Halfman is now (mainly) open source

Let’s face it. Halfman as a story building business, like Yugoslavia, the Segway and just about anything the Rolling Stones put out after Exile on Main Street, was perhaps at best a mediocre idea not well realised.

Halfman was originally just a domain, but it was just me and I’ve become attached to the idea of it was supposed to some grandiose thing. I’ve thought long and hard about cooperations, collaborations and disseminations that would bring me to some bright-eyed design ivory tower. None of it ever happened. Recently, I’ve realised this is absolutely fine. It’s the work that is supposed to be the thing that matters and I’ve just been dumb about a lot of things around this.

This is why I’m going to be open sourcing all of my work through Halfman that isn’t otherwise under some sort of legal stranglehold. By the way, a lot of my work is under some sort of legal stranglehold, so you can thank a 19th century concept of intellectual property and the treatment of design as an extractive economy for that.

You may ask: “Jim, why would you do this? We understand your privileged, overeducated turmoil, but this is design, this is precious! We hold it dear to our hearts, letting it’s breaths go shallow and shallower until it’s quiet, whimpering death.”

Design means to be useful, and what would be useful is if someone out there uses a bit of a thing I did and does something even better with it. So here is the first thing, a product/project/thing lying fallow, now freed from the shackles of all the nonsense above.

I present to you, Stokken-Blokken. What is better than building things out of snow? How about an easy to use, easy to pack up, inflatable building block that can build as big as the imagination can take it?

Here is the Github repository online

So go on. Its yours to create and use, assuming it’s not deemed dangerous, racist, discriminatory or otherwise what is completely asshole-ish. Respect the license. For the love of the gods, give credit where credit is due, this is all I ask. That, and you have a bit of fun, or a bit of inspiration and you email me what you did with it. Let’s be friends damnit. This is the first step. Rock and roll. Ride, shoot straight, speak the truth.