18. Invention, intellectual property and income

Assignment:
Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory.

Dissemination plan

My projects name is simply Forest Diorama, but it's more that that. It's a whimsical, electronical, cyper punkey setting. A piece of decor and a fountain of fun for me. I'll keep it in my room forever. The fun thing is that it is also possible to make it modular, with a growing forest. Every piece can communicate within a serial network. Originally, a diorama was a darkened stage invented by Louis Daguerre in the 19th century with a semitransparent prospectus painted differently on both sides. By alternately illuminating the front and back, it can be used, for example, to simulate movements and times of day to great effect. This technique, which is related to the panorama, is still used today on theater stages. Dioramas are often found in natural history and technical museums and can be very artistic. By properly changing the scale from foreground to background, the seemingly seamless transition from sculptural landscape elements to painted background, and skillful lighting, an almost perfect illusion of spatial depth and realism can be achieved - a kind of three-dimensional trompe l'oeil painting that allows the viewer to gaze upon the world like a giant. Natural history museums feature life-size dioramas in which taxidermied or reconstructed animals are presented in settings that mimic their biotopes. The world's largest diorama is at Disneyland in Anaheim, California; it depicts the Grand Canyon.

There are quite a few diorama producers but none of those dioramas are for home use, they are more likely to be used in museums and theme parks. The parts I could make for this diorama are made by me using e.g. 3D printing, laser cutting, pcb design etc. which means that these objects are exclusive. Their sale or distribution could only be done by me.

Intellectual Property

In my case, as with all other Fab Academy students, all of our work is supported by the MIT license, an open source initiative.
Everyone can make unrestricted use of my documentation, that means they can use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and even sell copies of the contents of my website.

As a member of a FabLab, each one of my creations is free for public use. That's why I'd like to use a Creative Commons license. How I found that out? Easy, there is a questionnaire which helps you decide.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

This paticular license means that you are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) or adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) it.
But under the following terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Business models and Future opportunities

As explained before, there are a wide range of dioramas but none really for home decoration and/or tinker fun- let's say it's quite rare. The most common home-use dioramas are train models, but most of them have a different effect, due to the reason that the focus is more on the trains and less on the environment. But this depends on the model of course. Some train models are whole complicated worlds. But some people would not like trains. With this project I actually don't want to distribute or sell it, I'd like to share the hobby of creating things and having nice things. It should be open source.
However, I'd like to develop it further and make it more complicated and more beautiful.
It is also possible to make it in a smaller scale for student courses so that they can learn almost every part of digital fabrication and end up with a nice lil thing.

Slide

Video