This Side Up Table by David Graas

In an Absolut world, we will download design on demand.

It is like the music for our iPod; dematerialized bits and bytes put together again where we need it, without the waste of a physical intermediary. In a world where we watch our carbon as closely as our waistline we don't want to be driving to stores; in a world where everything except Absolut can be digitized, why move material when we are interested in ideas, creativity and talent?

With digital designs we decide what we want from the best in the world, not what Mr. Store Manager picks out. The Long Tail is at our fingertips as we cruise from Korea to Kansas for the design that suits our taste.

Once we find it we email it to the neighborhood CNC shop (we could buy a Mr. Router home model but the shop is conveniently right next to where they print out our clothing and sew it together...) and bring home the pieces for assembly, no delivery van required. The long boat trip from China is a thing of the past as we choose local, sustainable plywood as the medium.

We don't want to own a lot so what we do should be the best and exactly what we want, what we choose, not what anyone else decides they will sell to us, because we live in a downloadable world.

Join TreeHugger and Absolut in this demonstration of a downloadable world. We have asked designers from around the world to give us one/sixth scale models of their designs that you can download, print, cut out and build. Collect them all!

We just learned about Paper Critters, an entire colony of paper toys inhabited by 4946 contributions from people all over the world. Not only that, they provide software tools to draw your own paper critter, make it part of the colony and print it out. Trend hunter Josh Spears says "it's all in the application; you’re supplied with different tools used to decorate your critter, like shapes, thematic stencils that range from “cute” to “rebel” — good for those of us who can’t even draw a straight line to save our lives — a palette of colors, as well as the option to incorporate an uploaded image from your hard drive. But the best is the end result; when you’re finished, you print out your little bad-ass, fold and glue him together, and wait for office workers to think you’re keeping your secret talent on the DL." Make your own at ::Paper Critters

Ryerson University School of Interior Design graduate Shirley Pui-Yu Cheung asks:

Why not maximize a piece of 4' x 4' baltic birch wood by taking advantage of its natural beauty and making it multifunctional? An occasional side table that functions like a study or laptop table with an extra height space for a glass of juice or a book. When not in use as a laptop table it can be easily transported by grabbing on to the oval cutouts. Not only is it multifunctional but its non-conventional form makes doing work more fun!

You, dear readers, are not the only ones thinking about downloadable designs; Writer Bruce Sterling wrote the book and made the video!

"The future will see a new kind of object — we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable — that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term “spime” for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won’t be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences." ::putting people first

Watch the amazing ::video here

Students at The Ryerson University School of Interior Design in Toronto, Canada were asked to design a piece of furniture out of a single 4 x4 sheet of baltic birch plywood. These wowed the crowd at the Interior Design Show this spring; We thought it a wonderful opportunity to present the work of these talented young designers as downloadable designs. So far as we know, none are in production, but that might change....

Ryerson University School of Interior Design Student Bradley Marks says:

Table as sculpture was the driving force behind the constructivist inspired cantilevered piece. Line and forms transform depending on the perspective from which the table is seen. In certain instances planar elements dominate, in others linear, while in some a false sense of mass is created, The strong colour was used both to unify and to lead the viewer's eye around and through the table's various components.

Please enjoy.

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In Finland, Freedom of Creation (FOC) is designing fabrics that use laser sintering technology to produce fabrics of interlocking links of plastic. "instead of producing textiles by the meter, then cutting and sewing them into final products, this concept has the ability to make needle and thread obsolete."

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"Mass culture is run by superficiality and ecological absurdity. Foldschool supports craftsmanship as a face-to-face approach to design and brings together product and user the closest possible.

The mindset of foldschool is to restore design to one of its original missions: to provide a product at an affordable price through a smart manufacturing process.

Foldschool is a collection of free cardboard furniture for kids, handmade by you. The ownloadable patterns can be printed out with any printer. Follow the instructions and assemble a stable piece of furniture."

You can download a free, full scale pattern from Foldschool or build a 1/6 scale miniature:

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While we experiment with downloadable designs on this site, at New Zealand's Ponoko, they are already doing it. They put all of the pieces of the puzzle together to let designers upload their flatpack designs, let purchasers buy them, and they find manufacturers to laser-cut them out. They call it "the world's first personal manufacturing platform. It's the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand."

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