Weird Alien Dolls, Designed by You

By Tim Maly

It’s April when I ask Makielab founder Alice Taylor how it’s going with Makie, their line of customizable dolls. “It’s going great, with the caveat of the usual (and some unusual) last-minute crazy.” That crazy includes the wrong shipment of eyeballs from Spain, a CTO stranded in America, a run of dolls with two left hands and some deaths in the team-family. 

All that told, the company hit their deadline last week, launching a public alpha of Makie.me, a site devoted to designing your own giant-eyed, fully posable moddable, hackable, custom dolls.
Using Makie’s character creator you can customize a doll to your exact specifications. Hit the order button and Makielab will 3-D print your own unique creation, assemble it and ship it to you.
Taylor’s background is at the intersection of games and media and, as you look over Makielab’s first offering, it shows. In terms of look and spirit, Makies have a lot in common with the DIY Blythe doll-modding community. In allowing customers to do some of that customization before the dolls are made, Makie taps into the obsessive attention to detail that can go into creating an avatar for a video game.

And once you’ve got your custom doll in hand, Makie encourages you to go a step further by hacking into it to add electronics.

Read the full article here.