In Home Manufacturing

Just the other day, Bre Pettis, the cofounder of the online design site Thingiverse, designed a small toy—a superhero monkey—and posted it. That night, a designer in Berlin saw the post and made a few elegant alterations. "I woke up to my design, but better," Pettis says. "That's the kind of participation that matters."

Conceived as a kind of Wikipedia for design—a place where designers could post new ideas and blueprints free of copyright and open to communal editing—Thingiverse intends to prove that shared intellectual property can create objects that work better.

In Pettis' somewhat utopian model, it would also provide a new, nonmercenary model for consumption: a world where blueprints circulate freely, and consumers cheerfully fabricate their own coffee tables. Consumers "want to participate in an object beyond just the act of buying it," Pettis argues. "Just a couple years ago, there were maybe 10 people publishing digital designs. Now we're in the hundreds."

Pettis is not the only believer in the WikiFab future. As far back as 2002, Saul Griffith, a founder of the engineering collective known as Squidlabs, began computer-designing his own furnishings, in hopes of eventually launching a digital furniture library: one where users could browse photos, download a blueprint, and send the specs to a local job shop—allowing buyers the choice of a huge pool of designs, each of which would be easily customized. (Want that breakfast table to be six inches longer? Just edit the file.)

In practice, the situation may be slightly different. After seven years, Griffith's furniture site has yet to launch. Thingiverse's content, meanwhile, still consists mostly of eclectic art objects and weird gizmos: a binary clock, a homemade circuit that counts the number of time your cat uses the cat door, the toy monkey.

Moreover, while Pettis envisions a day when all kinds of everyday items—from blenders to sofas—could evolve in real time based on user feedback, the fact remains that the average consumer is not up to the challenge of DIY housewares.

Despite this, Pettis and his fellow inventors may be on to something. As computer-aided design has become more accessible, the tools for fabrication have also become cheaper. New "desktop" 3-D printers now cost $5,000, while the price of a water-jet cutter—capable of slicing any material, from glass to marble, to tolerances of a hundredth of an inch—has fallen by half.

Falling prices led to the creation of Tech Shop, a workshop in Menlo Park, California, that maintains all sorts of fabrication tools for it's members to come and use, like a 24-hour Fitness Club for engineers. Needless to say, Tech Shop isn't likely to become the next IKEA. But it's arguably the first step in what may prove to be a radical shift in how products get made.

If everyone has access to computer-controlled machine tools and advanced 3D printers, why ship an item from manufacturing plant to customer? Why not just fabricate the object near home, on demand? For a small group of hobbyists, that future is here, now.

The theoretical advantage to eliminating shipping and warehousing expenses is obvious (look what happened to the cost of music after the CD burner) but at this point no one in the brick-and-mortar economy is even considering anything of the sort. And that's the way the wikidesign movement likes it—because the hobbyists aren't looking to revolutionize the supply chain, but rather to harness a communal creativity harnessed for the public good.

"The culture of sharing is really powerful," says Pettis. And yet, he knows that one day someone will invent the iFab, a device that will let us all download objects as easily as sound files. As Pettis puts it, "The future of the manufacturing economy is going to happen in the living rooms of the world."

We already shop on-line, instead of driving to the mall. But the Internet is changing the habits of consumers in more subtle ways as well. Portfolio.com takes a look at the phenomenon of "mass customization" -- a way of making standard consumer products as customizable as a Facebook page. While Wired.com dives into the DIY subculture, and meets a group of hobbyists who are starting to hack furniture and productt design like it was all just so much Unix code.