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Ponoko and the Future of Product Design

Published September 18th, 2007 in Tech & VC

mini-ponoko.pngAbout a year ago I wrote about how Threadless is a presage for the new form of product design. Products will be crowdsourced. These products will have incredibly small markets, but that won’t matter because common product design and realization expenses will be reduced by this new model. Fabrication will be on-demand (no inventory constraints), like lulu does for books, and a subset of the market will do the design themselves, so R&D costs will drastically reduced.

I’m not saying that the current era of mass-market product design will die. There will always be room in the world for great product innovators like Apple to build devices with mass-market appeal. But, crowdsourced design will fill in the long tail of gaps where a need does exist, but it’s a small need in a niche community. Bug labs has a great analogy to a pizza pie in filling this long tail of needs (they call it the pizza tail).

Ponoko, which launched at TechCrunch 40 this week, is big step toward realizing this world of crowdsource product design. Ponoko is a personal manufacturing platform. People can co-create physical goods, and all product fabrication is on-demand (enabled by efficiency of laser cutting production and programming).

As soon as I saw the power of Threadless I could feel this wave coming. There’s no reason why the crowdsource power of Threadless will stop at T-Shirts, and Ponoko is just another step along the way of making my academic background in Product Design obsolete :) I love it.

6 Responses to “Ponoko and the Future of Product Design”  

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  1. 1 Weissman Sep 18th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    I think the power (success?) of Threadless had something in addition to its crowdsourced product model. For it also built a thriving, open community around its methods. That community then virally promoted, urged and built the business with Threadless. The crowdsourced portion of designing the “widgets” was, imo, only one part of that equation.

  2. 2 Andrew Parker Sep 18th, 2007 at 7:14 pm

    Sounds right to me. One can easily fault me for exaggerating when making a point ;)

    However, I like that fact that viral distribution is baked into any crowdsourced product by definition. By participating in a crowdsourced creation, you are investing time, interest, etc and thus becoming an evangelist on behalf of the product.

    But yea, I agree Threadless has benefited from a coolness factor that other crowdsourced sites (like Cambrian House) don’t seem to leverage.

  3. 3 NicWA Sep 19th, 2007 at 9:38 pm

    Hi Andrew, thanks for the comment. We had an amazing few days at TechCrunch 40. And the resulting interest has been simply fantastic. We’re so excited about where we’re heading over the next few months (let alone years!) and it’s pretty awesome to have such amazing feedback through the various blogs such as yours. At present we’re promoting just laser cutting, but we see the other options (3D printing etc) very much a part of our (not so far in the future) future! At present we’re ‘launching’ our concept, and we’ll grow as our contacts around the world grow - therein being able to offer the production of ‘pretty much anything! Ponoko for all is going to just be a blast! Cheers, Nic - Ponoko Online PR Chick.

  4. 4 Tom Sep 20th, 2007 at 10:06 am

    I agree with your comments about the future of product design. Companies like Threadless, Lulu and Ponoko are doing an excellent job at building the manufacturing infrastructure behind co-collaboration and crowdsourcing.

    I don’t think it’s going to be long before we see a mainstream, physical product that has been co-produced by users, becoming a mainstream success of the same magnitude as Firefox.

    The future of niche product development is here!

  5. 5 Daniel Winzer Oct 13th, 2007 at 7:13 am

    Hello folks!

    We are a group of students at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration based in Austria and are currently looking into the topic of innovative communities and how/why they work. We are particularly interested in how fairness/justice affects the success of the cooperation between manufacturer and contributors to the community.

    As I have just read this article I recogniced that you all are very engaged in the subject of crowdsourcing. I’ve already contacted Andrew Parker, the autor of this article but I would be also very glad to know your point of view regarding fairness in communities. We especially turn our concentration on the plattforms ponoko.com and crowdspirit.com

    In return, we certainly could provide you with our core findings as soon as our study is finished. Every answer would be a great help for our study. If you have any information for us, please do not hesitate to contact me under daniel.winzer@wu-wien.ac.at

    Attached there is a list of our questions.

    Thanks a lot and greetings from Vienna

    1.) What do you think are the key factors of a successful community and how important is fairness/justice?

    2.) In recent discussions crowdsourcing communities were called modern sweatshops? Where would you draw the line between the benefits of participation and the risk of being exploited?

    3.) Should the operator or the community set up any rules for his community? Or would it be better not to have any binding regulations and to rely on common practices and mutual respect?

    4.) What do you think are the key factors that make the decision process objective and fair?

    5.) What do you think about the selection of ideas/designs? Should the operator of the platform be the one who makes the final decision or should the community decide about the production?

    6.) How important is feedback to the crowdsourcing concept?

    7.) Do you think that a plattform should use incentives such money and reward to motivate their users?

    8.) Could you think of any rewards and incentives apart from money?

    9.) What compensation scheme would you suppose to be most fair for contributors (lump sum or percentage of the turnover (and therefore taking the risk of getting nothing, if nothing is sold)or any others?

    10.) What do you think is the entrepreneur’s/platform-operator’s main contribution in the case of crowdsourcing?

    11.) Is there any other aspect of justice within communities that we should consider apart from fairness in the decision making process and a fair outcome for contributors?

  6. 6 faber Oct 22nd, 2007 at 9:21 am

    http://travelnursingdirect.com/

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