It’s no secret that much of the modern world angers me. Especially post-kids; I look at the crappy commercialisation of everything I once loved and wonder about the environment they’ll grow up in. I often find myself wandering around the internet looking at the constant streams of shit that advertising campaigns ram down our throat, dying a little inside as I go along.
Hell, even records are rushed out nowadays, not given time to rest before shipping, resulting in an increase in warpability becoming the standard. What happened to creating a quality product, and then making a decision on how much to charge for it based on it’s cost and worth? The concept doesn’t exist; nowadays we wonder what we can get away with charging.
So with that in mind I was pretty stoked to come across this presentation from Joshua Lifton of Crowd Supply. Titled The Anarchist Cookbook For Product Development, Lifton goes through the evolution of products that started as kits tot he current lack of transparency around what we consume, before delivering the good news that we’re slowly taking back what we lost.Highlighting the success of products from his own platform Crowd Supply Lifton uses this shift in consumer mentality to discuss how to ethically and successfully go about designing and funding your own products. And while the second half the hour is dedicated to the developers and aspiring crowd funders, the underlying message is directly relevant, and somewhat inspiring in my opinion, to pretty much anyone purchasing crap in our current climate.
Lifton’s talk was done as part of Curiosity Club – an ongoing series of events organised by Hand-Eye Supply. It’s a great series with the talks archived online as they happen. Loads of goodness on there including Karl Anderson, founder of free telephone network Futel, defintiely worth checking out as well.
via Hand-Eye Supply
The way products are designed, manufactured, paid for, and delivered is rapidly changing, driven by the same forces at play in the slow food, sharing economy, and open source software movements. See what happens when transparency becomes a core tenet of product development. I’ll be talking about Crowd Supply, a company I co-founded to explore these ideas by helping people create products in a new way. I’ll give a broad overview of Crowd Supply and then dive into several case studies of products created through Crowd Supply. This is a story about building things the way they should be built.