Open Source Design

In 2008, near the end of my time at Arcosanti, I was searching the web for some directions on how to make kombucha, a fermented tea some of my roommates were making, claiming great health benefits.  One of the first links in the search engine was a site called Instructables, a place where you could put up a short, photo-illustrated journal about a project and how someone might replicate it.  I quickly forgot about fermenting tea and delved into their furniture section, which was full of innovative, home-grown chairs, tables, and shelves.  

Instructables was cooked up at Squid Labs, a think tank that spun off of the MIT Media Lab, a famous incubator of new ideas.  Eric Wilhelm and Saul Griffith developed a number of new technologies and concepts there, one of which was a free, open-source website for sharing instructions on how to do just about anything.  In 2005, Instructables went online, crowd-sourcing innovation from swarms of tech-oriented tinkerers.  Articles there are published under a Creative Commons Copyright license, which states that the content creator allows anyone to use their work for free as long as they are credited.  This idea runs counter to the whole body of copyright law, which is primarily concerned with preserving the profitability of content creators, and therefore incentivizing innovation and artistry.


I was a perfect fit for Instructables: my projects had no value to be protected under copyright or patent as they weren’t necessarily blindingly original; none of the technology or techniques used were proprietary or new; and they served me best as a tool to publicize my work.  In other words, the product itself wasn’t as inherently valuable as the idea of the product; the value lay strictly in it being consumed as information by the world.  

My first Instructable, the Flagman Table.