We’ve seen how the web has democratized creative entrepreneurship and revolutionized the production and distribution of music and art. Today, we’re looking at a new project that aims to do the same for fashion design.

Garmz is an effort to empower young designers by disengaging them from the bureaucratic, corporate world of the fashion industry and allowing for their creative voices to be heard — and bought. In an industry that makes it near-impossible for new designers to break through, one that uses trend dictatorship to shape mass taste and dismisses creative deviations, Garmz offers designers a platform for taking their designs from idea to wardrobe, showcasing, funding, producing and distributing them to a worldwide audience.

The way it works is simple: Designers submit their designs and users vote on them. Once a design reaches a set level of votes, it moves into production — Garmz works with the designer to get a prototype going, then produces a full batch of 150 items in their fashion studio in Vienna. The garments are sold through the Garmz webshop and shipped to customers worldwide with Garmz handling all backend issues, including warehousing, shipping and returns.

So, basically, Threadless for fashion.

While Garmz makes money via revenue share, designers keep the vast majority of profits, determine their own price point and profit margin above the fixed costs, and maintain 100% of the copyright on their designs. All in all, Garmz offers a promising model for the decentralized, democratic propagation of fashion, giving today’s emerging merchants of style not only a platform of self-expression but also a viable business model.

via @Thomas_Wagner

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Nine months ago, design thinking powerhouse IDEO issued a challenge to expand the conversation about climate change, shifting it away from what we’d have to give up and towards what we could create.

Living Climate Change aimed to provide a platform for what IDEO rightfully calls “the biggest design challenge of our time,” inviting design thinkers of all stripes to imagine what life could be like in 20 or 30 years, considering all aspects of being — lifestyle, policy, economy, behavior, and everything in between.

This month, IDEO announced the winners of the video challenge, which invited people to capture their vision of a future shaped by climate change and to imagine a better way of reducing carbon emissions. A jury of A-list design and climate change thinkers and doers — including UNESCO director Christine Alfsen, Design Council chief design officer Mat Hunter, Core77 editor Allan Chochinov, BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, IDEO founder David Kelly, National Design Museum director Bill Moggridge, and filmmaker Gary Hustwit of Helvetica and Objectified fame — selected the winners, each of whom received $3,000 in addition to what we think is the bigger prize: A full-immersion half-day workshop at IDEO.

The winner of the under-18 category is particularly delightful — 12-year-old Alec from New Jersey crowdsourced ideas for reducing carbon emissions from some of the world’s 2.5 billion kids, offering a surprisingly rich intersection of simplicity and brilliance.

The winner of the 18-and-over category places a shift to sustainable food at the center of solving the climate crisis, envisioning a flourishing of local urban farms and the implementation of a local nutrient retrieval system, closing the nutrition cycle — in order to buy food from your local urban farm, you’d have to bring in the same amount of nutrients, in the form of compost, as what you plan to take away. A meat credit-system helps curb one of the biggest edible contributors to carbon emissions.

You can see all submissions on the Living Climate Change Vimeo page. While the challenge may live in the world of hypothetical ideas rather than actionable change, it offers a valuable exercise in thinking about climate change as a design problem — and, cliche as it may be, a solution does always begins with an innovative idea.

via

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What does “humanity” actually mean? How do the 6.7 billion lives around the world, with their daily triumphs and tragedies, amount to one cohesive human story? That’s exactly what Google is trying to document in the freshly launched Life in a Day project — a cinematic experiment to document a single day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. (Sound familiar? Very familiar? Just sayin’…)

Google is crowdsourcing submissions from filmmakers and ordinary folks alike who, on July 24, will have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of their lives on camera. The project is a partnership between YouTube, LG, director Kevin Macdonald, and legendary producer Ridley Scott of Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise fame.

Dubbed “the world’s first user-generated feature film,” Life in a Day is set to premiere in January 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival. (Here’s what festival director John Cooper has to say about the project.) Creators whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as co-directors, and the 20 top contributors will get to attend the premiere at Sundance.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t reiterate the striking similarity of the premise to the One Day on Earth project, with a dash of 8 Billion Lives mixed in. So while being backed by Google and Ridley Scott certainly gives Day in a Life the leverage to gain critical enough a mass to offer a truly comprehensive snapshot of humanity, we’d have to extend a slight eyeroll at all the gushing about how “innovative” and “groundbreaking” the effort is.

Still, we strongly encourage you to take part — if anything, it’s a fun experiment and any opportunity to feel even a little bit more connected to our fellow human beings is an opportunity worthwhile.

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In every moment, billions of human lives around the world are unfolding in vastly different ways, filling the space-time continuum with a myriad of experiences, with great loves and great losses, with triumphs and tragedies, with conflict and compassion, with unremarkable mundanity seen through a remarkably rich array of lenses. One Day On Earth is a new multi-platform participatory media project rallying documentary filmmakers, students and ordinary citizens around the world to capture 24 hours in the life of the planet.

On October 10 this year — 10.10.10 — people in every single country across the globe will record footage telling their stories and peeling away at their lives, which will then be collaged into a two-hour feature-length documentary to be released theatrically.

