According to Charles Leadbeater, the 21st century is the age of mass innovation as was the 20th century the age of mass production. In his book We-Think, he talks about the world wide web as a platform for mass creativity and innovation, since it allows people to share, collaborate and sometimes even create together. The main ideas of the book are also explained in this beautifully illustrated and animated video.

According to Sara Clemence, who wrote on the subject for Portfolio.com, mass customisation is our future way of shopping.

“Bespoke products have always been available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, whether for an individually tailored suit or a customized car. In recent years, one of the big shifts in retail has been giving customers the ability to design their own versions of premium products—like wedding rings, pricey handbags, and Nikes—at prices that are comparable to the regular versions.

Now, without most of us realizing it, we’re on the cusp of another big change. Thanks to market demands and developments in technology, we’re going to be living in a user-generated world, where everything we use can (and will) be customizable. It’s already happening, in ways both obvious and not.”

Clothing  is seen as an expression of one’s identity or as a symbol of the social group/culture one is belonging to, so why not wearing a smart, flex-image fabric that displays pieces of ones social network directly on clothes.

The OSMO Custom Social Network Wearable allows participants to customize clothing with smart, flex-image fabric.

The OSMO wearable is not only a wearable piece of your personal voice but it’s also connected, networked and alive. It communicates with your iPhone applications, detects “friends” from your Loopt™ profile and picks up and displays images from other participants in close proximity.

Source: Talk2myShirt, Creating Space

Remember to keep 30 April 2009 available, since the Flanders Fashion Institute organises a conference on “Smart fashion: creativity and intelligent fabrics”.

The conference will take place in the Yohji Yamamoto Auditorium of  Flanders Fashion Institute - ModeNatie,  Drukkerijstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp.

The full programme can be found here!

A fabric I like very much is felt. So I was very excited when I came across these UNCUT slippers which you just need to cut out of a sheet of felt. Ernest Perera, the designer behind the slippers, printed a pattern of the slipper on the fabric. So the user, just needs to cut out the pattern according to his or her size and fold it over.

A few weeks ago there was quite some uproar on the change in the Terms of Services from Facebook.

Amanda French compares the TOS of Facebook with the one of MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Linkedin seems to have quite a strong Terms of Service-statement: in fact, when you upload something (photos, ideas, your profile,…) you grant them the “right [...] to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.”

Twitter seems to have the most “user-friendly” TOS:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

If you are still in doubt whether you can trust “those social media”-sites, then maybe it’s a good idea to consider open source social networking.

Inshoshi calls itself a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product! Inshoshi tries to build the code to be able to “install” and further develop your own social networking site.

LovedByLess is a similar project and seems to be finished already. Both seem to be good tools to work third party-independent.