Out of Control : The New Ethos of Cobbling

by Kate Rutter

June 3, 2009

I come from a family made up of do-it-yourself-ers and fix-it-if-it’s-broken folks. As a result, any sealed-case product riles me up and makes me say bad words. Design for obsolescence encourages overt consumerism, supports a throw-away culture and is an affront to sustainability. We can’t afford to continue to make things this way.

The good news is that I see this changing. Green design, cradle-to-cradle considerations and initiatives like Make Magazine Owners Bill of Rights are percolating across the marketplace. These trends all wrap up into a concept that I call Cobbling.

Simply said, cobbling means working outside of what a product or system was originally designed to do. But it goes deeper than just the product capabilities: Cobbling is fundamentally about the relationship between customers and companies.

Why do people cobble? I believe that cobbling is an important indicator that an underlying system is broken or not serving the needs or the desires of the customers. When cobbling happens, it looks like breaking out, and mashups & remixing. Overall, there is a strong social component to cobbling. There’s also belligerence, self-reliance, and the DIY ethos. The word implies (and it’s baked into the definition) a sense of roughness and capability. It may not be pretty, but it works.

What does cobbling look like? I see three major ways that cobbling takes form. These are:

* Workarounds - people working outside the system
* Adaptations - making a product custom fit to people’s lives
* Explorations - pushing the boundaries to see what’s possible
* Workarounds - people working outside the system

Workarounds - people working outside the system

Circumventing the rules by creating a “hole” in the current system removes barriers to choice. One thing is for sure…workarounds are viral…once one person does it, others are able to do it too. Whole markets have been created by working around or bypassing an existing system.

The Legend of Napster

The poster child for cobbling workarounds is Napster. For two years, Napster fostered a vibrant, intense, wildly successful experience. The ability to freely and easily share music digitally was unprecedented anywhere or anytime before. Although Napster was shut down, decentralized, peer to peer ecosystems continue to challenge the business of copyright, trademark and digital rights protections.

Napster was a workaround for a system that was collapsing under it’s own weight of “legalese” and contracts. Napster was a loud cry and a success story for creating an outside ecosystem based on openness, utility and sharing. The issues around digital rights management that began with the Napster phenomenon continue to this day.

Jailbreak Rock

It’s a common story. Your friend has a great Nokia N95, and you’re thinking of upgrading your ancient mobile phone. When you call your mobile provider to ask about getting that new phone, they tell you it’s not available on your network. You hear from your friends that there aren’t any technical reasons why the N95 won’t work. You hear from your provider that it’s just not an option. And when you ask about canceling your service, they hit you with cancellation fees and early termination penalties.

But there’s another way. You buy an N95 on eBay that’s unlocked. You pop the sim card out of your current phone and into the N95. It works just fine. Why couldn’t you get your provider to play along?

Peer-to-peer music sharing and unlocked phones are an example of the workaround…finding a way to circumvent a current system. Workarounds look like this:

*Breaking out of a locked system
*Removing barriers to choice
*Closed systems that invite disruption

Now I’m not advocating for illegal activities. But what is interesting is the number of examples that are shaking the legal bedrock of terms of use. As markets change, the expectations of usage, permissions and legal agreements need to shift as well. Cobbling is an early indicator that expectations are shifting, and companies that identify and understand these changes are better positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that these shifts create. Adaptations - making a product fit for people’s real lives

Adaptations mean breaking the case open and jiggering products to better fit our lives. When approached with the right spirit, companies that make products designed for adaptation can tap into new markets.

Cracking open the case

Johnny Lee is a human-computer interaction designer, currently at Microsoft. He hacks the Wiimote to do cool things. He’s made a cheap interactive whiteboard, and jiggered a TV set to respond to gestural input via 3D head tracking and finger tracking. These are examples of adaptations: cracking open the case, mucking about in the insides to make a product more useful.

