Soenke Zehle

In an era of algorithmic cultures, designers willing to take on the challenges of sustainability must be prepared to deal with complex eco-politics. At the same time, any mapping of possible sites of aesthetic intervention must begin by visualizing complete material flows.

Aided by the research of non-governmental organizations and a wave of liberal celebrity journalism, users know that mobile media use here is linked to resource conflicts  TREND: SCARCITY OF RECOURSES somewhere else. The call to shift to renewables has triggered a new type of resource conflict, less about the conditions of extraction than about the terms of transnational trade, giving rise to a new geopolitics of resource access. In the race to create independent supply chains for these essential materials, industry and political leaders in Europe and the US now regret having placed potential mining areas under environmental protection and are likely to reopen extraction in the name of resource autonomy.

Any such efforts may not go unnoticed, however; electronics activists  ACTIVISM are already using free mapping tools to visualize global supply chains and demonstrate that transparency in the area of resource extraction is in fact possible. Above and beyond corporate social responsibility initiatives that may or may not amount to more than a greenwashing of largely unchanged production processes, such maps call on corporations to take responsibility for what is happening across their supply chains rather than delegating such monitoring to their suppliers. Complex data visualizations challenge claims that brand management is the only corporate responsibility in the age of intellectual property, ensuring that designers creating new gadgets and user experience strategies are placed adjacent to indigenous communities struggling to protect the integrity of local environments or local militias fighting over the revenue streams of a local.

New environmental governance regimes and regulatory frameworks (WEED, RohS) offer designers access to vast material databases that list toxicity, as well as use and disposal hazards, although corporate participation is not yet required by law. Moreover, these lists of declarable substances only cover materials present in the final product, failing to address job health and safety or the workers’ right to know what they are handling. The design (and scope) of such databases have become an eco-political terrain, giving rise to a new brand of design-related data activism to expand the collection and integration of supply chain data.

Open Source Design

The effective management of environmental standards across transnational supply chains and production networks requires some acknowledgment of worker demands to know the substances they work with, potentially raising health and safety standards for workers and consumers across industries. Even so, consumer choice in the notoriously fragmented world of electronics manufacturing, for example, does not yet extend to devices that are truly sustainable. As corporate sustainability reports show, electronics companies have no idea how to monitor, let alone control complete supply and disposal chains, lagging far behind their peers in the automotive industries.

Consumers interested in fair production are allies of designers no longer interested in ‘designing for the dump’, ¹ RECYCLING but consumer-designer alliances are rare, despite the enthusiasm over user-generated content and the emergence of ‘produsers’. Activist networks (like Bricolabs) lead the way in applying the principle of openness to hardware design – encouraging users to extend their desire to create and participate to the design and production of the very technologies of creation and participation. This pursuit of ‘open re:source design’ is aided by the wave of open educational resources (OER) available to designers. Material available online ranges from online syllabi on design and environmental topics ² to free software design tools and corresponding handbooks for self-study. ³

These developments place designers at the core of a new series of ethico-aesthetic conflicts, giving them a key role to play in the negotiation of competing futures, perspectives, and timescales of sustainability. In theory, they are well-positioned to play a pivotal role. At the same time, they are engulfed by a tentacular creative industries framework that lauds creative autonomy without providing much more than precarity compensation, while short product cycles and the volatile attention economy of real-time communications networks limit the potentially disruptive force of the call for sustainability. But ‘open’ re:source design means, above all, to raise the stakes of these questions.

→ co.xmlab.org

Jürgen Neumann

OHANDA is an initiative to foster sustainable copyleft-style sharing of open hardware and design. Since its emergence from the GOSH!-Grounding Open Source Hardware summit at the Banff Centre in July 2009, one of the goals of the project has been to build a service for sharing open hardware designs which includes a certification model and a form of registration. OHANDA is in process, and the process is open.

Why can’t we just use any copyleft license?

