7 ms·

OpenDesk – Open Source Furniture

196 points by mauricesvay 13y ago

antr 13y 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.
- VLM 13y 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-over-retailed 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.
  - pbnjay 13y 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.
    - VLM 13y ago
      Ah but that analysis assumes the only cost of retail area is initial purchase price of the undeveloped land. I would theorize the cost of construction is "more or less" the same and certainly the cost of labor to maintain and clean it is very high. Also energy costs to heat, light, cool, ventilate... all "about" the same. Another failure of analysis is the cost of a sq foot at a reasonably constant level of development. What I mean is a sq foot in Tokyo needs to be compared to a sq ft in Manhattan, not a sq foot in New Mexico 100 miles from the nearest Starbucks. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter if land in Wyoming is cheap, if its empty and shopper-free. There is also the inventory aspect... assuming a stable scenario (admittedly unlikely) my annual purchases have to subsidize the annual costs of 50 sq feet of "stuff" both inventory and maintenance whereas someone in .jp only has to subsidize the annual costs of 10 sq feet of "stuff", therefore their standard of living should be higher than mine because they don't have to support so much deadweight.
      - pbnjay 13y ago
        Much of these costs will be "built in" to the price per square foot. Land in Wyoming is cheap precisely BECAUSE it is empty and shopper-free - it has lower profit potential. No one will pay $10k/sq ft for space in Wyoming because it would take forever to make their money back. Simple economics - supply and demand - there is ample supply in wyoming but no demand. Inventory is also a bad metric, Wal-Mart for example makes much of its profits by way of logistics (getting stuff onto the shelves as it sells), not by keeping inventory in stores.
- ekianjo 13y 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.
  - antr 13y 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 13y ago
Cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendesk.cc&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendesk.cc&aqs=chrome.0.69i57j69i58.1524j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps... Its down for me
VLM 13y 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 13y 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?
kwestro 13y ago
Application Error 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.
wildster 13y ago
Is there anything like this for the architectural design of buildings?
- ics 13y 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 :)
- phreeza 13y ago
  That would be great, especially if you can license it such that local building code adaptations are also published automatically.
- thruflo 13y ago
  OD dev here. Check out our sister project http://wikihouse.cc http://wikihouse.cc -- an open source construction set for CNC printed houses.
phreeza 13y 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 13y 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.
  - thruflo 13y ago
    Our license is here: https://www.opendesk.cc/license 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 http://www.wikihouse.cc/community
    - phreeza 13y ago
      I think you could achieve this best by dropping the NC clause and enforcing the approval process by licensing the OpenDesk brandname? I think that is how Arduino works, for example. As it stands this is really not open source because you are trying to regulate how the actual information gets used, which in my opinion stifles innovation.
thruflo 13y 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 13y 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.
AlexMuir 13y 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-own-living-structures-by-ken-isaacs/ http://popupcity.net/featured/free-classic-how-to-build-your...
- twelvechairs 13y 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 13y ago
    plus, they sold SketchUp
  - ics 13y 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.
    - twelvechairs 13y ago
      Brad schell and Joe esch. a quick Google confirms ex autodesk
      - ics 13y ago
        Where'd you find that? I found some LinkedIn and G+ profiles that gave no info, and everything else I found suggested that they sold their first company (CadZooks) to Autodesk and then started @Last, but otherwise had no relation to them.
mathgladiator 13y ago
This is fantastic; I recently got into wood working, and I love the spirit of having open source furniture.
baruch 13y ago
What would be an effective and relatively inexpensive way to get into manufacturing such OpenDesks?
- thruflo 13y 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 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 http://wikihouse.cc/community group is active with people who know more than me...
lsemel 13y ago
So how could one who's not already a product designer learn to design new, workable designs for this type of furniture?
proexploit 13y 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 https://vimeo.com/23515020
anotherevan 13y ago
Would love to see a design for a height adjustable sit/standing desk.
- wyclif 13y ago
  Yes to this, this line of products needs a standing desk.
danielharan 13y ago
On my wish list: a network of fabs overthrows IKEA with open-source furniture.
- ics 13y 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 13y ago
GridBeam is another open source furniture option that I like. http://gridbeam.biz/about-grid-beam.htm http://gridbeam.biz/about-grid-beam.htm
e12e 13y 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-everything-ourselves-open-modular-hardware.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everythin...

