Continuing from the last blog post – the trip and Post-Scarcity Escape Velocity presentation (download here, 3.4M PDF) was breakthrough. The presentation was well-received – as the message of the Global Village Construction Set/Resilient Community Construction Set is coming through – as a potent solution to many pressing world issues. The Power Cube and Distributed Power Generator were perhaps the most notable for many listeners, as were LifeTrac II and Modular CEB Housing. While the technology was the focus as the enabler, the social impact was also becoming clear.
Hear my interview with Thom Becker, True Fan and Lastwear open source clothing company founder – who invited us to the Open Up event – on prospects of open source clothing production. We also comment on hiring a professional project manager as a means to achieving massively parallel product development program that we’ve been seeking for a long time. The practical result and major highlight of the trip is that we will position the recruitment of a professional project manager as a key requirement for the acceleration of GVCS development. We will work with David Wilhelm, who is a partner in Lastwear – as a professional project manager as recommended by Thom.
Lastwear – the Open Source Clothing Company from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
The second highlight was commitment on the part of Adam Schilling and Skylar Paris – to collaborate on a 10 minute Explainer Video. Thus the present team is building. (1) Isaiah, who is working on the 2 minute Explainer Video for the BFI Challenge – to be finished by Friday. (2) Adam – story and script for additional videos. (3) Skylar – illustration. (4) Will Cleaver and Noah Beasler – CAD, animation, exploding part animations; (5) Marcin – product ecology technical integration. The goal is to produce extreme clarity on the GVCS via story-special effects-CAD-real video footage. We can then include this in Proposal 2011 – and the rest of our publicity work.
The third highlight came from Adam Shilling – another True Fan -with whom I talked for hours not only on the video work – but on a multiplayer online game based on the GVCS as the inspiration for its connection to the real world. Adam is going to South America to meet real people – to assess the needs of real communities. The project will link gaming to the real world – where money exchanged ends up purchasing things like tractors or renewable energy equipment for villages in South America. I think this is one of the most potentially world-changing ideas that can come out of internet culture, as applied to the real world. We were convinced on this trip that virtual reality games can indeed have a profound, positive effect on reality. Hear more in this video – the first half is on the video work, and the second half is on the proposed game – which will be marketed as a game, not an effort to change the world:
10 Minute Explainer Video and GVCS-Based Game from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
In a nutshell, this trip was another consciousness-cracking experience. Life with the GVCS is becoming ever more exciting. We will post the video of the presentation as soon as it’s available. Next, we are all looking forward to the finishing of the 2 Minute Explainer video mentioned above, and the results of our application to the TED Fellows program.
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impressive work!!
here is a link which i found through this project on thingiverse. from what i understand, they are basically thinking on new ways to arrange materials and objects for different functions. better increase the amount of information than the amount of materials you buy.
http://thecommonsfactory.wordpress.com is the actual link..
Next time you speak with him, you might mention the possibility of making work clothes from un-retted ramie.
Ramie is in the nettle family, but unlike nettle, its fibers are very difficult to separate from one another (ret), and so to spin soft thread from it, one has the unfortunate choice of an expensive time- and labor-intensive traditional process, or an expensive petroleum-intensive process with heavy IP encumbrance.
However, there is a tradition of making work clothes from the un-retted ramie bast. This makes for a relatively coarse cloth, but it is some of the toughest, most rot-resistant fabric you can get. Additionally, the process of wearing and washing clothes made this way gradually rets the fibers over the years.
When Thom mentioned Japanese designs, and the option of designing panels to be multi-purpose and easily disassembled, it occurred to me that locally-grown ramie (which isn’t an expensive or particularly difficult ag product: Wikipedia says 1,600 kg/ha/year of dry non-de-gummed fibre.can be expected, and it grows in lots of different lattitudes) could be woven into work clothes, and the process of wearing them would add value to the fiber.
regarding the potential for open source ecology game
http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/GVCS_game
it may be interesting to contact people developing “Earth Game”,
as to see if it can be incorporated – as it is still currently in development ?
http://www.1earthgame.org/index.shtml
which I found via the coalition list
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coalition/X_Lcnk_6SAg
excerpt :
EarthGame™ is a massively multiplayer online strategic design and planning real-world “game.” It is also a set of tools for recognizing, defining and solving global and local problems onboard Spaceship Earth. It combines the vast and growing wealth of global data available on the web with sophisticate data visualization techniques, embeds these within a powerful strategic planning and design methodology, and places all this into a gaming context.