I remember seeing a wiki awhile ago (possibly on the r/solarpunk subreddit?) that was dedicated to providing people with open source furniture. Primarily they used a laser cutter and cheap plywood for ease of use. The end goal was to create public spaces that were easy to set up in the communities. For the life of me I can’t find the original wiki! I’d love to rediscover it as I’m moving and will finally be able to work on some of the projects. Does anyone know the website that I am talking about?
UPDATE: VenDiagraphein found it! It’s https://www.betterblock.org
Thanks also to everyone who helped out!
I don’t think that I’ve stumbled across that, but scraping through my notes on various open source projects, here’s what I can find (other than Opendesk).
- Mozilla’s Open Source Furniture: You’ll need the Internet Archive to snag the ZIP file.
- The Nell Desk: I don’t know if it ever made it to GitHub as promised, and again, the Internet Archive will get to the media to know what’s going on.
- Ronen Kadushin’s Open Design: It’s non-commercial-only, if that impacts anything, and not really “furniture,” but I might as well share whatever I have…
- Apparently, not even the mighty WikiSeat is invulnerable to bit-rot.
- SketchChair is definitely not a wiki, but generates custom CNC-cut furniture designs.
I also have a reference to something called “Simplified Building Concepts,” but the only reference that I can find is this monster of a blog post giving an overview.
I’d love to see the actually-intended site, though.
Do you remember how long ago you saw it? Everything I’m aware of for furniture disappeared or went for-profit years ago.
Someone’s already mentioned Opendesk, which mysteriously cut off access to files with a “we’ll email everyone when they come back!”. Spoilers, they did not come back, its been nearly 5 years. Instead they started selling furniture by request and partnering with fabrication services. There are some others that were similar, AtFab, fabsie, opendesign (which I think was a wiki, so maybe that was the one posted?)… but none are still active and the websites/links are dead or replaced by something different using the name. You can still find designs on github though, and some on Pintrest, of all places.
Here is one such repository of Opendesk’s designs: https://github.com/timrolls/Opendesk . Go forth and fab freely.
It wasn’t opendesk unfortunately. I saw it maybe a year ago and I just remembered it recently.
I think it was run by a nonprofit (or maybe it was some kind of company, idk) that I think both did planning for communities officially and provided the resources to do it on your own. Their wiki had multiple different sections, such as furniture, bus stops, beergardens, farmers markets, and more.
I want to say it got started in Portland but that could be a fever dream :/
Ooh, beergarden is very specific - perfect search term! Is “Wikiblock” the one?
Holy shit you found it! Thank you so much! I swear I searched every combination of beer garden but I couldn’t find it myself!
lol, I guess I got lucky! “open source furniture beer garden” brought it right up on duckduckgo 😄
this really is a wonderful project, thanks for tuning me into it!
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haven’t come across a wiki yet
closest I can think of is Opendesk –
they provide files for free andcan hook you up with a local CNC shop – but their stuff is very CNC intensive (multiple depths and curves) and is reliant on being glued togetherEDIT: looks like Opendesk no longer provides the files, apparently they are now fully for-profit …
I’d love to have this.
I’m not sure if they did furniture, but there was a European project I can’t find that had open source designs for a bunch of household objects. I think I saw it on notechmagazine, but there’s a lot to sift through there…