We are not frequent posters – opting instead to get a post up here when we have an observation that helps the underlying argument. Hope that explains the radio silence.

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to think how to get back to the core argument. This goes something like:

There are profound changes underway in the economy and society and they are taking place at a point where a set of new ideas meets a set of new practices. We think we can understand the probable success of the new practices by understanding the power (emerging popularity) of the ideas.

The image is of the Sintesi concept car from Pininfarina. The picture  is an example of new fabrication technology (one of the big ideas in auto) that represents one of these joining points in ideas and economic activity. It offers up an example of how resilience (a key element of new ecological metaphors or bioconsciousness)  and personalisation and customer-driven configuration (the ability to create or hack what I wish to) meet. Here is a couple more images:

So the obvious question is – why is it so interesting? The answer lies in the involvement of Materialize, who specialise in Freeform Manufacturing. Here’s how they describe their speciality:

Freeform Manufacturing uses additive technologies (also referred to as 3D printing technologies), fully automated processes that don’t require molds and thus allow a virtually unlimited freedom in design. Today, these technologies are increasingly used in the production of concept cars. Gradually, this production method will be applied for the production of final cars as well.

I came across the Pininfarina example at 3D Print. The link is this: desktop fabrication that can power the design and data output to make complex objects, cheaply, is upon us. Materialize’s facilities are desktop factories writ large.

In fact the DeskTop Factory project and others are aiming at providing that facility.

The interesting development (or evolution) in personal fabrication (well not quite personal but certainly local at $5000 a pop) is self reproduction in fabbing technologies.

Inevitably that idea is driven by an open source community. I think we are going to be surprised by what can be self-made and at the cost. The dream of self-fabricating things like autos is definitely one for the future but how absurd sane or is it?

I had the pleasure a few years back of seeing a few of the micro-cars created by impoverished engineers in the 1940s. For the most part I was looking at German microcars. They were made out of whatever an engineer could find in the rubble. Here’s an image from the Museum of MicroCars (mostly models from the 1940s and 1950s). MicroCars were homemades and they were production models. Their distinguishing feature was a skilled engineer who knew the product’s totality.

We might never get back to that but future production systems offer an opportunity for people to reinvent their interests and rebuild their communities. The term “bubble car” by the way seems to come from the aircraft cockpit inspiration for these early post War designs. Finally – talking about aircraft cockpits here are two pictures of the 1953 Messerschmitt KR175,

One of the key ideas for creating greater resilience is local fabrication and that’s what we are interested in, in this post. You might think that sounds obscure (local? fabrication?) or you may already aspire to make your own Nike trainers at home, instead of paying $100 for them, a, to travel a long way and b, to look like everyone else’s Nikes.

Fans of ideas like “local fab” can follow up with Neil Gershenfeld’s work. Neil is a well known academic from MIT but the great thing about his thinking is it applies to Mumbai and to Manchester as well as to the village and the home. In the near future, we will be able to make many things locally that we now depend on acquiring from elsewhere. I am looking forward to making my first car. Follow this link to one of a number of art projects that use digital fabrication to highlight the potential beauty and complexity of locally fabricated artifacts.

Consider too that local fabrication and resilience are being enabled, first via microfinance and now via digital fabrication, building objects digitally and then fabricating automatically from that. Poverty has helped us find new ways to design and fabricate (the $100 computer movement surely gave us the $200 netbook and who knows what will happen to autos now there is the $2500 Nano). The $7 baby incubator is already out there in the field (Western versions cost $20,000)

In principle the local fabrication network has precedents in local print shops here in the West, which were taken away from the locality and were then brought back (via franchises such as SNAP and Prontoprint).

From a brand point of view the apparent downside of local fabrication is either you resist and lose customers or you let people play around with your products and lose brand integrity. The idea that anybody can interfere with your product’s design and appearance has been brand anathema even though people have configured products forever (for example by hacking spoilers onto cars).

When Adidas commissioned an ethnographic study of online basketball shoe communities they found that most basketball shoe fans customised them anyway. Adidas now sells basketball customisation kits!

At the start of the skating phenomenon kids bought boards for $70. They now buy for $15-40 and customise. Sites like boardpushers.com have hollowed out the market for brand ads in Skating magazines, an early casualty of Skating customization.

The lesson for marketing is that brands too can be hollowed out by services that play to customers’ desire to express rich intent. And expression is becoming more important. It is not simply that people want to be in control, but that they are also eager to by-pass the brand in favor of creating highly personalised objects.

In the broader transition reflected in Metatrends, “personalization” is migrating production towards the local level and potentially contributing to what John Robb calls Community resilience, the ability of communities to retain strong positive identities through local economic interactions (which tend also to be socially richer than distant ones).

The momentum towards great community-level economic activity based around personal behaviour and preferences is arriving from different directions (here is John discussing resilience through Transition Towns). Perhaps the most powerful of these, ultimately, because it segues so well with personalization, will be personal energy identities, a concept of the new energy measurement company AMEE.

AMEE aims to measure all energy consumption on earth, down to the footprint of each of us. A huge undertaking is a huge understatement. The most fertile concept that AMEE brings to the green world is the idea that we will all in future wear and share our energy identities. That in turn will provoke more consumption of product that expresses our identity (which we do anyway), for example installing waste pipe hydro plants at home (which we will want to do because our identities will be green).

At the same time the “make” and “craft revivals (hack, knit, adapt) are spurring on local fabrication technologies (see tinker.it for on way the online creativity is being parsed to an offline environment). Added to this is the new and as yet little heralded open source hardware movement (see tinker.it partner Arduino and Chris Anderson’s robotics open hardware company, hardware hacking (www.hackerbot.com and widespread iPhone hacking – the iPhone has 20% of the Chinese smartphone market despite not yet being available there).

The mantra, if I’m not in it I won’t buy it is hip for kids who like to splice a vid or two. Grown ups, we say: if I haven’t hacked it or made it, I don’t want it. And “if I can’t see myself in it”doesn’t have to be limited to YouTube and other media hack-hubs. Seeing myself in the future of the green agenda is cool too.

BUT we also mean by it a broader change to biology and nature as exemplars for how we should live and work. Whereas trend analysis tells us we should be cautious of urbanisation and that it presents a real danger of economic and social disintegration, people are already engaging with new biological models for co-existence.

Biomimicry, or the use of nature to inspire and instruct on sustainable organisational processes or physical design, is becoming more popular. On the Timeline there are relatively few references to biomimicry even up to 2009. However in the past 12 months there are over 20,000 web page references to the term with nearly 2,000 of these coming in the past week.

As we more readily accept the idea of eco-systems guiding human activity the growth of business eco-systems is also worth looking at. Surprisingly the use of the term “business ecosystem” seems to have peaked in 2006/7 and currently runs at less than a 5:1 ratio biomimicry:business ecosystem. Nonetheless it is not a negligible term.

“Community” is a newly revived term that competes with “eco-system” as the way to describe how people interact around businesses. There are an incredible 2 billion uses of the term community on the web (in other words more than Google can measure from its 8 billion pages) but if that is restricted to “online community” about 1.5 million of these were used in the past 12 months. The United States is the main home of people searching the term “online community”.