Now this is nothing new…people have been doing this for a long time. But Johnny Lee took it to the last step: when he posted his videos on YouTube and the instructions on his website, he showed others how to do it, too. His video has over 10 million views.

Johnny Lee made cobbling social to an extreme. Before, you bought the Wii as part of a system, and you simply used the system. But now you have the blueprints to extend it to work with other things. His premise was to make his mods accessible to the widest possible audience. Everyone is encouraged to adapt their stuff to better work with their lives.

Legal hates the liability of this. Marketing isn’t sure. But it’s an important way for companies to create new relationships with new customers. Giving up control in your products widens the market for what your product can do. Products that are easy to open, adapt and modify gain market share because they can be used and mis-used in many ways.

Explorations - pushing the boundaries to see what’s possible

Put a Ring on This

In October 2008 the singer Beyonce released the song Single Ladies (put a ring on it) which shot to the top of the charts. The music video posted on YouTube featured Beyonce doing a distinctive set of dance moves.

Then it gets interesting. Shane Mercado, a dancer, created a video response showing him split-screen dancing with Beyonce and her dancers. The perfect synchronization is uncanny. Despite the garage look of the split-screen (and the fact that Shane is dancing in his bathroom in his underware) the video is incredibly compelling.

Within hours of Shane’s video going live, he had over 200 messages. As of today, the video response has over 3.3 million views, and spawned numerous other video responses. Shane was invited to dance on the national morning news show the Bonnie Hunt show, and the show closed with the TV show team dancing alongside Shane and the virtual Beyonce. The kicker came when Shane and Beyonce met in person. The meeting was captured and posted on, what else…YouTube.

YouTube’s viral meme of video response has powered a remix culture that was previously only available to people with specialized skills and equipment, and who had a public venue to share their work. With digital environments like YouTube, Vimeo and other media-sharing sites, the remix culture has gone viral to an extraordinary degree. Cobbling explorations have gone social.

Designing for Social Participation

Sharing work publicly makes it a social act, inviting further explorations and repeat iterations. This can escalate into larger forms of community expression. People now have the tools, the materials, the skills and the motivation to fully participate in a remix culture.

What’s compelling about this example is that it takes the idea of cobbling out of the physical world and into the digital world. The speed that things are produced, published, discovered, remixed, published and responded to is escalating and it’s not going to slow down. Design for digital cobbling creates the opportunity to facilitate a product ecosystem that fosters active customer participation.

4 simple ways to start

Do you think cobbling may hold interesting opportunities for you? Here are some ideas for how to get started…

1. Accept that cobbling will happen.

Look beyond the threats to see the opportunities. What are people doing with your products? Where are the innovations happening? How can you capitalize on the trends? Moving from ownership to participation extends the capabilities of your product, and as a result extends the reach of your company.

2. Screws, not glue. Make it easy to open.

The Maker’s Bill of Rights published by MAKE magazine has 17 guidelines for manufacturers. It’s directed towards physical products, but thinking metaphorically, it can extend to digital and service products as well.

3. Choose who will respond: legal or marketing. And decide how to respond.

Are you going to fight cobbling? Encourage it? Work with it? Ignore it? Break down the terms of use into smaller chunks. Creative Commons has a flexible set of use and re-use licenses that facilitate a variety levels of sharing and control. Select granular terms that can be applied to specific ways you will or will not support cobbling. Be explicit about the terms and opportunities to your market.

4. Identify and participate in emerging communities about your products.

Note that this is about participation, not monitoring. Be a part of the conversations that your customers are having about your products. Invest in social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to be an active voice in the marketplace.

Cobbling is an indicator that changes are happening with your customers and your products. Learning how to work with these changes is increasingly a key competency for companies that are poised to survive and thrive in a consumer-driven marketplace.

The big opportunity is for companies to give up control…to start designing towards a future of open systems. Customer participation in an open ecosystem is a significant way for companies to listen to the market, to be intimately engaged in how people live, and to make products that become deeply embedded in the lives of customers.

Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. During her ten plus years in the web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.”