The Schooner Boat, part II

The Schooner Boat, part I

Check out her builder, Marty Harris’ site.

Two ideas collided this morning. “Boats I’d like to design” and Crowd-Sourcing.

It struck me right away, “Why hadn’t I thought of this before?!”

The strangulation point that’s afflicted boat design – leaving Yacht Design to the side – has been the growing gap between what people can afford – in a world of lowering incomes and many competing interests and activities chasing that lesser amount of discretionary income – and what a design costs to produce. People would like a new design, can see at least some of the benefits of having a boat that fits their needs most closely; but they simply can’t afford what it costs to commission a design.

I’ve struggled with this all through my career. The conditions in which L. Francis Herresshoff or John Alden worked required a number of comfortably well-off middle class people with an abiding interest in the culture of boats and enough time and money and attention to spend on that pursuit. By the time I was starting out those conditions had already begun to pass away. Some designers did well with a mail-order, “mass-market” approach – miniscule compared to any really mass-market – or found a fortuitous relationship with the moneyed world of Yachting like Olin Stephens for example, finding his Mr. Sparkman and taking off from there.

For various reasons these paths didn’t appeal or didn’t materialize for me. The alternative has been to “subsidize” many design commissions by simply not charging enough to cover my time. This of course was never a sustainable strategy!

Lately I’ve stumbled on a different approach, design consulting as a type of mentoring for people who have the capacities and the desire to do the physical work of designing a boat, but would like to have the added benefits of having my advice and counsel available to them at a rate they can afford. I’ll be fleshing this out in a later post, but basically this is an open-ended series of sessions where we go over the client’s  – usually a home builder’s – requirements and plan out a strategy to let them do as much as they can towards fleshing out the design of their new boat. This continues as a series of reviews, either in person or through correspondence at whatever frequency is needed, and within a time-frame that they find affordable, until the boat is completed. For someone familiar with construction plans, building a fairly simple boat, it’s surprising how much they are able to do for themselves. Each situation is different of course, and this system allows for infinite variation to meet those particular circumstances.

I’ve never been able to fit into the model of “stock-plan” retailer. Not only is it too much “business” for me, but it tends to go against my philosophy of putting people into their own boats. It’s always seemed to me that the build-your-own-boat phenomenon has, to a significant extent, been limited in its potential by this tendency to start with some “one-size-fits-all” design. A home builder with some guidance can build the equivalent, even the superior example, of a “bespoke” craft. They have the time, and every incentive, to build the boat they want, not to compromise to meet some conception of  a “market.” Of course when a custom design costs, or appears to cost, more than they can afford, then they have tended to go for something available over pushing for something that intimately connects with their unique situation.

Crowd-sourcing may be an answer to this. Positing that there are only two choices, a “stock” design or a “custom” one, is a little too limiting. The reality is more that there are a number of people who could be satisfied – not just having settled for – a particular boat design. Many people have found their “ideal” boat through a stock plan, but any pathway to connect people with what they want is fraught with dislocations and points of derailment. There will always be a certain falling between the cracks. The current choices, of stock or custom, have left many people feeling their needs not particularly well-met by the choices on offer. In fact, the whole small boat, traditional boat, alternative boat world; is a reaction to the soul-less consumer cattle market pushing to channel our desires to be on the water onto a path that is profitable and convenient for the mass-market suppliers while totally irresponsible on every other level. A third choice has been opening up and is being tried out in a number of other fields, crowd-sourcing.

Crowd-sourcing is such a simple principle. It takes advantage of the openings given to us by the web to help overcome the raft of disadvantages that have accumulated over time. If the word can be spread widely enough, and at little or no cost, then a quora of “like-minded” people can be introduced to each other and focused on a mutually agreed upon task. The sticking point of negotiating commitment, getting from, “Yeah, that’s a great idea!” to “Here’s my down payment!” has always been a problem. There’s the basis of the profession of salesmanship! Crowd-sourcing handles this in a unique and exciting manner. The intermediary, who also handles the logistics of spreading the word and handling the money, sets up an “escrow” account as a trusted third-party. Each participant agrees that if a certain base level of financing is met, they will honor their commitment, as guaranteed by the third-party holding their payment and ready to refund their money if that level is not met within a reasonable length of time. This combines elements of a traditional auction with the way a “booky” gathers and holds bets! The result is a situation where people can feel comfortable committing to say, “I’m in!”

