Hands On

Ponoko

A LONG-TAIL, PRO-AM, DIGITAL MAKER THING.

By Bruce Sterling

PONOKO, WHICH IS PRONOUNCED po-NO-ko with a New Zealand accent, is a Web 2.0 startup that makes physical objects.

Ponoko’s plans are deep and limpid and philosophical, but they break so many 20th-century paradigms that they’re hard to parse. For instance, so far, Ponoko makes mostly plastic jewelry and furniture. But Ponoko’s not an industrial factory or an artist’s atelier.

It’s a “platform,” which means that Ponoko’s a “place” (the ponoko.com website), a “tool” (a bunch of laser cutters), a “marketplace” (to buy and sell objects, or to buy and sell files for the objects), and an “online community” (to get all chummy with customers and/or attempt to befriend designers). It’s also an informal trade school, because it attempts to recruit people who are just floating by and turn them into helpful Ponoko producers. Yeah, kind of a long-tail, pro-am, digital maker thing!

But wait, there’s so much more! It’s also a promotional service, and it’s a blog. Ponoko is also a mashup, because you can’t create with Ponoko unless you already use design software.

Still, I don’t want to describe Ponoko in this tech-centric geek way. Let me approach this subject from the point of view of the material differences potentially made in the real world. So let’s imagine a hands-on encounter with Ponoko products, in a future scenario where web-based “personal manufacturing platforms” are as big a deal as, say, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Amazon are today.

Scene: A hipster’s living room somewhere in Iowa, during the late 20-teens. There’s a Goodwill couch, some hand-crocheted clothes, a third-hand plywood Eames chair held together with shoe glue, and a wi-fi repeater sitting on a checkerboard table. JANE WEBGEEK is idly playing with a shiny toy when her country cousin, JEFF NEWBIE, comes in,

20 Make: Volume 13

banging the screen door behind him.

JEFF: What’s that thing?

JANE: (Mesmerized) It’s a spinning top.

JEFF: (Sitting on the busted couch) Does it spin good?

JANE: It’s OK. Yeah. Try it yourself.

JEFF: (Bug-eyed) Hey, wait a minute. When it spins, this little top has got your face engraved on it.

JANE: Yeah, I was gonna give it to my niece, but see this? (She deftly pops the plastic top into separate gleaming tab-and-slot components). You think little Vicky might swallow this pointy part? She’s 3, you know.

JEFF: Is it from China?

JANE: It’s from New Zealand.

JEFF: Well, then at least it’s not poisonous. (With some small effort, he reassembles the toy.) It doesn’t spin as good now.

JANE: You gotta push hard till that little bump clicks and locks right in there. Yeah, that’s it. You gotta really work those slot affordances.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s real pretty, but it’s, uh, pretty slotty.

JANE: Well, when you’ve got pieces lasered from laminar sheets, they’re plenty stout on the x and y axes, but the z — where you kinda stress it orthogonally to the grain of the material — you gotta watch that.

JEFF: (Putting his feet up) Say again?

JANE: It’s like my coffee table here. See how it’s waxed sustainable plywood all mitered along the edges? My boyfriend fell over this while we were drunk last night, and it kinda tooth-chipped right here on the vertex. Knocked that strut clean loose.

JEFF: Your table’s from New Zealand, too?

JANE: The plans for my table are stored in New Zealand, but they cut this one with a water-saw down at the local Kinko’s. I gotta get a new strut.