Maker and educator extraordinaire Chris Connors shared this tweet which was presumably about making vs. buying gifts for Christmas. It is an interesting insight into the psychology of someone who is interested in making stuff, but see’s more barriers than opportunities.

+ Tools – This is a major barrier for many people and few are lucky enough to have a well appointed workshop, but there is always the Singer Problem. If tools were the major problem, why don’t more people sew their own clothes (sewing machines are cheap and wide spread), experiment more with cooking, or create computer graphics master pieces.

+ Supplies – Again, there is a kernel of truth here, and you may not be able to cheaply and readily source exotic hardwoods or performance thermoplastics, but fabric, food, and pixels are all affordable.

+ Time – I think this is the biggest creativity and maker killer. At the most basic level, you can interpret this as the time it takes to actually make one widget, but there are many other facets:

+ Procrastination – It’s easy to put off making forcing you to buy something at the last minute. I think this tendency to put things off has its basis in fear. Fear of:

+ Ideas – Will I think of a clever enough idea?

+ Quality – Will I be able to execute this well? What if I invest a couple hours and my product isn’t impressive enough?

A little bit of fear and trepidations is probably a good thing in the world of DIY, otherwise we’d be flooded with horribly knit sweaters and inedible fruit cakes, but removing fear and maybe giving people “Hand Turkeys” we could help amplify new voices and create new customers.

This has been a great week for metal working enthusiasts who also like nightmarish subject matter whether your taste is 13th century Italian poetry, or 21st century zombie pop culture.

This amazing suit of armor would fit perfectly into the Walking Dead or other Zombie fare.

Via Makezine

And this stunning knife does a great job capturing the story from Dante’s masterpiece.

Via BoingBoing

The juxtaposition of these two projects reminds me fondly of art school where a subject and media would be assigned, but the solution to the problems could come in dramatically different forms.

The always interesting Professor Thomas posted a request to Twitter wondering if there was a “Board game of the month club” or similar offering as a holiday gift. Unfortunately, I know of no such service, but it got me thinking. Subscription ecommerce has been a hot area in the tech world this year with companies like BirchBox coming out of no where. The Christmas season has to be the busiest time for “_______-of-the-month” club purchases, but there doesn’t seem to be much innovation in the space. You can find dozens of services that will ship wine, cigars, chocolate, and other savory treats on a monthly basis, but they don’t do much to expand horizons or educate their audience. Could the “_______-of-the-month” club do more? What about:

Game-of-the-month clubs – This is a great idea. German/hex style board games one month, Dominion/deck games the next, dice games, table top games, and so on. Most clubs of this kind are an attempt to broaden your aesthetic sensibilities, so why not do the same with products that appeal to the intellect rather than appetite?

Fitness-of-the-month-clubs – The spiritual successor to the “Couch-to-5K” program. Every month you get a new supplement, work out tool, diet guide, or other fitness product. A gentle reminder that you should resolve to think about your health every month, not just around new years.

Craft-of-the-month clubs – KiwiCrate and BabbaCo both are approaching this market for kids, but what about adults? Do you have a relative who has always wanted to get into wood working or quilting? What if every month you got a new tool and block of wood to experiment with? Would this make the undertakings seem less monumental?

Chef-of-the-month clubs – What if every month you got a new ingredient or implement and ideas for dishes you could prepare with it? Could you create a dynamic like the Iron Chef competitions where people share their various creations online? Could this ignite innovation in kitchens across the country?

There are a lot of barriers to make these kinds of programs work, but there is a spark of a cool idea here. In the past, the monthly gift did more for the giver by reminding the recipient of who is sending them these monthly parcels, but what if we could use this appointment dynamic to improve the life of the person who receives it?

This banner ad for industrial strength cosmetic Dermablend was recently on YouTube’s home page. The ad and it’s accompanying video cleverly shows the product’s strength by concealing the full body tattoo of the model and slowly revealing the skin art underneath. It’s an effective demo for the product, but highlights a bigger trend. As much as people like to build and tinker there are consequences and opportunities with DIY gone awry.

There is even a sub-genre of television programs dedicated to the challenge of craftsmanship gone bad. TLC has a program called “In Over Your Head” which chronicles the stories of home owners who thought they could remodel their kitchen, but ended up leaving their house in shambles. We’d all like to roll up our sleeves and get to work there is a lot of skill and taste required to successfully execute DIY projects.