In short: copyleft  ACTIVISM derives its legal basis from copyright, which cannot be effectively enforced in the physical world. The equivalent would be patents, but the process of patenting hardware to make it open would be slow and expensive. The proposed solution with OHANDA is a label in the sense of a trademark. The label will allow the developer to associate a copyleft licence with any kind of physical device through OHANDA, which would act as a registration authority. The label could be compared to other common certificates, such as organic food, fair trade or CE certificates shown on products.

How does it work?

The designer  DESIGNERS applies the copyleft license to the product designs and documentation. This makes it possible to licence the work under his name without restricting its use to the point that it could no longer be considered open.

First, the designer signs up for a registered account (as a person or as an organization) and receives a unique producer ID. When the designer registers at OHANDA, he accepts the terms and conditions of using the OHANDA label. This means that the designer grants the Four Freedoms to the user (see below) and publishes the work under a copyleft licence. The designer then registers the product and receives a unique product ID. After doing so, the designer may apply the OHANDA label to the product. The OHANDA label and the unique OHANDA registration key (OKEY) are printed/engraved on each copy of the device. This ensures that the link to the documentation and to the contributors always travels with the physical device itself, providing visible proof that it is open source hardware. The OHANDA registration key on the product helps the user link the product back to the designer, the product description, design artefacts and the copyleft licence through the web-based service offered by OHANDA. Empowered by the Four Freedoms, the user may develop the product further,  BLUEPRINTS register as a producer in his own right, share his design artefacts under a copyleft licence, and be associated with the derivatives of the product.

Four Freedoms

The four freedoms from Free Software Definition lay the foundation for sharing hardware through OHANDA. The adaptations below are made by just replacing the term ‘program’ with the term(s) ‘device /& design’. This may not be the most understandable way of describing freedoms of sharing open hardware, but it describes the degree of openness that OHANDA stands for. By granting these four freedoms for all documentation attached to a product, sharing takes place on a sustainable basis.

Freedom 0. The freedom to use the device and/or design for any purpose, including making items based on it.  REMIX

Freedom 1. The freedom to study how the device works and change it to make it to do what you wish. Access to the complete design is a precondition for this.  WYS ≠ WYG

Freedom 2. The freedom to redistribute copies of the device and/or design.  SHARE

Freedom 3. The freedom to improve the device and/or design, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the complete design  HACKING DESIGN is a precondition for this.

Who owns it?

Ideally? Nobody… and everybody. A legal entity is needed to register a trademark. This legal entity should either be a credible, pre-existing, not-for-profit organization, or a new non-profit organization with enough transparency in its operational management that the ownership of this common asset does not become an issue. Distributing the ownership gradually among all those who share their hardware feels like the right thing to do, but it may turn out too complex to manage in the long run. OHANDA is still a work in progress; existing certification models are being studied in order to adopt best practices. In the meantime, the community  COMMUNITY gathering around OHANDA will simply proceed without any legal entity or definitive registered trademark.

→ www.ohanda.org

Mushon Zer-Aviv

I have been teaching open source design since 2008, in an attempt to figure out whether it can even exist. This article is an opportunity for me to reflect on and share my latest failures and successes in teaching what has yet to be learned.

I was first exposed to the open source world as a user of some free software; it was only later that I was introduced to the idealistic arguments about Freedoms, ACTIVISM as a more abstract principle. This combination of collaborative work and individual autonomy intrigued me. Coders were developing appealing political structures that were fostering creativity, collaboratively. I envied that degree of creative freedom; as a designer, I live in fear of ‘design by committee’.

Don’t designers know how great free collaboration can be? Are they too afraid of trying? Do they just need a helping hand? Or is the problem that what works for code just doesn’t really translate into the design process?

