In this era of mass customisation and user-creation, very often questions are raised whether everyone can be a designer and if this doesn’t mean a loss of quality? A very famous critique is the one of Andrew Keen, who argues on a Fast company article that:

The consequence of this design democracy is an ugly spectacle of deep purples and electric oranges. It’s a culture of me-me-me: my hideously personalized car, my hideously personalized sofa, my hideously personalized house. It’s that fat woman in the tight dress that only exaggerates her obesity. It’s that loud pick-up truck with the tinted windows and the tastelessly sexualized exhaust pipe.

But according to Matt Sinclair on the Fluid Forms blog, the critique above isn’t about design, but about taste! And this opens a whole new debate: what is ‘good’ taste? According to him, the question of whether joe public can be designer, depends on how one defines design:

Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. Consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb – something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it.

New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping.

Sometimes I wish I could use a sewing machine in a proper way! Unfortunately, even sewing on a button is a mission impossible!

After checking out Spoonflower,  I again felt the urge to learn some basic sewing tricks. Spoonflower is a website where you can design your own fabric. And although I can just design, order and buy my fabric … it isn’t enough, you have to do something with the fabric. But enough about my sewing disability. So Spoonflower offers custom digital textile printing. Everyone can upload an image, choose the arrangement (do you want your image being centered or repeated?) and have it printed on cotton. So if you just can’t find the right design for those new curtains, why not creating the pattern you’ve always wanted? And what’s more: every week, there’s the Fabric of the Week contest, in which the Spoonflowers decides which fabric they would like to buy. The winner of the contest not only gets 5 yards of the fabric for free, but his or her design will also be offered for sale in the Spoonflower Etsy Shop, for one week.

Another similar site is Bonbonkakku. This Finnish site is for fabric, what Threadless is for T-shirts. The basic principle in both sites is the competition, only the subject is different. In the case of Bonbonkakku, every fabric designed will be published on the site for viewers to see and vote on. The fabrics that get the most votes are chosen to be sold on the Bonbonkakku site. So anyone can upload and submit a fabric design to the competition and if the design gets selected, the winner gets a  heap of fabric, with his/her design on it. Furthermore the winning design  will also be sold on the site.

I think it’s time, I’m taking a sewing class!

Source: Spoonflower, Bonbonkakku

So, last week I started sharing my Blurb-experiences with you. Meanwhile I finished collecting the pictures and text for my book and Blurb-day – the day I had been waiting for – arrived: I could finally upload my own book to the Blurb-website.

And then, it happened: an error!  Booksmart encountered a technical glitch and needs to close down!! My enthousiastic feeling changed in frustration. However, I wouldn’t give in: so I kept on trying but after approximately 25 times, I changed tactics and send a mail to the customer support.

I have to say it: I love their customer support! Thanks to Megan and Jeremy, I was able to order my book. Each time, I received an answer within the day! When I couldn’t upload the book making use of the Booksmart-software, they offered another option: uploading it throug YouSendIt. Yesterday evening, I received a mail from Jeremy with some very good news:

Hi Katrien,

Good news: we were able to repair the error! Please note that to do so, we had to remove the 3 lines of “byline” text on the spine (BookSmart can encounter trouble when there is more than one line of spine text).

Your book has been uploaded to your Blurb.com account and is now ready to be ordered (or will be ready in 10 minutes).

I can only say that I had a very good experience with Blurb, thanks to the great work of customer support! Thanks Megan and Jeremy!

At SwarmSketch you can collaboratively sketch with other users, from all over the world,  on an online sketch board. A new – popular search – term is randomly chosen every week, which becomes the sketch subject of the week. Users have the opportunity to sketch one line which adds up to what others have already drawn. The sketch grows thanks to the contribution of all users.

Furthermore, after drawing a line, a user can improve the sketch by regulating the color of the lines drawn by other people, which the system randomly choses. Another interesting feature is watching an animation of the progress: how the sketch evolved during the week.