VistaPrint uses print on demand technology to mass customized business cards, wedding invitations, and other printed ephemera. They are easily one of the largest mass customization businesses with revenues of close to $750MM. They have recently started to dabble in television advertising and the subject of their commercials are the small and medium sized businesses they serve. The commercial embedded below highlights a small company called “YouBar” which will customize a granola bar to your taste from a list of fixed ingredients.

It is a neat milestone in that it is one of the first major mass customization companies to utilize mainstream marketing (the custom M&M’s are the only other example that comes to mind). It is also great to see them focusing on another business that combines the internet and physical production to customize products for end users. Hopefully, the campaign will continue and many more interesting businesses will have a chance to draft of Vistaprint’s pioneering success.

The Rice Krispie treat has remained largely unchanged from its origins in the 1920′s to the modern day. Maybe your mom would throw in chocolate chips, but I had never seen as wild a variation as this multi-color version made with Fruit Loops.

It also took the Kellogg company over 7o years to start selling a packaged version of the treat that has been a bake sale staple for its entire existence. This seems like the food equivalent of not putting wheels on luggage for 30 or so years after wide spread commercial aviation.

The DIY culture seems to be changing this. Last year, a woman invented a new kind of cookie by baking an Oreo inside a chocolate chip cookie. Within 2 weeks the recipe had evolved on the internet and many experiments were conducted.

Just like Darwin’s finches adapted to the varied environments of the Galapagos, DIYers are adapting to the “fame” that the internet provides. Adaptation doesn’t lead to survival in this case, but social capital. Inventive chefs now have an audience that might only include their Facebook friends, but still they become the Martha Stewart of their circle. In some cases, a cake a mother makes for her child can end up in the New York Times as was the case with Anya Richardson’s Angry Birds cake.

Fruit flies are the common medium to do experiments in genetics because of their quick reproduction cycles. I think food might be the equivalent in the DIY world because of the low cost of experimentation and easy access to tools. Today we see the DIY influence in cakes, tomorrow cars?

Any child of the 80′s will remember this “Idents” from MTV, the creative animations that would pop on between videos to reinforce the burgeoning brand. At the time they were the most avant garde design work most Americans could see on a regular basis. Looking at this collection, one thing that pops out is the pure physicality of these clips. Every one was made with a camera on a stand, taking pictures of clay or by scratching and coloring pieces of celluloid. This was a world before FinalCut and AfterEffects. A time when making a movie literally meant MAKING movement.

The world has advanced and largely for the better. We live in an age where anyone with a MacBook, some video editing software, and talent can create animations and digital videos that garner millions of page views and Hollywood contracts. Still, these movies are a fun time capsule where media was MEDIA and not “0′s and 1′s”.

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.

BattleBots, Food Network Challenge, Iron Chef America, Chopped, Project Runway, Cupcake Wars. These are justsome of the TV shows that combine DIY projects with a competitive format.

The conventional wisdom is that competition and artistic expression don’t mix. There isn’t one right solution in art the way there is in math. A landscape painting by Thomas Cole is no better than one by Vincent Van Gogh, or Richard Diebenkorn. While it is true that artistic endeavors are some what subjective, competition and judging adds a lot of value.

+ Competitions have calendars – The biggest barrier to DIY projects has to be time. It is way to easy to put off starting to learn a new skill or tinkering with a project if you don’t have an external deadline. Competitions force you to finish your gingerbread house or combat robot at a fixed time.

+ Competitions create awareness – Competitions have audiences. These people get exposed to the craft or skill and some percentage will want to participate. The other portion will be spectators and make the practitioners ”famous” which sets the bar higher while providing a psychological reward.

+ Competitions diffuse knowledge – Competitions are like patents that last for 17 days instead of 17 years. When you compete, you are sharing new ideas and innovations. Your new designs provide a short term advantage, but once demonstrated spread in the community helping to raise everybody’s game.

+ Competitions force practice – No one wants to be embarrassed in front of friends or foe so they step up their game and really try to build their skills. Absent public pressure, it is easy to fall into a rut and not experiment or improve.

+ Competitions are social – Win or lose, competing brings together people with similar interests and temperments. People talk shop, build bonds, and make memories that outlast the outcome of a single day.

A barrage of basic cable programs have shown us what is possible when creativity and competition are combined. Hopefully, this trend will spill out of the television and onto kitchen tables across the country.

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.

