TED Community » Dominic Muren

More About Me

I'm passionate about

I want to understand the consequences of the way we make our material world Then I want to change the way we make objects so that these consequences align with our collective desires.

An idea worth spreading

Consumer electronics benefit from over 100 years of manufacturing advancement. Yet they are frustratingly un-customizable, sport laughably short lifetimes, and become toxic waste when they die. These problems come, not from the devices themselves, but with flaws in the way that manufacturing creates the illusion of choice through overproduction, and low cost through reduced durability.  The Skin-Skeleton-Guts (SSG) Open Framework offers an alternative model for product creation which addresses these problems. By combining modular design with open, shareable design specifications, and using flexible, low cost machines for fabrication, SSG gives local manufacturing control back to users of products, while enabling faster innovation and lower overall costs. 

Talk to me about

Making, Electronics, Creative Commons, Sewing Machines, Cooking, Gardening, Rock Collecting, blogging, appropriate technology

People don't know that I'm good at

Rock collecting. Growing up in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, a place with a low population, but a rich geologic history, there wasn't much else for me to do but drive around digging up agates.

My TED Story

I'm at TED as a fellow, hoping to spark just enough interest in real, useful open products to nudge the juggernaut that is manufacturing onto tracks that lead to a more open, flexible, useful marketplace of products. I think TED is the perfect place for this to happen, because I don't need to convince everyone that open products are the future. I only need to convince enough people to form a niche within the market -- once there is a bloc of users willing to pay to keep the value they have invested in electronic products (or any object) then large-scale manufacturers will be lead by their bottom lines to join the party. I'm hoping that TED represents a group of people imaginative enough to see past the early, kludgy, ENIAC-sized present of open devices to a future which is almost unimaginably awesome. Whether this makes sense or not, I'd love to hear what you think -- come find me.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +50.80 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Conversation: If your cells were used to grow an organ in the lab, is it still "your" organ?

  Oct 3 2011: OK, Nina, most people have been responding to the "What if you grew an organ" question, and I think that's interesting. But I don't really care about organs that much -- I'm more interested in products. For example:
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4070522.stm
  An artist team has been making bone wedding rings using actual bone cells from the couple. how does ownership work in this case? Cells make lots of great materials that makers could use -- horn, nails, teeth, hair, shell. If these are made from cultures obtained from people, how does the ownership work?
  
  Henrietta Lacks's HeLa cells may have lead to all kinds of incredible life-saving breakthroughs, but their legality is even now almost incomprehensibly convoluted.
  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
  The tricky thing about cells is that they can be grown outside of people. And that means that a small culture that we might not miss, can go on to do gigantic things (like cure polio, for example).
  
  This is definitely an interesting question. And I want the answer too. Particularly when it comes to bikes made from bone :)
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: If your cells were used to grow an organ in the lab, is it still "your" organ?

  Oct 3 2011: Also Juan, a child is derived from tissue from two people, not one, so ownership is further complicated. But realistically, I think the key piece here is that the child is a whole human. Whole humans have legally defined rights, and that's why you don't own a child. This is also why the abortion debate is so heated -- at what point to reproductive cells (obviously not a whole human) or even a zygote (probably unambiguously not a whole human) morph into a whole human?
  
  OK, take it another way. When you go get a haircut, you are chopping off a lot of "You" you didn't have to sign a waiver... Is hair too impersonal? What about teeth at the dentist? Or a melanoma that you had removed? Or your appendix? Or a breast from a mastectomy? Or a busted heart that you had replaced with an artificial heart? At what point do you feel like you "own" this stuff?
  
  Did you notice that it got harder to trivialize these things, as they got more dear to life? I'm starting a new question above that breaks this even more.
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Has the global warming debate been settled?

  Feb 19 2011: I think the better question is, given the facts we have, what action is crucial now. (Granted, it would be nice to know what human activities lead to warming, to enable accurate prediction of how different global development scenarios will play out)
  
  For me (as a product designer trying to understand how I can help) I don't care whether humans are implicated or not -- I can act based on well established facts:
  
  1) Average warming is happening.
  
  2) CO2 (a known greenhouse gas) levels are higher than recorded previously by humans.
  
  Both points one and two are well documented (on TED.com and elsewhere), and not contested by the scientific community.
  
  3) Oil consumption is increasing, while oil supply is simultaneously decreasing. There is some question as to when peak oil production will occur, and what effect this will have. However, there is little disagreement that oil is finite, and that we are using it up.
  
  4) Using up oil tends to produce CO2 -- particularly because we burn it directly, or turn it into by-products (solvents, fertilizers, and lubricants) which tend to be burned or decompose into CO2.
  
  5) On top of that, an oil-fueled world tends not to develop the sorts of biomass-heavy ecosystems (like prairies) which naturally sequester carbon.
  
  My job as a product designer is to provide tools which give customers the resiliency to thrive despite changes to their situation.
  
