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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.
If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.