#HTE
The 16 Best (And Weirdest) Crowdfunding Projects of 2016
Crowdfunding is still a hit and miss landscape but its popularity for project backing is still solidly on the rise. While high profile disappointments are increasing too (hope you didn’t buy a Pebble), Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns have highlighted some of the most intriguing designs of the year. Key trends were simplified bike accessories, seriously elegant tools, design nerd resources. Here are XX of the most popular crowdfunding stories, plus a few headscratchers, from 2016.
Bike security is an ever-evolving but perpetually annoying issue. The Hexlox system offered up a tiny and surprisingly robust option for parts security using streamlined design and magnetism.
Your Garmin is hideous and hideously complicated and your bike deserves a more beautiful option. The OMATA One suggests switching to a large and retro dial with the GPS guts you crave.
A “light” and “easy to use” electrified bike wheel caught a lot of eyes with the promise that it could electrify any bike in under 60 seconds. A tall order, and front wheel drive would be an interesting thing to tangle with in traffic, but overall an exciting design.
The “BIY” bamboo bike building folks at Bamboobee busted back onto the scene this year with an updated and improved jig. Can you now build a bike frame in under five hours? Probably not, but man it sounds good!
Another good sounding idea was the Ottolock, an ultralight option for bike security that functions much like a big zip tie and claims to resist cutting and theft a lot better.
FormBox raised a lot of eyebrows and a lot of support with their small scale vacuum former. The conversations it’s sparked about small scale tooling and prosumer design have been intriguing too.
In similar but more surprising news, THEY MADE AN AFFORDABLE DESKTOP WATERJET? They seriously made an affordable desktop waterjet.
Looking at other people’s ID sketching can be both educational and a little voyeuristic. Tom Skeehan’s well Kickstarted book Sketching Process clearly caught both sides of interest, and is now spreading new nerd gospel from Australia.
The Dieter Rams documentary also got a load of community support, which is hardly surprising considering the renewed popularity of his philosophy and the shocking fact that this would be the first feature length doc on him alone.
The attractive and innovative Noria AC unit had folks sweating over its minimal shape and extra smart engineering. Even the current winter chill can’t take the shine of its cool design.
Sketching in 3D got a streamlined redesign too. After years of development the Gravity Sketch team took their VR app to Kickstarter and gave us a look at the future.
Back in the meatspace, an Army veteran and mechanical engineer out of MIT brought us a tiny multitool we didn’t know we wanted.
The Peak Design backpack blew a few minds and kicked up a lot of interest in smarter bag design. I bet you could fit like 700 multitools in there.
On the weirder side, one of the early eyebrow raising campaigns of the year was this bottle slicer. Don’t know exactly what you’d use a bottle slicer for? I still don’t. Maybe someday we’ll have a clear bottle-to-3D printer route map, but for now, we just have strips of post-Pepsi plastic.
Our test of folding polygonal measuring spoons turned up some gaps in the design that other projects might learn from.
And perhaps most necessary and inventive of all, 2016 offered us the Toasteroid, a smart toaster that will print weather reports and sexts. So let’s see what the hell 2017 can do to top that.
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More from Core77’s 2016 Year in Review
16(ish) of 2016’s Best Materials Moments
10 Things 2016 Had to Offer to the Future of Transportation
2016 Best of Digital Fabrication
Footwear Designs That Pushed Boundaries in 2016
9 Ways Robots and AI Took Over 2016 + How to Cope
2016 Best of Alternative Living
http://www.core77.com/posts/59269/The-16-Best-And-Weirdest-Crowdfunding-Projects-of-2016