An executive at a customization company once told me that there are now more people under 30 with tattoos than blue eyes. At some point many of these people will develop “Maker’s Remorse” and will look for solutions to undo their creativity. Along with coverup, I wonder if we will see a market open up for gently used table saws, RepRaps, and other DIY tools that never got to live up to their true potential.

If you visit any seaside town in the northeast of the USA you will likely find an old time commercial district with a board walk, games of chance, and a candy store that is making fresh saltwater taffy in the front window. This demo, where the candy is repeatedly stretched using a civil war era mechanical contraption never fails to draw crowds and sell otherwise underwhelming candy.

I wonder if the MakerBot and laser cutters could serve the same purpose for a next generation of DIY shops? A glittering lure to bring people through the doors where they could be sold all the DIY tools they could need. Salt water taffy is an inferior product by any metric, but millions of pounds of it are sold each year because of these gravity defying machines that make the process look magical.

Current DIY retail is a waste land. Michael’s owns suburban art supplies and generates $4B a year in revenue in cavernous, but uninspiring stores. New breed retailers like Ponoko help people make custom products, but all the magic happens behind closed doors and requires weeks of waiting. There seems to be an exciting opportunity to fill that gap with a store or service that provides all the staples you need to build things with the wizardry of next gen DIY tools.

One of the best design firms in the world is sharing it’s technical tricks for free online. Art School will barely exist as we know it in 10 years. Oh and currently for profit, online art education is worth ~$2B/year.

QVC is the second most profitable channel on television with revenue in excess of $5B. YouTube is now offering a tech platform that will let tens of thousands of bands (and other folks in the future) create their own QVC/HSN channels.

With increasing access to machines that can produce production quality goods at quantities of 1 we are going to see more high quality product satire like these cereal box mock ups.

Combat robotics seem like the natural evolution of UFC and NASCAR, but are currently limited to the world of fantasy at this point (Unless you count the BattleBots that look like toasters). However, this behind the scenes feature from the movie Real Steel talks about how the robots are made for the silver screen.

The DIY urge waxes and wanes over time. The Arts and Crafts movement came into being during the industrial revolution as a counterweight to poorly made goods coming out of factories. During the depression people “used things up, wore them out, made do, or did without” out of necessity. In the 1970′s, environmental activism and increased cultural awareness led the masses to macrame and caning. Martha Stewart brought DIY out of the doily cupboard in the mid 90′s and now on the border of 2012 we see elements of all these prior waves coming together, but super charged with communication tools.

Whenever I learn about a new site that focuses on DIY i’m always interested to check out the quality of the site and it’s traffic. Usually I’m shocked that some poorly designed site focused on some niche of a niche has a thriving community with more unique visitors than a consumer web tech company that has raised $25 million dollars.

I like having dashboards to check the pulse of an industry so I compiled and embedded reports from Compete.com for all the user generated content/community driven DIY sites I could find. Please let me know if I missed any good sites (e.g. there must be a bigger/better hobby robotics site). Also, if there is a tool that automates this kind of reporting, let me know!

Two things popped out when looking at all these sites:

• Tech < Community – You don’t need much more than VBulletin or PHPBB to get 100K+ unique views per month. Many lightly customized message boards have 500K+ user bases while some high profile VC funded sites struggle to find an audience. The ad revenue they generate might be insignificant, but they have demonstrated the ability to gather an audience.
• “Makers” vs. Crafters - There is a lot of excitement about the “Maker Movement“, but O’Reilly Media’s flagship site Makezine.com gets less traffic than niche sites Cake Central and Dave’s Gardens. This is a huge opportunity for O’Reilly and anyone else interested in DIY as a business.