This holiday season there has been a torrent of articles about how bricks and mortar retailers are facing increased competition from ecommerce and mobile apps. Amazon was widely criticized for offering app users a coupon not to buy something at a bricks and mortar store. Slate provided a blue print for how physical retailers could fight back, but the trend seems inevitable.

Some people are upset by this, especially as it relates to emotional product categories like books, but this increase in competition can only be a good thing. Take this example:

Is the retailer adding much value? Educating customers about which tools is useful in a given scenario? What powers this will confer upon them? No, it is a mess and offers no help to the user except for immediacy and the ability to inspect the product.

Hope is not lost. This display gives a hint of what a retail display could do:

With this display you see what tool should be used in a given context and what purpose it serves. It isn’t perfect, and doesn’t help solve the larger structural problems inherent in the conflict between retailers and ecommerce merchants, but it does use the physical space to help a customer make a smarter decision.

Considering the Swiffer costs ~$20 and the average price of the power tool hovered around $100 I expect more from power tool display. Traditional retailers have challenges ahead, but they also have an amazing stage to educate and inspire their customers that no ecommerce sellers can match. Hopefully they will think more like Broadway producers rather than community theater players, otherwise their will be few frowns when the show closes.

@JennWebb, a blogger at O’Reilly media has posted a couple interesting posts to the “O’Reilly Radar” the publishers all purpose blog. Both are worth a read, the first covers the tumultuous world of publishing in 2011 and what it portends for 2012. The second is a shorter piece about “$0.99” pricing in the book world. What struck me was how open and self reflective the posts were.

Imagine if GM had a blog where they openly discussed the issues that shaped their market. Pointed to Ford if they were doing something interesting? Linked to a new announcement that Toyota made? Most companies would say that such a strategy was suicidal, but O’Reilly pulls it off.

O’Reilly is a proponent of business model innovation – and they come up with a novel access strategy in the form of Safari.

O’Reilly is staunchly anti-DRM – and they walk the talk by leaving their books free and open.

O’Reilly promotes and supports the “Maker” movement – and they create “trade shows” to make their customers famous and then create a retail division to help distribute these inventions while diversifying their revenue.

O’Reilly talks about “spreading the knowledge of innovators” and does that with every part of the corporation from publishing technical manuals to funding early stage companies.

It makes sense for O’Reilly to do this since a big portion of their business is selling conferences and the intellectual exchange they facilitate and it may not scale from a $100MM business to a company with a 12 figure market cap, but imagine if if P&G discussed the environmental or resource issues that shape it’s strategy? If Target wrote about the demographic shifts that are impacting retail or how they were dealing with the rise of ecommerce? If every company had an ambition that was as broad as O’Reilly’s:

“A diversified media company that focuses on emerging technology communities and what we can do for them”

This video is a great time capsule from a period in America’s history where steel was a major industry and a vast middle class was sustained on high paying manufacturing jobs. It was also an era when fantastic animation was produced even for something as mundane as welding instruction.

Along with an excellent voice over, this video explains the principles of a fairly complex process in a way that anyone could understand it. In an age of omnipresent design software, most DIY tools, processes, and products lack such succinct and artfully executed instructions.

The aesthetics of almost every product and service are considered in a way that they never have been in the past, but instructions for use have devolved over the same period. Everything from medical devices to power tools to cooking implements could stand to learn a few lessons from this great example of DIY instruction.

There is an old saying that you collect data, parse it into useful information, which becomes the basis of knowledge, which is the foundation for wisdom.

At every point along that continuum you are getting additional value and perspective in exchange for effort and analysis.

I came across a company that made me think about this concept in the context of craft and DIY for the first time. P.S. I Made This is a company that does something related to DIY. Their website isn’t very clear, but they are selling kits for people who want to make customized stationary, wine bottle gift bags, and other domestic accouterments.

The kits are really simple – once consists of canvas wine bottle bags, stickers coated with chalkboard paint, and chalk. The “data” of DIY. Putting the elements together in a kit makes them more like “information”.

The exciting thought is what happens if you carried this thought experiment forward. How would DIY retail be different if instead of selling “Data” you were selling products that represented the equivalent of “Information”, “Knowledge”, or “Wisdom”?

The success of companies like Sparkfun, iFixit, AdaFruit, Make:, and other DIY dynamos show what is possible at the “Information” level and I’m excited to see this trend continue.

For reference, this is a “P.S. I Made This” Kit

P.S. I Made This Introduction video