Five Ideas That Matter

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,

Bioconsciousness is a term we use to group ideas that draw for inspiration on biological processes. It obviously includes the concern over depleted ecological resources and the constraints on our ability to pursue traditional activities, as climate change becomes more debilitating.

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”.