OpenDesk – Open Source Furniture
opendesk.cc
opendesk.cc
The idea is titillating though. I would love to have a toolchain to go with these plans that enable me to tinker with such plans. Would love to come up with a standing/sitting desk combo for example.
Trying to find out what this kind of thing would cost to have done in Berlin now...
Our intent is to allow anyone to download, adapt and make the designs for free whilst retaining the right to charge a markup on commercial manufacture / distribution. I.e.: we're not just about Open Source but also about a local making marketplace that (transparently) we make a cut from, in exchange for value offered in QA and ease of purchase.
What we have definitely found is that it is not clear what exactly "Non-Commercial" means. On the one hand, we want to approve makers who commercially re-sell OpenDesks. On the other, we don't want to stop you taking a design to a local CNC shop yourself and asking them to cut it. We'd welcome both legal instruction on the validity of that position and any steer on appropriate license text.
N.b.: if you're interested in a "purer" effort to create a public domain library of CNC-able designs, check out the next stages of the WikiHouse project: http://www.wikihouse.cc/community
I agree that any and all license restrictions stifle innovation / building on each other's work. I also think it would be nice to limit the application of "open source" so that in a perfect world, you don't get the kudos if you don't encourage the innovation.
On the other hand, the literal meaning of open source is pretty clear: that the source code is available for you to view, tinker with and re-compile. Which with OpenDesk is, I hope, the case -- despite the NC license restriction.
Aside: `license the brand` vs `license the design` reminds me a touch of the What colour are your bits article re-posted yesterday http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 A name is just a tag that can easily be snapped off...
> to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.
Unambiguously opposed to a NC license being defined as open source.
I have a mild knowledge of open source, but never felt Opendesk nor Wikhouse ever truly embraced open source despite using the name for kudos, nor do I feel the team operate with a true open source mentality. The Creative commons site is explicit that the CC BY SA license is their license that is closest to open source and do not say that all CC licenses are open source. For me, the precense of the NC tag has always torn me in different directions wondering do I understand this stuff well enough as my understanding is that Opendesk is not actually open, (nor is wikihouse).
With my own separate endevour, I have thought alot about this and wonder what parts of our furniture and the furniture of our community should we open source and what parts should we be opposed to. Opensourcing the design project is fundamentally destructive to the current model of design of which they are pro's and con's to that project, the main pro being that you potentially enlarge the size of the design field which would have be proven, the con being that you discount the value of the design where designers are potentially unable to pay their cost of living which is not a glorious project.
Opensouring CNC joints in a beautiful collection is much closer to what I intend to mean by open source, i.e that the components are open sourced so that community and other communities can create great designs. I believe that primitives should also be opensourced that are not attributed to any designer such as square table with no design thought, much of what may be perceived as classical woodworking designs that have been around for decades if not centuries. But as for opensourcing the final design of the desk you guys have designed, I am fundamentlly against, nevertheless you haven't open-sourced it yet, merely used open source in name for now.
I agree with the substance of your analysis on OpenDesk. I don't accept its extension to the WikiHouse project.
On OpenDesk, our aim has been to let people cut and customise the designs themselves. We weren't aware (before this thread) of a contradiction between NC and open source. We'll have to address this in our narrative.
On WikiHouse however, the project truly is and aims to be open source. All designs are released public domain. The goal of the project is to create a collaboratively developed open commons resource.
On both projects, I don't doubt that the design files we release aren't componentised enough and aren't in enough formats. However, we've carefully mastered the OpenDesk designs so they can be both cut from and re-modelled, and you can already see many structural components, as well as whole designs, in the WikiHouse library[1]. That there aren't more (and perhaps that designs aren't modelled more intelligently) is a reflection of our capacity, not our intention to restrict use.
See the WikiHouse constitution[2] and development goals[3] for more. Plus see an example OpenDesk download here[4].
James.
[1]: http://www.wikihouse.cc/library [2]: http://www.wikihouse.cc/static/doc/968a0b62b832d8a2661616e36... [3]: http://www.wikihouse.cc/static/doc/c977861f2bd29b1a53532f4f1... [4]: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/opendesk-assets/gfx/desig...
We do quite a bit of CNC work. Our main product is CC BY-SA. I think you'd be surprised how much customers appreciate that, and how much they are willing to work with us.
So I agree with phreeza. Licensing the brand name as a stamp of approval for OpenDesk looks like a better way to build an ecosystem around your quality design work.
Other options might be to do like the your Richard Stallman did with free software. He delivered the free source code with the (software) product. Essentially you would sell physical furniture including CNC files without commercial limitations.
Or maybe you could, with minimal disruption to your current business model, make the commercial license CC too? Sell a CC BY-SA licensed design. Distribute a CC BY-SA-NC version for free like you do.
Just my .02€.
What other open source designs are there for functioanl furniture? I need to build shelving units for a warehouse, and I'm experimenting with a few designs for modular partition walls. I enjoy playing with plywood.
There's some cool stuff in Ken Isaac's book - Living Structures. http://popupcity.net/featured/free-classic-how-to-build-your...
for example. Looks like Schell sold Cadzooks and was absorbed into Autodesk. Not sure about Esch
Wonder how much of the original team is still there? The original product was brilliant, and it's nice to see it survive multiple acquisitions.
I have to say it is hard to beat commercially available warehouse-grade shelving systems for this application. I'm not sure I'd consider a DIY solution unless I had nothing better to do with my time and the wood just happened to be laying around. You can go on eBay or Craig's list and find the kinds of shelving systems you see used by Home Depot for pennies on the dollar. Hardly worth the effort to build. Focus on your business.
I only see two scenarios under which building your own furniture makes sense:
1- You want something that simply isn't available off the shelf.
Example: a custom entertainment center.
2- You want to learn about woodworking.
