Threadcakes: Personal Fabrication That Works

by Joseph Flaherty on July 5, 2009

How may of your customers would turn your product into a cake if given the chance of a small reward? Threadless, makers of crowdsourced Tshirts and Chris Cardinal, a developer in Arizona have teamed up to answer that question with a competition called Threadcakes. The ground rules are simple. You choose a Tshirt design from the Threadless catalog and turn it into a cake using only edible materials. Barely a week after launching the submission form, 74 cakes (and counting) have been entered. Most are at least good and a few are amazing. This is the kind of passion that most customization services have not yet been able to generate and provides instructive lessons for people interested in personal fabrication.

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Develop Passionate Followers - Mass customization and personal fabrication are going to succeed where people feel passionately about a brand or product. Giving people access to a laser cutter or 3D printer alone isn’t enough, you need a brand people feel invested in. Threadless has this in surplus and a large group of fans sacrificed their weekends for the chance at a free Tshirt.

Provide Design Scaffolding - In developmental psychology Jean Piaget developed a theory of scaffolding. Basically, you want to help people learn for themselves so you don’t provide answers, but tools that help them find answers independently. That is the role of the pre-existing Tshirt designs in this competition. Bakers can focus on the challenges of translating a Tshirt into frosting and dragée’s without the burden of also creating the design.

Require Low Time Investment - I’m guessing most of these cakes took 2-4 hours with some taking upwards of 8. In any case it is the kind of project that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Enable Peer Review & Praise - Threadless has established a great community that encourages, critiques, and raises the bar for all members. The more intimate Threadcakes community does something very similar allowing members to show off and get feedback from their peers.

Utilize Existing Skills - Threadcakes utilizes the existing skills of its members. Knowledge of how to use an electric mixer is far more prevalent than expertise in Adobe Illustrator. Again, this prior knowledge lets participants excel at the task at hand rather than struggle with tools.

The Threadcakes competition runs until August 3rd.