OpenDesk – Open Source Furniture

https://www.opendesk.cc

by mauricesvay • 13 years ago

196 52 13 years ago

antr2• 13 years ago

This type of initiative, open source platform, disintermediation, and innovation is what makes me think that a very large part of traditional retail will disappear in the next 10-15 years.

VLM3• 13 years ago

Its interesting that US retail brick and mortar is about 300% overbuilt aka in a bubble at this time. All we need to do to revert to the norm is close/bulldoze 2 of 3 CRE buildings, or triple our population without expanding CRE.

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.

pbnjay2• 13 years ago

Square footage is a pretty dumb metric. square footage of the US >> square footage of Japan, Switzerland, UK, etc. We have more room, and it's much cheaper - of course we use more of it.

Normalize square footage by some reasonable metric (price per sq ft in percent GDP perhaps?) and maybe I'll take the "bubble" idea seriously.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

So what, you think there are no economies of scale? Obviously traditional retail will keep being strong, because it will remain cheaper and with higher margins. You are instead looking at and expanding market.

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.

antr2• 13 years ago

1. I haven't said "there are no economies of scale"; and I don't know how this relates to my point.

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.

singold• 13 years ago

Cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

Its down for me

VLM3• 13 years ago

The site is 404 for me... Is there a repo? Google didn't find anything useful.

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.

grey-area• 13 years ago

Needs an ecosystem not just free downloads. If you want free downloads the competition already has that.

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?

thruflo9• 13 years ago

Thanks for such an insightful and supportive comment :)

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.

thruflo9• 13 years ago

Hey, we're working on this with http://www.madeonjupiter.com/ -- see the parameterised OpenDesk design walkthrough http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y-ubblgDmc

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...

fest• 13 years ago

The tools for this are already here. Check out OpenSCAD. It's a parametric 3D modeling tool, which lets you create 3D models using code (loops, variables, math functions are available). It can export projections of your models in DXF too.

kwestro• 13 years ago

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wildster• 13 years ago

Is there anything like this for the architectural design of buildings?

ics4• 13 years ago

Yes. My work (not public as of yet) is in this area and the creators of this are also the creators of wikihouse, which has produced modular units for structures, some of which have been built as prototypes. If you're willing to count the Whole Earth Catalog, then there have actually been many things like it. Unfortunately phones suck for typing and trade shows suck for burying your head into HN :)

phreeza3• 13 years ago

That would be great, especially if you can license it such that local building code adaptations are also published automatically.

thruflo9• 13 years ago

OD dev here. Check out our sister project http://wikihouse.cc -- an open source construction set for CNC printed houses.

phreeza3• 13 years ago

This is great but not open source in the OSI sense, the license seems to be restricted to non-commercial use. edit: The license is CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

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...

irickt• 13 years ago

The intent of the license is not clear. My interpretation is that the plans may be remixed and republished non-commercially, while the production of furniture is expected to be commercial. To limit or charge royalties on the production of furniture would require a more restrictive license.

thruflo9• 13 years ago

Our license is here: https://www.opendesk.cc/license -- it is CC Attribution-Non-Commercial (we dropped the Share Alike as an unnecessary restriction).

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

thruflo9• 13 years ago

OpenDesk dev here. Just spotted this thread and that the traffic had caused the site to fall over.

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.

kamaal• 13 years ago

I will need two things as a programmer, A desk and a chair.

Will be great if we can see a few designs for those.

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

[Slightly OT, Sketchup is the standard for sharing woodwork designs now. Thanks Google, and Trimble]

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...

twelvechairs3• 13 years ago

[slightly further OT] don't thank Google or Trimble for SketchUp. Both have done hardly anything with it since purchasing it from the few small developers who originally built it (I believe they were ex autodesk).

Zoomla• 13 years ago

plus, they sold SketchUp

ics4• 13 years ago

McNeel (Rhino and OpenNURBS developers) was ex-Autodesk, is that who you're thinking of? I'd be interested in knowing if the Sketchup team was too.

reneherse• 13 years ago

@Last Software was the name of the original company, and a great one it was, in terms of both innovation, customer service, and community building.

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.

robomartin• 13 years ago

I need to build shelving units for a warehouse

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've done lots of #1 both for myself and as third party projects to earn money and fund other activities.

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.

superuser2• 13 years ago

My dad has gotten pretty decent at making furniture, and already owns tools for fun. He makes things himself in part because he likes it, and in part because he wants high quality craftsmanship, which comes much cheaper when you are the craftsman.

If you want IKEA-level furniture, it will never make sense to buy your own, but good handmade furniture gets expensive fast.

AlexMuir2• 13 years ago

You're right about the specialised stuff, and it's fairly cheap second hand. The warehouse is more a playground than functional though - I've set up a woodworking shop in a quarter of it, I have an area for mechanics and some desk space. I'm quite happy making things just for a break and because I enjoy it - I don't have kids yet, but I can't wait to teach them how to make things. Thanks

mathgladiator• 13 years ago

This is fantastic; I recently got into wood working, and I love the spirit of having open source furniture.

baruch• 13 years ago

What would be an effective and relatively inexpensive way to get into manufacturing such OpenDesks?

thruflo9• 13 years ago

We're actively building the OpenDesk maker network, specifically looking for pro CNC makers with finishing capacity (sanding, oiling, etc). See the info on the https://www.opendesk.cc/contact page. (Plus we'll be on the sketchup stand at Maker Faire next month).

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...

lsemel• 13 years ago

So how could one who's not already a product designer learn to design new, workable designs for this type of furniture?

proexploit• 13 years ago

Pretty awesome. I eventually shelved a somewhat similar idea, of a more modular, minimal desk for hackers that could be customized [1] (the original concept included an open ecosystem for the modular components). I found that all the work going into manufacturing and distribution were just a huge time sink and I didn't have the drive for this particular project. Maybe a service like this would allow me to resurrect my concept in the future.

[1] https://vimeo.com/23515020

anotherevan• 13 years ago

Would love to see a design for a height adjustable sit/standing desk.

wyclif• 13 years ago

Yes to this, this line of products needs a standing desk.

danielharan• 13 years ago

On my wish list: a network of fabs overthrows IKEA with open-source furniture.

ics4• 13 years ago

On my wish list: IKEA turns into the Amazon/EC2 of fab labs. Just think of a hacker space with that much inventory of materials, etc...

hugs• 13 years ago

GridBeam is another open source furniture option that I like. http://gridbeam.biz/about-grid-beam.htm

e12e• 13 years ago

Interesting. It's nice to see other ideas like Gridbeam flourish -- lets just hope this one doesn't go away. For a quick overview of similar ideas, see:

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everythin...

OpenDesk – Open Source Furniture

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