Garmz: Goodbye Fashion Industry, Hello Designers

From concept to closet, or what multipurpose bags have to do with democracy.

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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Winners of IDEO’s Living Climate Change Challenge

Design-thinking our way out of the climate crisis, or why 2.5 billion kids may hold the key to a sustainable future.

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.

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Life in a Day: Google Crowdsources Humanity

Documenting the world, or how to take one of 6.7 billion pathways to Sundance.

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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One Day On Earth: A Timecapsule of Humanity

How to become a pixel in the collaborative portrait of the world.

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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