Pattern Recognition

This column was published in CRAFT:04.

Have you ever heard of cosplay? Combining the words "costume" and "play", cosplay is a subculture that originates from Japan. Cosplayers dress up as characters from comics and video games. I got the opportunity to attend my first cosplay party not too long ago. Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, I mingled among the hundreds of super dollfies, elegant gothic aristocrats and loli-goths, all wearing wonderful self-made or self-designed costumes. Trailing the global success of manga comics and anime cartoons, cosplay has has made costume-crafting a growing trend worldwide.

Because more people are making their own clothes and accessories, the demand for useful blueprints and recipes is on the rise. Crafters, if anyone, should know that good patterns are valuable because they require hours of careful planning and design. Not everyone can express a complicated model in a simple way. Those who exceed at it can become celebrities. When a Toronto-based crafter nicknamed TheJordy published an illustrated how-to for making a purse on craftster.org, the response was awe-inspiring. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed the instructions, and the post generated over 100 pages of comments on the Web site.

Virtual worlds, blogs, online communities, and discussion forums offer new channels for crowdsourcing patterns and recipes. They are changing the way patterns are sought out and distributed. For example, if you are a fan of the fantasy role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot looking for the sewing pattern of a Sepiroth jacket, you’ll be happy to know one can be found on forums.cosplay.com. Valuable is thus not only the pattern itself but also knowledge of where to find it.

The distribution of patterns in magazines has traditionally been a profitable business. But if that is the case, why are then people like Nicola Enrico Stäubli, a Swiss-based architect, giving away the design patterns of his foldschool cardboard furniture on the Web for free? One answer is that sharing free patterns generates goodwill. In a world where everybody wants to earn a nickel, giving out something for free makes you stand out from the crowd.

A freely editable pattern invites us to play and contribute. Patterns can be a puzzle. For example, showstudio.com has a neat downloads section where it publishes the patterns of legendary but extremely complicated fashion items, like the Alexander McQueen Kimono Jacket. In exchange for giving out the pattern for free, showstudio asks the ones who succeed in making the garment to send in photos of the result for publishing.

Good patterns are sometimes referred to as the “source code” of great crafting. BurdaStyle, a spin-off project of Hubert Burda Media, is applying the software vocabulary even further. Burda has launched the concept of open-source sewing, and offers a free pattern database for crafters around the world. A pattern can be freely downloaded and used as the base for other designs. During its first four months Burda reports the database had over 60 000 downloads in the US.

Not all software programmers want to share their code. Likewise, many crafters consider good patterns and recipes their business secrets. Still, there are a growing number of those who believe that sharing patterns for free will eventually benefit the distributor and, in one way or another, generate a return on the investment. This makes sense. Who wouldn’t like to have a community of passionate amateurs promoting one’s core business?

Comments

[Balaji Sowmyanarayanan]

Crowdsourcing, Opensourcing and Craft. Oh What a deadly combination.

The celebrated social media revolution has its seeds in the opensource movement. Opensource made benefits of technology accessible to more people. Similarly Open Craft movement your are outlining will make benefits of craft accessible to a lot more people.

Very interesting. Indeed, Craft liberates! Way to go!

[Brian]

Cosplay Rules! I wish I was good enough to make my own cosplay ^_^