Open Source Shoes
For all of you aspiring shoe designers out there, swing by the Fluevog store in the Haight tomorrow and bring a drawing of your dream shoe. Fluevog is hosting a party to honor the latest winner of their Open Source Footwear project. You can read an interview I did with Stephen Bailey to get more information about their initiative.
I’ve been interested in this project since I first heard of it, not just because I love shoes, but because it is yet another way in which the lines between authorship and consumption are blurring. And that it’s not just fluid interfaces that users can affect, but the atoms as well.
And, if you are just looking to get 10% off some new shoes, you can submit your own shoe ideas and bring in this postcard. I’m designing a pair of boots (above), and I’ll submit the sketches tomorrow.
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3 Comments
Sorry, but from what I’ve seen on that site it seems little more than an opportunistic form of crowdsourcing … with media benefits. It reminds me of Nueros’ laughable “bounty” which offered next to nothing in exchange for some very specific code that Nueros needed for its gadget.
As far as I’m concerned, both are a way of exploiting enthusiastic people. Sure most everything submitted will be unusable, but if just one sketch is worth a damn and Fluevog run with it, they owe the person a whole pair of shoes. Gee, how generous of them. I suppose giving that person a royalty is … un-open source-like or something.
Interesting. I don’t see it as exploitation. Fluevog is capitalizing on the passion their consumers have for their brand and allowing them to participate with it in a fun and easy way. I don’t think they should be condemned for developing a way for their fans to get involved, with the slim potential that hey could benefit from it. Fluevog has mentioned that it takes considerable effort and time from their own designers to translate the participants ideas into an actual shoe. It should be a wake up call to any organizations that think open sourcing is the way to connect with a bunch of free labor. So many crowdsourced projects tank because they fail to offer anything to the user in exchange for their participation. Perhaps that was the issue with Nueros’, but I don’t think it’s the case here.
I tend to fall more along the lines of what Matt posted on the PDF forum thread I started regarding this: http://www.productdesignforums.com/index.php?showtopic=10034
In particular, this comment of his: “To be honest what annoys me most is this kind of venture being called open source – it isn’t, because the company decides what flies and what doesn’t, rather than the community.”
This is a critical distinction in my opinion and is where I see this effort as both a misappropriation of the term and a possible violation of labor laws (e.g. AOL’s class-action lawsuit filed by “volunteers”).
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