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April 16, 2005
Design Your Own Toaster?
Prices for appliances like toasters have gotten low that their quality almost doesn't matter, as long as they don't catch on fire. But what about if you could design your own toaster? Here's a forecast for just that:
My theory? Bespoke everything. The tech pretty much exists to have anything and everything custom fabricated at a price nearly in line with mass-manufactured products. Once we move beyond micro-brands to designing, producing and consuming everything on a personal level, I suppose the only brands worth talking about will be which fab shops have the best pricing, turnaround, tech support and customer service.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to design their own socks and toasters etc, so there'll still be room for exceptional designs from people like Philippe Starke, or whoever. On the other hand, when 200,000 *have* designed their own toaster, I wouldn't be surprised to see open source and file sharing of product design specs flood the bulk of the market. Whether these will be free or just really cheap is up for grabs. Probably both.
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Posted on April 16, 2005 04:28 PM by toaste174.
Filed in Reports by Consumers under toasters.
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Comments
Aside from customization, I think the other thing we will start to see much more of is unique manufacturing. As a metal worker, I often make my own specialized tools to accomplish a specific task for a specific job. Some of them are useful long-term and others really only get used once for some odd task that never comes up again.
I'm now gearing up to micro-manufacture some of the more broadly useful tools and market them to niche markets. Ten years ago, or even five, it wouldn't have been possible to turn a profit on such small numbers. Between the manufacturing cost and the cost of finding the market for them, I shelved a lot of good designs as more trouble than they were worth. It's really exciting to see the combination of the web and new fabbing technology make it possible to bring some of these projects to market.
Posted by: johntunger at April 17, 2005 11:39 PM