To become a part of this micro-timecapsule of humanity, sign up to participate in the project and take a peek at many who have already joined around the world.

Besides being a brave experiment in collaborative storytelling, the project is a bold effort to find out who we are, as a culture and a civilization, and what we stand for in the grand scheme of human existence. Will we like what we see?

via GOOD

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Photographic Time Machine is one of our all-time most popular articles, but it spotlights projects that, while fascinating, are one-off art experiments. How fantastic would it be if there were a broader, more expansive platform for intersecting past and present through historical photography, a digital time machine of sorts? Well, now there is. Enter Historypin — a mashup of modern mapping and archival photos that offers a new way to explore and share history.

Developed by We Are What We Do, the social movement behind Anya Hindmarch’s now-iconic I’m Not a Plastic Bag bag, in partnership with Google, the project pulls photos from various national archives and private-sector collections, and “pins” them over Google Maps Street View to create a fascinating fold in the space/time continuum.

Archival photos can both be dated and geotagged, painting a precise portrait of how specific locations have changed. Users can even submit their own and write stories about them, adding a wonderful urban storytelling component akin to Hitotoki.

From 19th-century views of Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station to London’s iconic High Street on Victory in Europe Day in 1945, Historypin features nearly 2,000 photos and stories pinned just a couple of days after the official launch and has the potential to become the largest user-generated archive of historical images and stories, documenting not only how the physicality of our world is changing but also how our experience of it is responding to those changes — a priceless timecapsule of cultural change.

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Our friend Aaron Koblin — he of Sheep Market and Bicycle Built for 2,000 fame — is back with a brilliant new project in collaboration with director Chris Milk for Lost Highway records: The Johnny Cash Project, a global collaborative art project constructing a music video for Cash’s final studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave,” from hundreds of user-submitted one-of-a-kind portraits of the iconic artist.

The drawings are crowdsourced using an online tool similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which randomly selects three frames for the contributor to choose from and draw.

The Johnny Cash Project is a visual testament to how the Man in Black lives on — not just through his vast musical legacy, but in the hearts and minds of all of us around the world he has touched with his talent, his passion, and his indomitable spirit.

You can algorithmically curate various versions of the video by toggling between different criteria by which to sort the individual frames — highest-rated, most recent, most intricate, realistic, abstract, and more.

Needless to say, we love both the concept and the execution — not only because it offers an intriguing contrast between this digital playground and what we’ve always found to be the rustic, analog appeal of Cash’s sound, but also because it crafts a beautiful metaphor for the breadth and impact of his music, revealing both the uniquely intimate experience of each listener and the powerful global cultural resonance of his heritage.

Contribute your thread to this wonderful collaboratively woven magic.

via Creativity

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While we do have a soft spot for pure layman voyeurism, we’re always more interested in projects that use this underlying, hard-wired mechanism of human curiosity about others to do something bigger, to celebrate diversity and build a sense of interconnectedness.

Enter 8 Billion Lives, an inspired effort to foster global citizenship by showcasing the work of independent and amateur filmmakers, who capture day-in-the-life stories about ordinary and extraordinary people alike. The short documentaries aren’t glamorous or glitzy. Their narrative isn’t always seamless and their cinematography is often questionable. But what they lack in production value they make up for in sheer candor, from the quiet humanity of mundane life to the raw richness of everyday triumphs and tragedies.

The films feature curious characters and everyday heroes alike, from Westpoint alum and gay rights activist Dan Choi, who was expelled from the army for being openly gay, to celebrity chef David Burke, from a Japanese lifelong learner to an American Buddhist nun.

The project reminds us of Yann-Arthus Bertrand’s 6 Billion Others, a digital anthology of 5,000 interviews filmed in 75 countries by 6 directors since 2003. Both projects paint a powerful, coherent portrait of humanity through the richness of diversity, weaving an intricate patchwork of personal stories that together form the great social quilt of our day.

Submit your own short documentary to 8 Billion Lives and become a part of this story.

via TBD

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One of the most exciting things about the social web is its tendency to democratize the creative industry, allowing creators — artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, writers, entrepreneurs — to bypass the traditional industry distribution model and self-publish their creative output by crowdfunding it through platforms that connect them with their audience. Today, we look at three brilliant platforms for funding creative projects, plus a few more options specific to narrower creative fields.

KICKSTARTER

We’ve already featured Kickstarter extensively, but suffice it to say this brilliantly simple yet remarkably slick platform makes it as easy for creators to bring their visions to life by collecting pledges — promised donation amounts — from supporters. Creators set a donation period for each project posted for funding, then people begin pledging money, committing to donate the promised amount if the project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If it doesn’t, no money is collected at all and the pledges simply don’t materialize. If the project does get funded, Kickstarter only takes a 5% fee* and project owners keep 100% of creative ownership.

Kickstarter has funded anything from the brilliant 8-bit map of NYC, which we raved about on Twitter, to the The Obama Timecapsule project, which we featured in our curated gift guide to books last year, to a grassroots effort to save 10,000 Polyvinyl records from destruction, a project that resonated so much with the community that it was overfunded by 1563%, raising over $15,000 after an initial goal of just $1,000.