Tech + Crafts

Etsy

http://www.etsy.com/

Instructables

http://www.instructables.com/

Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/

CustomMade

http://www.custommade.com/

Fabric Arts

Ravelry

https://www.ravelry.com

Cosplay.com

http://cosplay.com/

Quilting Board

http://www.quiltingboard.com/

Burda Style

http://www.burdastyle.com/

Nerd Craft

Deviant Art

http://www.deviantart.com/

BoardGameGeek

http://boardgamegeek.com/

iFixit

http://www.ifixit.com/

TheRPF

http://www.therpf.com/

MOCPages

http://mocpages.com/

Thingiverse

http://www.thingiverse.com/

DIY Drones

http://diydrones.com/

Open Wetware

http://openwetware.org/

Let’s Make Robots

http://letsmakerobots.com/

Shop Class

Dave’s Garden

http://davesgarden.com/

LumberJocks

http://lumberjocks.com/

Practical Machinist

http://www.practicalmachinist.com/

RC Groups

http://www.rcgroups.com/

Random Crafts

Tattoo Artists

http://www.tattooartists.org/

BalloonHQ

http://balloonhq.com/

Food Sites

AllRecipes

http://allrecipes.com/

CakeCentral

http://cakecentral.com/

Discuss Cooking

http://www.discusscooking.com/

Craft Media

Food Network

http://www.foodnetwork.com/

HGTV

http://www.hgtv.com/

DIY Network

http://www.diynetwork.com/

Martha Stewart

http://www.marthastewart.com/

Make:

http://makezine.com/

Fine Woodworking

http://www.finewoodworking.com/

Art Supply Retailers

Michael’s

http://michaels.com/

Jo-Ann Fabrics

http://www.joann.com/

A.C. Moore

http://www.acmoore.com/

Hobby Lobby

http://hobbylobby.com/

Dick Blick

http://www.dickblick.com/

Scrapbook.com

http://www.scrapbook.com/

Crafts and DIY activities are fashion driven. Beading was barely a category at big box craft store Michael’s a decade a go, but is now a significant portion of their $4B in revenue. Technology plays a role as well as the mass adoption of the Arduino platform demonstrates.

However, once a craft has been established, it is nearly impossible to see them go extinct. Take the humble art of matchstick modeling. A past time that originated in prisons in the 1700′s was taken up by sailors in the 19th and 20th centuries and survives to this day. We may actually be in the midst of the golden age of this craft as this monumental rendition of Hogwart’s Castle from the Harry Potter series shows.

The detail of this model is stunning.

Match stick models are an easy target for humor, but it is also amazing that this humble artform that originated in prisons 300+ years ago is now reaching it’s apex.

On a trip to the Lego store at my local mall I came across a display for the “Lego Mini Monthly Build” program. This program gives a small (<40 pieces), free kit, based on a seasonal theme to fans who arrive at an appointed time. A great idea that flows nicely with other trends in ecommerce/retail:

+ Borrows from other successful industry trends – In this case blind box urban vinyl popularized by Kid Robot. Like Kid Robot, these slick designs are hidden until the last minute, rare, and highly collected.

+ Creates an “Appointment Dynamic” – I don’t want to lump this project in in with the fad du jour of “Gamification”, but it is part of a trend of companies that have turned what were once discreet purchases into an ongoing, regularly scheduled product experience. BirchBox and Foodzie are other examples of this subscription based commerce.

+ Two way communication – Some of the designs are created by the users and Lego actively solicits customers to suggest the next year’s design.

I have no idea if this gooses sales any more than releasing another Star Wars based kit, but it seems like a great way to foster engagement at a relatively low cost and a reminder that “co-creation” can be fostered as much by the calendar as cool technology.

Related articles

• LEGO Gears of War Lancer Assault Rifle (techeblog.com)
• Lego bricks meet iPhone with Life of George augmented reality game (geek.com)
• Lego Introducers Lego Mini Modulars Set (shoppingblog.com)
• How a father-son Lego project turned into our latest app. (jacksonfish.com)

When I was a freshman at RISD, a group of my classmates and I took a trip to NYC to see a retrospective of Chuck Close paintings. Close’s style is part pointillism and part wild brush strokes. From a distance you see a beautifully rendered face, up close you could be looking at the wild brush strokes of a kindergartener.

This is true of any painting. The most spectacular rendering of a roman tableau is ultimately just pigment and linseed oil on canvas, but Close’s work shows that masterful output does not need to be dependent on fine motor skills.

Alan Kay famously said “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points” and I think the same is true as it relates to creativity. For all the buzz around crowd sourcing product designs, services that let you fabricate your designs with a 3D printer, and other tech mediated marvels, there is still a lot to do just getting people to THINK creatively before they lay pencil to paper. Sites like Pinterest might help fill this gap for certain things, but for every tool that makes it easier to build something, there needs to be something that helps people “Get excited and make things“.

Sometimes, all it takes is a little nudge. I had seen a bunch of blog posts where people organized their book shelves by color rather than subject or author and thought it looked cool. When I moved into a new place, I set my collection up that way.

Creative solutions are often “Free”. A great designer can extract loyalty and extra revenue from an injection mold. The challenge is getting people to see the latent value in the raw materials lying all around them.