This article from Make is an overview of the nascent Open Source Hardware movement. As I read it I think “Sure, this makes sense for Make, and the Instructables people, because us revealing our work is how THEY make their money. But what about us?” and then I read the developer’s page from Chumby’s site, where they make everything open source, schematics, hardware, much of their source code, etc. How do they do that? And still make money?

I need to figure this out. This is what I want to do. How can I make money while involving the community too?

This post from Make talks about Ambient Inc’s release of their chipset and schematics so other vendors can embed their stuff.

What if I make a gateway and sell it, and I make devices and sell them. Or, I don’t make devices so much as scriptable transceiver boards that work with my gateways and web systems. Then use instructables and make etc to show people how to easily make very cool complex net-connected projects. ??

All these paradigms are slightly different. All are very interesting. All inform the aiosphere in one way or another.

Here are some resources:

• Wikipedia’s entry on Tangible computing.
• Proceedings from Subtle Technology Symposium 2007.
• William Hazlewood’s paper on design studies for ubicomp interfaces.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield, the book I’m reading right now.
• Texts date very quickly in this rapidly evolving field, but Ambient Intelligence remains a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of the challenges in the field.
• Pousman and Stasko’s paper on the taxonomy of ambient information systems. A good overview of the complex of related fields.
• An interesting idea: an ambient information soundscape.
• MIT’s Ambient Intelligence Group. Approaches tend to be a bit too complicated, but hey, they’re research. And the aggregate is very inspiring.

Also read the Manifesto (link at top of blog).

I used to call this work the “Creative Peripherals Project”, then the “Desktop Extension Intiative”. Why so clunky? Because though perhaps most apt, the term ‘ambient’ seems so… taken. (see Ambient Inc.) Yet the reason the work I discuss here is so important, and compelling, is that that company both defines and at the same time squanders the potential and the promise of this vast area of exploration. I understand it, of course. That is their business model: the objects drive subscriptions to a proprietary, closed system.

But what if there was an open system for ambient information? What if anyone could create a device to fill an unmet need, or a novel idea? What if anyone could easily write a new behavior for an existing object? What if the system was open, in the sense that information on how it works, how to modify and customize it, how to make hardware and software, was freely available?

That’s the idea behind aiosphere.

Here’s a dated but still relevant paper on Ambient Computing