberryComment

Flat-Pack Design: Methods and Materials

IKEA's vast particleboard empire is built on one prime directive: affordability. Each product in their 10,000-item catalog starts with a price point and then backs into materials, colors, ergonomics, structure, and fastening systems. A key part of the cost strategy involves flat-pack, ready-to-assemble designs that are up to seven times more space-efficient to ship than conventional furniture. All of this tweaking and tinkering is done by a crew of 16 in-house designers and about 100 freelancers (a crew that is always looking for pitches!). The process is intense, taking up to five years, and involves close coordination with sawmills, manufacturers, distribution warehouses, and focus groups.

It would seem, then, that IKEA would be the authority on flat-pack design. Yet people hate putting together their furniture, generating memes in equal proportion to wobbly bookcases the world over. Frustration seems to cluster around two things: language-agnostic instructions made up of impenetrable diagrams, and fickle fasteners that never seem to equal the holes meant to accept them. That said, from an engineering view IKEA's hardware is ingenious, combining simple tools with self-registering systems that (hopefully) force pieces into alignment as they are assembled.

William HolmanJanuary 30, 2014IKEA, flat pack, ready to assemble, hardware, fasteners Comment

Flat-Pack Design: Past, Present, and Future

Twice in the last few months I have been out to FabLab Baltimore, at CCBC Catonsville. Last week, I took the introductory workshop that is a prerequisite for using the facility. At home, I've been hard at work on the CAD files that will translate my Ziptie Lounger into some form that a CNC router will understand. All of this is in preparation for prototyping my first machine-made piece of furniture, which I've posted over at OpenDesk, a platform for distributed design. Distributed design, in its simplest form, operates something like Instructables -- a central online repository of DIY manuals that folks can follow to make their own products. However, making something from scratch still presents significant barriers to entry, namely skills, tools, and time.

OpenDesk, along with similar startup Assmbly, are challenging (or, to use a current term of art, "disrupt") the traditional design-manufacture-wholesale-retail model that the furniture business has operated on for a hundred years. Designs are uploaded to the OpenDesk site, where they can be downloaded directly for free or, for a fee, sent to a local networked fabber who will cut, sand, and drop-ship the parts to the consumer's doorstep. Everyone in the chain -- OpenDesk, designer, and fabber -- make a small profit. Due to the nature of both the fabrication machines and the distribution network, all of the products are flat-pack.

William HolmanJanuary 21, 2014assmbly, opendesk, wikihouse, ponoko, IKEA, ikea, sauder, kem weber, gillis lundgren, swedwood, louise brigham, michael thonet, flat pack, flat-pack, plywood, furnitureComment

Blog