Hasta La Ideas

Your typical adjustable camera or gear bag uses padded, removeable sections that you affix to a matrix by means of velcro. It sounds great in theory, but is horrible to use in practice; the velcro has a tendency to stick when you’re trying to adjust or remove it, quickly turning your reconfiguration into a laborious chore.

A Denver-based startup called TrekPak has designed a better system of user-configurable gear protection. TrekPak’s velcro-free padded sections use simple U-shaped pins and exposed sidewalls as connection points:

As the system is designed to be dropped into an existing bag, it brings to mind the purse organizers we wrote about earlier, with the added benefit of user-determined layout.

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Adolphe Bitard – T&eacutel&eacutephone via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine you are nine months pregnant. You’re in the delivery room, legs in stirrups, pushing as hard as you can. You’re in pain. You feel vulnerable and tired.

You look up and a thousand people are in the room with you. They actually spent their own money to be in here. In fact, their cash helped pay for the room. Now they’re watching the most intimate parts of the birthing process and giving you real time feedback of how they think you are doing. (“Just push harder!” “You’re doing great!” “What’s taking so long???”)

You’re thankful, obviously. Eternally grateful. You wouldn’t be in this room if it wasn’t for their generosity. These amazing people gave you the support you needed to help bring your baby into the world. If you could, you would give them all a big hug. At the same time… It would be really nice to just get some peace and quiet so you could just focus on popping this kid out.

That’s kind of how it feels to work with Backers when you’re crowdfunding a project.

Design has traditionally been a quiet exercise. A small team of people get together and make something in relative solitude. You go through your iterations, successes and failures in private. Eventually your work is released and then rest of the world gets to weigh in on what you did.

Crowdfunding projects are the opposite of that. Design turns into a performance art. Once you launch your project, everyone (at least it feels like everyone) has an opinion. You are being judged. Your successes and failures are magnified. One moment someone will call you a genius and the next, someone will claim you’re running a Ponzi scheme.

Dealing with this, while simultaneously getting a new-to-the-world product off the ground can be…challenging. This is new stuff for designers to think about: How do you talk about your progress with a big, public audience that has a small, yet personal stake in your success?

In this part of the crowdfunding series, we will talk about how to effectively communicate with Backers.

There are a few key things you will want to think about: Kickstarter’s Methods of Communication, Backer Psychology, Tips on how to communicate effectively, and Dealing with “Special” people.

Kickstarter’s Methods of Communication

There are three ways you and your Backers can communicate with each other on Kickstarter:

Click for larger image!

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3/21/2012: Updated with the latest from Colin, after the jump

It’s not rocket science—nor is it the first acoustic iPhone speaker we’ve seen, though it might just be the smallest—just dedication to the craft, a decent work ethic and commitment to quality: we’re pleased to report that the upstarts at Kinetic Custom Machine has reached its funding goal for its first Kickstarter project, “Sonastand,” as of last Thursday afternoon. Like many All-American entrepreneurial stories we’re hearing these days, it’s a timely tale of a couple young fellas, Colin Chu and Bob Wimbrow, with a dream and a CNC machine.

Colin found a worthy counterpart in Bob when they were juniors in high school whose hobbies included building model rocket cars and modding paintball guns—”thinking back on it, we played with fire quite frequently”—with vague dreams of making stuff for a living. They went their separate ways after high school (I’m picturing something like the last scene of Superbad): Bob completed his B.S. in Physics at UC Riverside, Bob ended up on the East Coast, working in the solar industry, while Colin put his International Studies degree to use as an English teacher in Japan, where “he became increasingly fascinated by the fact that every person I observed working was doing it to the best of their abilities.”

Their disparate paths led them back to California, where they finally had the means to fulfill their longtime dream of owning a CNC machine. To hear Bob tell it, I can’t help but think that a bench-top lathe might have put me on a completely different path myself:

My first exposure to metalworking was in high school working for Blume Engineering where I worked with a (Prazi D6000) bench-top lathe. I was blown away by the process of metal cutting, the forces involved, and the accuracy/beauty of the result. I’ve had a thing for these machines and what they can do ever since. Being a computer guy from a very young age, the idea of combining the accuracy of these machines with computer numeric control (CNC) blew my mind. What a potent combination!

The “Sonastand” is not only their first Kickstarter project but the “first product from [their] long list of ideas,” and it will be available through the de facto venue for DIY product design these days for another month or so. Colin notes that they could have used Don Lehman’s advice regarding shipping when they launched their project, adding his own take on the Crowdfunding Revolution, the topic du jour:

One thing that I enjoy is cutting out investors and middlemen. For sure there is a lot of benefit to investors, but at least in our case, we don’t want to have to report back to our investors and update them on how much profit we are making. I’ve told potential investors that “it’s our company, our ideas, our products, and we would like to keep it that way”, and Kickstarter helps with that. I feel like the hardest thing to do as a new company is to raise capital and Kickstarter allows that to be possible. The market decides what is worthy.

Our two cents, more CNC porn and the full story (from Colin) after the jump:

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Su Kickstarter delle volte si trovato progetti interessanti, pronti per essere prodotti come questo The HuMn Wallet.
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It’s something that everyone uses everyday (or so we hope), yet the humble bar of soap is often discarded before it lives its life to completion: as Aric Norine—a Vancouver-based animator by trade—notes, that last 10% of ‘soap sliver,’ often finds its way down the drain (so to speak) before it can go to use. He was inspired by his germaphobic wife, as the story goes, to preserve the integrity of these last unloved, unlathered bits, to create the STACK, a bar of soap with a concave surface for reviving these slivers. “Stack soap is my way to eliminate the soap sliver… and save my marriage.”

It’s something like a soapdish made of soap, “designed with a special groove,” such that “each new bar is ready to receive the previous little sliver.” (If you misread that as “precious” the first time around, as I did, you might just be in the STACK’s target market.) Thus, the old bar completes the new one and the lifecycle—illustrated in the the graphic above, not to mention in the product itself—continues: as Norine writes on the Kickstarter page, “You’ve now begun the Infinite Cycle of Soap.”

The other, less salient (but perhaps equally important) feature is the raised logo, which adds crucial grip between the two bars. For what it’s worth, STACK is produced in USA and is free of sodium laureth sulfate (SLS).

STACK joins a handful of other soap designs we’ve seen lately, from a purportedly age-old French (via Korean) design to a snap-off soap concept, as well as a grater-based dispenser that sort of splits the difference.

See it in stack-tion:

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