  My customer's situation is changing: Oil-fueled, oil-manufactured products will be increasingly difficult to afford (3) and will in all likelihood, lead to bigger, harder problems for my customer to respond to (1,2,4).
  
  Therefore, I should be working to create products which not only actively reduce the need for oil in their production or usage, but also foster the sort of ecosystems that can reduce atmospheric carbon. I think this strategy can be applied broadly.
  
  I am writing and researching at Humblefacture.com to give designers the tools, materials, and frameworks to meet this need.
• +3

  A reply on Conversation: Has the global warming debate been settled?

  Feb 19 2011: Matthiew's point is well taken here, and I think addresses Jordan's statement that a debate is ongoing.
  
  However, I think the real issue that Jordan may be alluding to, is whether a "debate" is the proper mechanism to determine if global warming is anthropogenic or not. Debates are fundamentally subjective -- they are designed for questions to which quantitative data cannot be obtained. This is why they are done in front of audiences, who act as detectors of the direction in which the debate is swinging.
  
  Science, unfortunately, is also incapable of definitively proving hypotheses -- only disproving alternative hypotheses. Disprove enough alternatives, and you can assume the plausible remaining option is correct.
  
  Evolution is a great example. Yes, it cannot be demonstrated definitively that every orderly transition between species which we observe within the fossil record is the result of arbitrary accumulation of genetic traits over massive spans of time, and millions of generations of selection and re-selection. But this is the most compelling hypothesis which is not disproved by all available hard data. So we hold it as correct.
  
  Luckily, we may not need the debate "settled" to pursue prudent, reasonable action -- see a more thorough explanation above.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: How we can use social media on a world scale to launch a global campaign to recognize Internet access as a basic human right?

  Feb 18 2011: Philip, I think Giorgio's point, however infrastructurally inconvenient to acknowledge at this moment, is nevertheless valid.
  
  As a related example, when the United States recognized that freedom from slavery was a basic human right (although at the time, only enforceable on Americans), the infrastructure to replace slavery was by no means in place. The civil war, and post-war depression in the South stemmed directly from this disparity of infrastructure and need. But that didn't (and doesn't) make it any more valid to enforce human enslavement -- and numerous international treaties explicitly lay this fact out.
  
  Your example of water is an interesting one. I would submit that access to water is, at least tacitly, recognized as a basic right -- this is the motivation behind the exciting debates on corporate control of water supplies, and for great films like Irena Salina's "Flow" about water rights around the world. Water rights haven't been explicitly codified in constitutions as a basic right, but I think that these changes will come as the heralds of the predicted water wars over the next 20 years. The civil war wasn't the first or last conflict to arise out of rights/infrastructure disparities.
  
  As for internet access, the upside is that unlike water or slavery, it's much easier to distribute and redesign for maximum impact with minimum cost. For example, a minimum level of connection -- say low-bandwidth SMS interface with text-based databases -- might be established globally. This low-bandwidth connection, like free speech, or accommodation for childhood, or any of the other rights outlined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wouldn't give the best possible access to the fullness of the internet. But it would give all the crucial benefits.
  
  If you don't think you can get a lot of mileage out of low-fi networking, there are a couple million Egyptians and Tunisians who would disagree...

• A comment on Conversation: A conversation with GE: What are the best ideas for alternative energy management at home?

  Feb 18 2011: Graham's point below about using outdoor air to chill refrigerators is spot on, but I don't think it goes far enough (in fact, there are minimart outside air chiller solutions already in place, and heat pumps are sort of a techno-version of what he's proposing)
  
  We should recognize that houses are not spaces, but surfaces which separate inside from outside. The severity of this separation defines the eco-responsiveness of household living.
  
  For example, in the Brady Bunch house, the separation was complete. Electricity, natural gas, water, and groceries were the only inputs to the system (processed into light, entertainment, warmth, cold, sterility, and dinner) and the only outputs were "waste" (waste heat, gray water, black water, and garbage). The inputs were generally divorced from the local ecosystem within which the house existed -- artificial electricity and gas, water from a reservoir hundreds of miles away, and groceries from the store via the newly constructed interstate highway system. Wastes were just as separate, pushed into pipes below the street, whisked "away" as quickly as possible.
  
  No wonder the Bradys got canceled.
  
  To find an alternative vision of how a house might operate in a more integrated way, you need only move forward to the present day to look at permaculture construction strategies, or back 400 or so years to the great estates of Britain. These homes (to greater or lesser extent) look at the flows of energy and matter around and through the surface of a house as potential motive forces for beneficial work. Water comes from springs on the property which are replenished through careful swale construction and vegetation management. Likewise, energy comes in the form of current solar income (solar panels, solar hot water, passive heating strategies) or stored solar income (fuel from the woodlot). Food can be grown on property, and it can be fertilized with with composted organic wastes.
  
  Buildings are membranes. Separation means death.