It seems to me this system is a great way to get around the impediments to getting reasonably paid design into the hands of people at an affordable price. It combines the multitude of buyers so as to lower the cost per buyer while eliminating the risk to the designer in working up a generic design in the hopes of attracting enough buyers to cover costs.

An historical aside on this: Traditionally stock plans were the resales of designs that had been worked-up as payed commissions. It was a bonus a designer might bring in if a past design was particularly popular, but the labor involved would have been paid for by the initial commission. That is how, coupled with the low “over-head” of “dead designers” – as I like to call them, those who no longer have pesky living expenses to cover, sorry boys, you know who you are! That’s why stock plans have traditionally been priced so low, and have stayed low. The glut of old designs, and the temptation to meet those price points while trying to recoup living expenses, has brought my foray into stock plan designing to a starvation point. This appears to be a way to work around these conditions. At the end of the process, plans could still be sold as stock, but that would be in the traditional sense of a benefit of popularity achieved, not a Hail Mary Pass at meeting expenses.

My next post will be in the form of a “Boat I’d like to design” that includes this concept of crowd-sourcing as a way to get past the hypothetical stage. It will cover some specifics of how this will work, which crowd-sourcing service we’ll be using, etc.. In the meantime, your participation in this, your suggestions towards meeting the logistical challenges, or prior experiences you may have had in crowd-sourcing that might be helpful as I start out, or of course, suggestions on THE boat to inaugurate this project; are all welcome!

One of the things I like best about this concept is that it removes the trappings of an adversarial relationship from between the designer & client. This should, and can be, a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship. It thrives on trust and openness between the parties involved. The crowd-sourcing process “negotiates” the development of that trust and channels our overtures of cooperation into the start of a vital relationship. I’m excited about what this can lead to! I hope you are as well.

Remember a short comment or reply is a first step on this path, and there’s no charge!

Mark Sutherland approached me this past Spring to see if we could recover the actual form of a Newport catboat with an interesting history. The 25′ Catboat Falcon was lost off Brenton Reef in a summer thunder-squall at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Two lives were lost, an older brother passing the bowsprit to his younger sibling, leading to his singular survival. The older brother and a friend’s bodies were never to be recovered.

Mark was fascinated by the story, and the boat, a type similar, but distinct from the well-known Cape Cod Catboat. He’d already built a model “by eye,” but wanted to build a half-hull model. To do that, he felt it was important to arrive at as accurate a set of lines as possible for the boat.

There are no surviving plans, but there have been a number of photographs that have come don to us. He wondered if there s some way we could”scan them in” and spit out a set of lines electronically. That’s where the conversation began.

I told him that the DOD might have the capacity to do this, that the problem was much more complex than it seemed at first blush. Any photograph has distortions built in based on the optics of the camera used, the distance from the lens, and the angle and perspective of the shot. Unpacking all of these distortions to “flesh-out”the image into 3-d would be a real challenge. I also brought up my own mounting questions about the compelling yet often illusory “accuracy” of 3-d virtual reality. As with any powerful tool, it can be extremely difficult knowing how to control it, and not be controlled by it. In the end I told him I thought this was much more interesting as a study in perception and mental recreation that would be better done by drawing a series of drafts by hand and using our combined “eye” for form to guide us. In the end, that’s what we did.

Without giving too much away, Mark and I plan on doing an article on this project once his model/models are completed – I also hope to do a painting from the model of Falcon on that day of her sinking – here’s a thumbnail view of the lines we came up with.

I’ll keep you posted on further developments.

Just heard from Marty. He’s put up a bunch of new pictures on his website.

Here’s his update:

“I just put the cotton in the seams and primed the bottom and topsides.  The boat is doing well.  I plan on putting in the underwater seam compound in the morning then flipping the boat back right side up.”