Quirky, the product development community, has launched again after a redesign of their website. If you’re unfamiliar with the site, the premise is simple: every day we are faced with situations where a doodad or widget would make our lives easier. We are not inventors but we could be, if we worked together.

Quirky brings together a community of every day inventors to come up with new ideas for products, work together to bring these ideas to life, and finally manufacture the product for sale.

The ideas that emerge from the community are usually simple solutions to every day problems: how to better clean up the cords on your desk, slice a melon, or organize your pens. But what is innovative is the glimpse it gives into a potential future of product development, one in which the innovation process is inextricably tied to actual consumers.

It works now on a small scale to produce tangible results, but how far off are we from having the ability as amateur inventors and enthusiasts of changing entire industries with crowdsourced ideas?

Check out Local Motors, the first open source car company, recently featured in a Wired story about the upcoming DIY revolution in product design. Their “Rally Fighter” has reached production and can be had for $50k. The car was designed by the 10 person company with help from a large online community of car builders and enthusiasts who helped materialize the concept art of graphic artist Sangho Kim.


As the costs of small batch manufacturing come down industries will need to adapt to a burgeoning market of local/guild producers to stay relevant to consumer needs.

Advertisement