Ponoko brings product design to the masses
The printing press, the photography studio, and the movie set are already in the hands of the people thanks to products like wordpress, flickr, and youtube. Now Ponoko is looking to revolutionize product manufacturing by providing a direct channel for users to create designs, have them manufactured to order, and distributed via an online storefront with zero upfront costs. You pay nothing unless your product gets sold. A variety of materials including acrylic and MDF are available in many colors. Designers simply upload their 2d or 3d files and choose materials.
Essentially, designers become able to produce any of their ideas without having to look for a factory to do limited production runs, which can be extremely expensive if at all possible. Democratization of the means of production has already created many interesting new ‘long tail’ genres (the overphotoshopped but interesting flickr photo, the silly viral video, etc). I wonder what kind of interesting long tail products will come out of the ability for anyone to be a product manufacturer. There already quite a few interesting ones in the ponoko showroom.
Even cooler, some designs can be made open, which means other users can download and modify your design and improve or tweak it to create their own products. Open source product design, how about that.
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