The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [19]
CASE STUDY:
Kickstarter
In April 2009, a new way to fund creative ideas and projects made a splash on the Internet. Designers, filmmakers, journalists, inventors, artists, and other creatives flocked to Kickstarter, a platform for soliciting small yet consequential monetary contributions from donors. Kickstarter is powered by a unique funding method that is not about personal investing: project creators maintain 100 percent ownership of their intellectual property.
Starting a project on Kickstarter is free, but currently projects are posted by invitation only, and must be based in the United States. Founder Perry Chen says Kickstarter plans to assist international project creators in the future. To initiate a project, creators set a funding goal and a deadline of up to ninety days after the project’s posting date. Kickstarter offers advice to help creators meet their funding goal on time and to attract possible investors with compelling project descriptions and clever rewards to funders. Gifts have been as simple as a pen boasting the project’s name for a $5 donation, and as elaborate as a hot-air balloon ride for a donation of $150.
After “micro-patrons” make donations, they receive updates on the project’s funding progress. If donors become invested in a project’s success, they can send e-mails to the creator, link the project proposal to their Facebook pages, or Tweet about it to raise awareness of the project and help get funding. With viral support, donations can pile up quickly: one $8,900 book project was 200 percent funded within the first forty-eight hours. Even if the funding goal is surpassed, projects can accept pledges until the funding deadline arrives. Kickstarter applies a fee of 5 percent to the amount raised. The caveat: if a funding goal isn’t achieved, all pledges are canceled, and no money changes hands.
As donors and artists bring their own social networks to the site, the potential for donors to find new interesting projects, and for artists to reach more donors, naturally builds. Perry reports that Kickstarter is increasing the number of projects and the volume of its transactions at a rate of about 20 percent a month. Kickstarter has momentum, a growing following, angel investors, and a big idea—perfect ingredients for success in the Mesh. A similar service is off and running in France called Kisskissbankbank.
3
Mesh Design
WHAT’S HERE: heirloom design, or the half-life of crap; the welcome return of Mr./Ms. Fixit; design is continuous and two-way; impersonate nature wherever possible.
When my friend Joaquina first arrived in the United States from Chile, and her camera, or bike, or shoes developed a problem, she’d ask where to take them to be fixed. People would look at her as if she was from another planet. “Fixed?” she heard. “No, no, it’s just cheaper to throw it away and get a new one.” I hear people say it all the time. I’ve said it. But that sentence should make all the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. As the architect William McDonough has quipped, “Where is away?”
The mantra of the ownership business model is simply: “Sell more.” Taken to the extreme, this mantra has severely warped the basic principles of good design. Standing before the Egyptian pyramids, one marvels at the beauty of their design, but also that they have endured for thousands of years. At Sacsayhuamán, in earthquake-prone Cuzco, Peru, engineers struggle to understand how the Incans built an outdoor arena of irregular boulders, some weighing hundreds of tons, that even today fit together so snugly that you can barely slide a credit card between them. Architectural students study the churches and temples of Europe and Asia to absorb the underlying principles. The buildings awe us with their beauty, while retaining their structural integrity for centuries. For most of human history, those who designed the tools and temples, the roads and aqueducts, the musical instruments and microscopic lenses, have sought