Like many homes in what we locals call “in-town” Atlanta, mine is an older one, built over half a century ago. There are many charms and challenges that come with owning an older home, but it’s the unexpected trials that prove the most onerous.

One of the unusual features of my house is the closet in my bedroom. Given the era in which the home was built, it was small to start with (wardrobes, not walk-ins would have been the norm). But when a washer/dryer was installed later on, the depth of the closet was further reduced to make room for plumbing in the wall behind. The result is an unusually narrow closet unable to accommodate standard hangers.

For five years, I’ve made do, using makeshift shelving in my closet and distributing hanging clothing into closets in the other downstairs bedroom. I’d often wondered if some solution might be possible, but I’d never been able to find hangers that would fit in the closet as it is designed.

Today I finally re-engineered my closet, in a way that I don’t think would have been feasible even a year ago.

First I designed a hanger slightly narrower than standard, such that it would fit in the closet but still balance correctly.

Then I used the on-demand manufacturing service Ponoko to laser-cut a prototype. I tried both wood and acrylic, discovering that the wood smells too much from the laser cutting and also feels a bit less sturdy. So I went with the plastic version.

Then I had another few dozen hangers cut, using larger sheets to reduce my per-hanger cost. I’d decided to wait a few months until New Zealand-based Ponoko had introduced US manufacturing, along with which came reduced prices and free shipping. The entire process still takes a couple weeks from upload to receipt, but the results are quite impressive. In my case, it meant a usable closet, at long last!

While it’s true that my hangers ended up being absurdly expensive compared to ordinary, mass-produced ones (at around $7 each, probably thirty times more expensive), I was happy to pay the price. A few hundred dollars is far less than I would have had to spend on a wardrobe. Plus, the value of reclaiming the space necessary for such a large piece of furniture is beyond financial measure. My house is modestly sized and space is valuable.

The wonderful world of web 2.0 often woos us with promises of fortune and fame. Become a YouTube celebrity. Make a killing with a well-timed t-shirt on Zazzle. That’s certainly how Ponoko has positioned itself, as an easy way to “sell your products and products plans from your own Showroom.”

But perhaps the more interesting uses of on-demand manufacture are the personal ones, the ones designed for specific use rather than armchair entrepreneurship: a set of CafePress-printed t-shirts created for a family trip to Disney World. A custom LuLu-bound book made to keep a set of personal recipes. A set of Ponoko-forged clothes hangers that allow a broken closet to be used again. These are more than mere clay ashtrays; they are objects that we can value for their use rather than their exchange or symbolic value.

MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld has been calling this practice “personal fabrication,” and he wrote a book on the subject in 2007. The book is based on one of his courses at MIT, “How to Make (Almost) Anything,” which strives, in Gershenfeld’s words, toward “fulfilling individual desires rather than merely meeting mass-market needs.” While one of Gershenfeld’s interests is in the application of “fab labs” in the developing world, he does not deny the concept’s application in the first world either, where Wal-Mart cannot always satisfy the specific needs of real people in real situations.

Web services like Ponoko and Zazzle have a lot to learn from folks like Gershenfeld. Their marketing and interfaces orient them primarily toward replicating the model of leveraged sales that drove the founders of these companies to seek venture capital and open them in the first place. But perhaps they miss the point: not all things need to be done in the interest of commerce, fame, or other forms of public recognition. Sometimes—perhaps most times—improving one’s private life is enough.

published July 11, 2009

Comments

  1. Ari Velazquez

    I can’t wait until I find a need for Ponoko in the way you used it. I’m moving in a few weeks so I hope my new place is flawed in some aspect and I’ll be able to correct it with a “personal fabrication”.

  2. Ben Combee

    Ian, if you’ve not already done so, consider uploading your design files for those hangers to thingiverse.com — it’s a site some friends of mine in NY run to collect designs for fabricated objects for sharing. They’ve got an ever expanding collection of interesting objects there.

  3. Amy Jacoby Ayers

    I’m finally going to be able to produce the ideal toilet paper holder I’ve had in mind for some time. This is ingenius! Way to reuse your existing closet, Ian.

  4. anxiousmodernman

    Thingiverse! What a fantastic name.

  5. Ian Bogost

    Ponoko wrote a bit about my closet on their blog.