LampGustaf Stitch Lamp
A lampshade that invites you to stitch your own pattern onto the surface. It comes with a needle and an online community hub where you can plan your design and see those made by others.
Why it's Awesome:
By offering a service in tandem to the product, LampGustaf is taking a step towards socially-engaged products.
What separates LampGustaf's Stitch Lamp from today's multitude of customizable products is the lamp shade's role. Rather then being an object existing in and of itself, LampGustaf's perforated metal cylinder is an extension of a social/personal activity.
Technically, all objects are extensions of social activities and conversely its arguable that all products are isolated from social relevance but what makes the Stitch Lamp intriguing is the fact that LampGustaf is actively attempting to engage its customers and have its customers engage one another through a community hub developed in tandem with the lamp.
As a product, the lamp shade bears more similarities to the blank t-shirts thatThreadless prints community-voted designs on. The physical item does not hold much value in and of itself. The true value lies in a web hub that allows the fan community to generate ideas that appeal to other fans.
LampGustaf facilitates this with an intuitive Pattern Making program that lets visitors draw out a design before printing it out or saving it. The interface is clean and elegant with movable pop-out windows for colors and patterns. Each stitch you draw is shadowed as a reminder that your piece isn't exactly flat and the program gives you the option to view and rotate your drawing in 3D.
Products that act as user-content platforms are not new but most have been limited to niche or digital cultures. For example, a lot of programs with semi-open architectures have communities dedicated to add-ons or modifications for extra functionality. Likewise, hobby modeling cultures often revolve around personal modifications of scale models and competitions to see who's work is more awe-inspiring. There are likely far more subcultures that I've failed to mention. The investment of effort is the reason why these practices are limited to specific group cultures but Stitch Lamp's emphasis on social identity brings use-content closer towards general consumer culture. Unfortunately, the entrance into user-content platforms and community development brings about all new design problems.
Shortcomings:
I think the lamp has the potential to be very sophisticated but I am wondering if this will be perceived as a child's toy. I browsed through the user-submitted designs and the majority were rather crude. LampGustaf's own sample patterns reinforces this concept with stick-figure animals and generic flowers. The lack of actual repeating pattern forms is also disheartening. Since it's only been one month since the lamp's release, I'm hoping that in time the community will grow and that we'll see some beautiful designs. If it turns out that the hub stagnates, my guess would be that LampGustaf either failed to promote its ingenious project sufficiently or failed to identify its target audience properly.
Another major shortcoming is the fact that the product is marketed as a sculpture instead of a lamp. None of the promotional images show the lamp in a darkened environment. As a DIY product the Stitch Lamp's success hinges heavily upon its ability to give the user a sense of accomplishment but this cannot be fulfilled if the user finds the lighting results to be irritable. The lamp's lighting effect will be drastically influenced by the thread density and other factors. Will light poke through the thread holes or is the lighting limited to a vertical projection? Since there's no translucent lampshade to soften the lightbulb, would the lighting be unpleasant with minimal stitching? Would the stitched colors and shapes be visible at night without a second light source? These are issues that LampGustaf has neglected to address and without informing the user of what kind of lighting conditions to expect, I believe they may be setting users up for frustration.
A related concern is the purported ability to translate a digital image into a tapestry that covers one's lamp. The process is just a resolution reduction, which isn't particularly hard, but the program fails to reduce the number of colors it uses to a manageable number. While some people may not mind using 12 different blue threads to stitch the sky of a landscape scene, the lack of an option to reduce the number of colors used is poor design. At worst it can deceive the unsaavy into thinking that producing pictures with rich gradients is a breeze. This problem is akin to the JPEG / GIF dichotomy and can be solved by integrating software that allows the user to pick how many colors he or she would like to use.
Final Thoughts:
LampGustaf's Stitch lamp is in my opinion, the first of a coming generation of user-content platforms. It's not the next step of customization but the next step of user participation. It's a transition from a web program to a physical object. Since the product is only one month old it's too early to comment on how successful it is but I am hopeful that it will grow into something amazing.
As the first generation of a new type of product, it bears some shortcomings, which will hinder its success. None of them are death sentences and as a pioneer product, shortcomings are par for course. The clunky MS-DOS operating system didn't stop computers from becoming a crucial part of the world. The "user-platform-as-product" design is currently in the early-adopter phase so it remains to see what sticks.
-Ming