I find myself doing a lot of woodworking under the pretense of learning (or, more appropriately, teaching) these days because I am teaching my older kid how to build things. For example, a few months ago we built a custom wooden standup paddle-board. We started with cheap lumber purchased from Home Depot and ended-up with a beautiful fiberglassed wooden board that does pretty well at the lake. He learned a ton through that experience and we spent hugely valuable time together.
If you want IKEA-level furniture, it will never make sense to buy your own, but good handmade furniture gets expensive fast.
Needs an ecosystem not just free downloads. If you want free downloads the competition already has that. Woodsmith Shop is a PBS network show with free plans downloads, some of which look pretty nice, although I've not tried to actually build anything from those plans.
As an amateur wood butcher I don't need to download someone else's design to make a very basic boring desk. (whoops edited to make clear I'm not implying their desk is boring, just my simple ones are) What I would benefit from is a simple script that given some criteria such as desired tabletop height, or load limit, or wood thickness, or whatever, out squirts a file with artistic proportions and stylish artistic design and reasonable engineering that I could then cut.
Or squirts out an error message. "warning: 5/8 plywood for a 8 foot wide desk? That exceeds wobbly limitation. Use --force option if you are crazy"
I want to run a script "opendesk --height '40 inch' --toplong '48 inch' --topshort '24 inch' --woodtype '5/8 plywood' and pipe the output into a laser cutter file. Or, frankly, just output a PDF for me to cut manually.
I believe that's exactly what they're building here. See the cached link to their website from singold. I agree an ecosystem is important, but that's what they're trying to provide.
Their desks are not at all boring, I think they're very nice thoughtful designs, and they're set at certain proportions and with certain materials for a reason - because distorting the proportions, wood thickness etc would mess up the designs in various ways. Your request for a tool which you can fiddle with all the parameters of a desk presupposes that design is some sort of gloss that is added to a final product rather than a solution to a given set of parameters, so I doubt it'll ever be realised. If you think it can be, please do go ahead and make it, but setting up these concrete designs which exist against a hypothetical tool which doesn't exist is hardly fair.
What I want is what this website delivers (or does when the site actually works) - beautiful designs which I can ask someone to make, or make myself if I'm so inclined. If I was furnishing an office I'd look here before buying something from IKEA for example, these desks look sturdy, functional and yet elegant - everything I'd want in office furniture.
My only hesitation is that it undervalues design somewhat, but they could possibly introduce a marketplace for designs at some point too, if this takes off - obviously the CNC machine owners would make money, so perhaps the idea is that design shops could make their own furniture and sell it, as well as giving away the plans?
I think you're right that the free design / pay to get made model does to some degree undervalue the design. It only really fitted for us because we a) had the designs and b) wanted to explore the local making proposition.
With other designers and ranges, we see a model where designers can name their price for the use of their design / IP. In fact, with the current OpenDesk system, a design fee is already included in the price to "get it made".
We're also interested in designers controlling their distribution: the territories they want to sell to, with a price breakdown they control.
With SpokeCreator and similar tools, it is a matter of mastering a design as a kind of logic network. I blogged on it here: http://thruflo.com/post/56330542825/inside-the-distributed-m...
I've removed some web service calls and allocated some more hosting resources. Fingers crossed this will keep it up -- it's running OK for me atm.
Its down for me
You can google for "per capita square feet retail" or just try this link which is reasonably good. The graph of "Square feet of retail per capita by gdp per capita".
http://improvingtheinherited.com/post/7351838533/is-the-us-o...
Its also interesting to look at greater trends WRT income inequality, destruction of the middle class, and permanent downward mobility, vs the existing stock of CRE. Its looking like a bit of a mismatch. That future is here already WRT "food deserts" in the inner city, etc.
Normalize square footage by some reasonable metric (price per sq ft in percent GDP perhaps?) and maybe I'll take the "bubble" idea seriously.
Another failure of analysis is the cost of a sq foot at a reasonably constant level of development. What I mean is a sq foot in Tokyo needs to be compared to a sq ft in Manhattan, not a sq foot in New Mexico 100 miles from the nearest Starbucks. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter if land in Wyoming is cheap, if its empty and shopper-free.
There is also the inventory aspect... assuming a stable scenario (admittedly unlikely) my annual purchases have to subsidize the annual costs of 50 sq feet of "stuff" both inventory and maintenance whereas someone in .jp only has to subsidize the annual costs of 10 sq feet of "stuff", therefore their standard of living should be higher than mine because they don't have to support so much deadweight.
Inventory is also a bad metric, Wal-Mart for example makes much of its profits by way of logistics (getting stuff onto the shelves as it sells), not by keeping inventory in stores.
When something new comes, it does not mean it replaces something existing. Same mistake people do with tablets, thinking they will make all desktop computers completely disappear. AGain, it just leads to more fragmentation and a bigger cake overall.
2. "traditional retail will keep being strong", during the past 5 years retail has been one of the hardest hit industries both in the US and Europe, I don't understand the basis for such argument.
3. "will remain cheaper and with higher margins" - retail prices tend to have an over cost of 30%-40% due to fixed costs, primarily due to distribution, real estate and retailer markup. Again, I don't understand the basis for such argument.
4. "When something new comes, it does not mean it replaces something existing." The internet replaced travel agencies, taxi/limo booking desks, the yellow pages, music distribution, etc. That's the internet alone, but if you take a look at large supermarkets such as Walmart, this has swiped mom 'n pop retail shops all over the U.S.
The great thing about this discussion is that time will tell.
Will be great if we can see a few designs for those.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everythin...
If you're more looking to get into CNC making generally, you can build your own CNC machine or maybe check out a local fablab, like techshop, etc.
The http://wikihouse.cc/community group is active with people who know more than me...
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