In distant days we made things to our own liking, to fit our own needs and desires, however eccentric they may have been.

Some needs to be met were clearly utilitarian — sharp points to pierce flesh and hunt game or grinding stones to mash vegetation into something more digestible.

Other objects we will never fully understand, their context long forgotten: artifacts that could be ritual objects, decorative embellishments, status symbols or something else entirely.

All of these forms were one-offs. Each object embodied the quirks of its maker and bore witness to their skill or lack thereof. Handmade products were inferior in their consistency object to object, but this way of making also enabled a fluid process of changes and improvements.

An object’s type and form were fixed only once, at the time of making — each tool could be made to perfectly fit the hand of whoever wielded it, each vase made more elegant to the eye of its ideal beholder. Hypothetically, every object was an improvement on the last, becoming more pleasing in proportion, better balanced, higher performing.

But as more complex technologies were developed, the need for twinned parts grew acute.

Wheels needed to be closely matched to work properly, archers could be more accurate if the shape and mass of their arrows were carefully controlled. Military-sponsored efforts to standardize weapons and ammunition played out over hundreds of years, only arriving as the status quo in the 1700s. From there, the technological and theoretical leaps required to get to cheaper, faster, more identical products piled on quickly.

Scientific breakthroughs in physics, material science, and chemistry enabled new categories of product-objects. Perfect duplication expanded from goods that required it as a functional property to those that offered a potential for business efficiency. The object as a tangible cultural artifact became the object as product — certainly still a tangible cultural artifact but in a new way.

Early mass market products were often genuinely innovative, transforming the quality and texture of life for the better.

Devices like electric skillets and toasters gave the ability to cook food without having to deal open flames and dirty smoke, washing machines could clean clothes without grinding manual labor.

Patent drawings for an early electric stove

These objects were function first: social status was conferred in possessing them rather than their particular styling. You had upward mobility because you had a toaster, not because your toaster was shiny. But that functional signaling was short lived as the price of goods at scale fell.

True innovation was expensive and time consuming, with a return on that investment far from guaranteed. To simply restyle a product was cheap, fast, and effective. “Innovation” grew more and more shallow, approaching skin depth just as product design became a recognized field for study, awareness and critique.

Designers conceived of enough gadgets and tchotckes to fill countless SkyMall catalogs while critical medical devices, objects for improving accessibility, and tools for secure communication lagged behind, the domain of university research departments or frustrated end-users-turned-inventors.

The potential size of the market became a primary factor in whether some item or device would make it into the world. The large capital commitments of setting up an assembly line or fabricating tooling meant that if a certain scale could not be achieved, or if demand was uncertain, those needs were simply ignored.

Making high-quality goods cost-effectively in the physical world means facing a world of complexity. The deep capital and domain knowledge required to tool up heavily favors incumbents, not plucky inventors or small businesses. Pure duplication at a massive scale remains the route that can net the greatest profit, and so it persists for physical goods, even in instances where we would be better served by bespoke solutions.

Software on the other hand, free of factory production schedules, minimum order quantities, and expensive tooling, had a near-miraculous pliability: capable of changing its form on an entirely different timescale, sometimes implemented by the end user themselves.

Products could be now be intangible but valuable, cultural but not as artifacts frozen in a particular state.

Hunting with digital arrowheads

The experience of a device can change dramatically just by loading up a different piece of software. Machines that can produce different outcomes through code creates an opening for a more continuous way of building — like those early vases and arrowheads that became better with each build, but with the added power to supplant or overlay prior incarnations without repeated labor and associated waste. The “form” can be reworked endlessly, without starting from scratch every time.

Once again products were being built that closely matched the desires of the people using them, rather than dictated by taste-makers from afar.

Suddenly a few college kids could build the product that they wanted in short order and distribute it as quickly — from their dorm room to the world in a handful of weekends, launching something that could threaten the walled gardens that entrenched industries had built up over decades of consolidation.

Connections enabled by the internet made the old command-and-control strategies of large organizations all but impossible to maintain.

While all these shifts of access to markets and product development power were happening in software, hardware development wasn’t on the same trajectory.

It took decades for the tools and systems to arrive at the right time and place. Some pieces of the puzzle were conceptual: crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, others were tangible: easy to use microcontrollers like Arduino and low cost 3D printers like the offerings of Makerbot or Formlabs. These tools enabled a flexible development environment for even complex electromechanical products at a price that was affordable enough for the bootstrapped startup.

Amateur hardware enthusiasts could easily build (at least a rough version) of what they wanted without the blessing of a big corporation. At the same time the rise of the smartphone left in its wake a bunch of small, powerful components with small prices: sensors, tiny cameras, rechargeable batteries — a LEGO-like toolkit that could be configured in myriad ways to develop not just proof of concept, but devices in production. Equally important was the growing ubiquity of wireless connectivity that allowed much of the computing to happen offsite, combining the continuous flexibility of software with the tangible objects we use to interact with the physical world.

Speed to go from an idea to a product at scale became faster than ever, cost greatly reduced