About

Oddly Specific Objects aims to create comprehensible open source designs that democratize the knowledge required to create useful technology.

We live in an era of powerful but inscrutable gadgets: your smart phone arrives in your life fully formed, an object that is meant to be used, but not understood. Too often, technologists capitalize on this lack of understanding to create products that diminish and disempower users of the technology.

Oddly Specific Objects aims to create devices that people can understand and in some cases even build themselves. The goal is to show that there is no magic to these gadgets. To that end:

• The technology we build should be comprehensible and well-documented: users should able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works.
• The technology we build should be accessible and extensible, serving users with different abilities and allowing them to modify it to meet their unique needs.
• The technology we build should be open source and permissively licensed, so that users can use it as a base to build technologies of their own.

Everything that is was made, and it was made by folks like you and me. That means we don’t have to accept technology that was made for us by folks that don’t have our best interests at heart.

We can make objects that work on our terms.