The only drawback: Kickstarter, still in Beta, is currently invite-only and requires a US bank account and mailing address. But we suspect the platform will open up significantly as it reaches Alpha.

ROCKETHUB

While we don’t generally support replica projects — which RocketHub seems to be of Kickstarter — this relative newcomer in grassroots crowdfunding does have a couple of advantages. Projects aren’t limited to the US — so long as you have a verified PayPal account, you can live anywhere and fuel your project with RocketHub. The platform is also open to anyone, no invitation needed.

But this extra liberty comes at a price — at 8%, RocketHub’s fee is significantly higher than Kickstarter’s, partly due to PayPal fees, which account for 3.5%.*

*Correction: Kickstarter charges a flat fee of 5%, but also passes along the Amazon Payments transactional fees (3%-5%) to the artists who use the platform, for a total fee anywhere between 8% and 10%. RocketHub charges a flat total fee of 8%. We apologize for the mix-up.

INDIE GOGO

Though limited to film only, IndieGoGo offers a promising platform for filmmakers, animators and web video entrepreneurs to fund their projects. The online social marketplace connect filmmakers and fans to make more independed film happen, giving filmmakers the necessary tools to make the elevator pitch for their porjects and allowing fans to contridubute directly to the films and causes they believe in.

IndieGogo is free to sign up and open to anyone. Unlike on Kickstarter, projects don’t have an expiration date and funding is ongoing until the goal is reached.

One of IndieGogo’s winning points is that it’s not US-only — it’s available in 90 countries and counting. And though it’s designed for film, anyone can use it — musicians, app developers, miscellaneous entrepreneurs.

The downside: It takes a 9% fee, almost double that of Kickstarter.

BONUS

Here are a few more options for funding projects in specific creative disciplines:

• Society6 matches visual artists — designers, painters, illustrators, photographers — with grant-givers. We interviewed founder Justin Wills about the platform last year, and have been delighted to see it blossom into something quite substantial.
• SellABand allows fans to microfund the recording and distribution of their favorite artists’ albums.
• Kopernik, which we featured last week, offers a microfunding platform for product design with a humanitarian focus.
• Spot.Us is a nonprofit experiment in communitiy-funded journalism, where freelance journalists can pitch story ideas and readers can pitch in money to bring them to life.
• Authonomy is an effort from publisher Harper Collins, using the wisdom of the crowd to spot — and sign — the next big bestseller.
• BuskerLabel, another crowdfunding venue for musicians.
• microPledge helps developers fund software projects.
• DonorsChoose offers microfunding for public schools by matching donors with specific classroom needs.

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UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who helped, Invisible Children met their goal and are now bringing three fantastic artists to Uganda. They’ve just revealed the third, another epic favorite of ours: Lykke Li. You can follow the project’s progress here.

It’s a special occasion when three things we love are coming together for a world-changing cause. Case in point: Invisible Children, the fantastic social and political global movement using storytelling to empower and change lives, is partnering with La Blogotheque to take The Polyphonic Spree and Yeasayer (two of our favorite bands, so that technically takes it up to five favorites) to Uganda.

And they’re using the brilliant Kickstarter platform to crowdsource funds for it.

The project will only be funded if it raises $20,000 by 11:59PM EST on March 11. Right now, it’s at a little over halfway. Please — and we say this with our biggest, most hopeful optimism — help this absolutely life-changing cause by pledging a donation. Even if it’s as little as $10.

You know what they say, many hands make light work. And it’s a heavy burden Invisible Children is fighting. Lend a hand today.

via BOOOOOOOM

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We fully endorsed Emily Pilloton’s vision that design can empower people and change the world. But there’s often a disonnect between the world-changing products and technologies that get dreamt up, and the actual ability to fund them and get them in the hands of those who need them the most.

No more. At least not if it’s up to Kopernik, a revolutionary new social platform that connects breakthrough technologies with the people and communities whose lives they will better the most, harnessing the power of crowdsourced microfunding.

The name, of course, comes from Copernicus, the Polish Renaissance astronomer who busted the geocentric model of the universe and completely changed the way people perceived the way around them — an aspirational metaphor for Kopernik‘s ambition to revolutionize how people see and understand the biggest challenges the world faces today.

From a rollable water container for women in East Timor, to self-adjustable glasses (remember those?) for refugees without access to eye clinics, to computer training for Sierra Leonean youth, Kopernik lets development groups write short proposals and submit them to the public for crowdfunding. Sort of like a humanitarian Kickstarter, which then does a three-way connect with individual supporters, technology provider companies, and the local organizations who seek those technologies.

Founded by a team of United Nations and World Bank expats, Kopernik is planning to expand beyond crowdfunding proposals and into developing their own products with DIY and open-source instructions that local communities can use to build technologies.

Because the only kind of design revolution that’s going to stick is one where grassroots empowerment lets people take ownership of the very solutions that are changing their lives.

via TBD

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