in 1961 john habraken designed the WOrld BOttle: a new beer bottle for heineken that upcycles into a building material, turning an often-disposed and hard-to-recycle product into an empowering tool for do-it-yourself home building.
Category Archives: open objects
creation story
natalie jeremijenko started a wiki called how stuff is made to tell the story of how various products are made, from wine bottles and american flags to colombian flowers (above). the anemic collection requires people to submit manufacturing processes to wikipedia, providing that the manufacturers are proud enough to reveal their standards.
Also posted in possessed products, product design, visualization
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open products
the makers’ bill of rights rests on the simple premise of making products easy to operate and modify by using commonly available parts and designing them to be replaced or modified. it could stand as the beginning of an open-source industrial design philosophy. among its many advantages are that open products can last longer, and […]
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sketch board
this image inspires me: no need for fab labs, with a knife you can scratch out a circuit board from copper. via MAKE
Also posted in fabrication
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open replicator
reprap is an open-source 3d printer capable of fixing itself by replicating its own parts, or even make offspring. the current limitation is that it still requires advanced components such as stepper motors and circuit boards, which it cannot make but are widely available.
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stitch sculpture
mexican sculptor javier marin makes beautiful deconstructed figural statues in the classical tradition – this is a tower representing human suffering in plaza juarez, mexico city via maman
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plastic teachings
tap plastics is building a great online collection of instructional videos: how to make latex, silicone and urethane molds, how to bend plastic, and the collection is growing here.
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string theory
before the spanish conquest, the inca empire (1476-1534 AD) spanned farther than any on earth at the time – from argentina to colombia. but there is no evidence of a written language to communicate across these vast distances. instead, the inca are survived by a unique language of knots called quipu that was used to […]
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