196 points by mauricesvay 13y ago

antr 13y 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.

VLM 13y 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-over-retailed 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.
- pbnjay 13y 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.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Ah but that analysis assumes the only cost of retail area is initial purchase price of the undeveloped land. I would theorize the cost of construction is "more or less" the same and certainly the cost of labor to maintain and clean it is very high. Also energy costs to heat, light, cool, ventilate... all "about" the same. Another failure of analysis is the cost of a sq foot at a reasonably constant level of development. What I mean is a sq foot in Tokyo needs to be compared to a sq ft in Manhattan, not a sq foot in New Mexico 100 miles from the nearest Starbucks. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter if land in Wyoming is cheap, if its empty and shopper-free. There is also the inventory aspect... assuming a stable scenario (admittedly unlikely) my annual purchases have to subsidize the annual costs of 50 sq feet of "stuff" both inventory and maintenance whereas someone in .jp only has to subsidize the annual costs of 10 sq feet of "stuff", therefore their standard of living should be higher than mine because they don't have to support so much deadweight.
    - pbnjay 13y ago
      Much of these costs will be "built in" to the price per square foot. Land in Wyoming is cheap precisely BECAUSE it is empty and shopper-free - it has lower profit potential. No one will pay $10k/sq ft for space in Wyoming because it would take forever to make their money back. Simple economics - supply and demand - there is ample supply in wyoming but no demand. Inventory is also a bad metric, Wal-Mart for example makes much of its profits by way of logistics (getting stuff onto the shelves as it sells), not by keeping inventory in stores.
ekianjo 13y 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.
- antr 13y 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 13y ago

Cached page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendesk.cc&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendesk.cc&aqs=chrome.0.69i57j69i58.1524j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps... Its down for me

VLM 13y 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 13y 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?

kwestro 13y ago

Application Error 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.

wildster 13y ago

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

ics 13y 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 :)
phreeza 13y ago
That would be great, especially if you can license it such that local building code adaptations are also published automatically.
thruflo 13y ago
OD dev here. Check out our sister project http://wikihouse.cc http://wikihouse.cc -- an open source construction set for CNC printed houses.

phreeza 13y 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 13y 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.
- thruflo 13y ago
  Our license is here: https://www.opendesk.cc/license 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 http://www.wikihouse.cc/community
  - phreeza 13y ago
    I think you could achieve this best by dropping the NC clause and enforcing the approval process by licensing the OpenDesk brandname? I think that is how Arduino works, for example. As it stands this is really not open source because you are trying to regulate how the actual information gets used, which in my opinion stifles innovation.

thruflo 13y 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 13y 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.

AlexMuir 13y 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-own-living-structures-by-ken-isaacs/ http://popupcity.net/featured/free-classic-how-to-build-your...

twelvechairs 13y 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 13y ago
  plus, they sold SketchUp
- ics 13y 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.
  - twelvechairs 13y ago
    Brad schell and Joe esch. a quick Google confirms ex autodesk
    - ics 13y ago
      Where'd you find that? I found some LinkedIn and G+ profiles that gave no info, and everything else I found suggested that they sold their first company (CadZooks) to Autodesk and then started @Last, but otherwise had no relation to them.

mathgladiator 13y ago

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

baruch 13y ago

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

thruflo 13y 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 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 http://wikihouse.cc/community group is active with people who know more than me...

lsemel 13y ago

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

proexploit 13y 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 https://vimeo.com/23515020

anotherevan 13y ago

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

wyclif 13y ago
Yes to this, this line of products needs a standing desk.

danielharan 13y ago

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

ics 13y 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 13y ago

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

e12e 13y 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-everything-ourselves-open-modular-hardware.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/12/how-to-make-everythin...