Inspired by these initiatives, I started my own open source project, co-founding ShiftSpace.org; I took part as a designer, collaborating with Dan Phiffer, a coder. It was my enthusiasm about open development that inspired me, but I was surprised to find that this excitement was not shared by my fellow designers. Don’t designers know how great free collaboration OPEN EVERYTHING can be? Are they too afraid of trying? Do they just need a helping hand? Or is the problem that what works for code just doesn’t really translate into the design process?

I set out to answer these questions, but trawling through online resources did not yield enough satisfactory writing on the subject. Many discussions confused sharing with collaboration,  CO-CREATION or were trying to advocate the use of open graphics software for purely ideological reasons. These arguments did not convince me; I was fairly sure that the ideological stance of coders could not be the only element that makes ‘Free Software’ such a desirable practice. Similarly, there is no intrinsic sociable instinct that leads coders to one another. The networked collaborative model of Free Software for coding is pragmatically the best way to go; any other way just makes much less sense. In this context, ideological reasons are secondary to simple pragmatism.

An Open Design Lab, with My Students as Lab Rats

It might be that we just haven’t found the right way to transcend the design process; it’s not as if we’ve tried all that hard yet. Art and design schools still nurture the image of the genius  DESIGNERS as an individual artist. Originality is rewarded as a higher standard than com-munication, and copying is considered a sin. I figured the classroom would be the first place to start, so I proposed a class for the Parsons School for Design entitled Open Source Design. I assumed that our exploration of design based on Free Software methods should probably start with interface design, since interface is an integral part of most of the software we use. My hope was that I would be able to convince my students to contribute their design skills to some projects – have them get hands-on experience working on real projects while actually making some actual (and much-needed) contributions to Free Software.

To drive home the point about collaboration (and to scare off any students who might not be ready for the bumpy ride), I decided to kick off the first class with some bold statements:

“In this class, we’re going to explore the possibilities of Open Source Design while learning HTML, CSS & WordPress theming. However, I should warn you that I don’t have much experience in HTML & CSS, and I will practically be learning WordPress for the first time along with you guys.”

You can imagine the looks on their faces. Luckily for me, only some of them left as soon as the class was over. My approach to this class was different than what I had done in previous classes I had taught. Rather than teach the students to use the technology, we learned how to figure things out on our own. Rather than memorizing every HTML element and what it might be good for, we learned to use Firefox and the Firebug extension to inspect the source code of every site. Open source made sense immediately when the students could read the HTML code   KNOWLEDGE of any page like an open book. Unlike in other classes, the students were encouraged to copy, to analyse, to understand and to implement code and design patterns they found on the web.  HACKING

To look at grid-based design, we used the Blueprint BLUEPRINTS CSS framework; for WordPress, we used the Sandbox and Thematic framework themes. In both cases, the students based their work on previous design decisions coded into these frameworks and explored ways of modifying the code or design to fit their needs. We were using design foundations that were strong, but at the same time easy to modify. It made sense to the students; they understood why the concept of openness might actually be relevant for them.

Teaching vs Learning

Like many other design educators, teaching is one of the ways that I can stay up to date. I am required to constantly keep myself informed, constantly learning and make sure I actually understand new subjects enough to teach them. That is also a benefit of being involved in open source initiatives. The professional exchange between coders facilitates a sustainable peer-to-peer learning environment – and one that extends beyond the structures of institutional education. To extrapolate, if I learn by teaching students and geeks learn by teaching each other, maybe my students can learn that way too.

The first assignment in my class was ‘The Tutorial’. Students were required to create a (non-digital) tutorial on something they already knew how to do, preferably a topic that others might not be familiar with. They exchanged tutorials in class; over the following week, all the students had to follow the guidelines provided by their peers and report to the class on their experiences. The students wrote tutorials on such topics as ‘How to curve a football’, ‘A recipe for banana bread’, ‘DIY 3D glasses’, ‘Finding an Apartment in NY (Without Paying a Broker)’ and ‘How to Sell Multiple Pairs of Shoes’. A tutorial is an involved interactive design task, even when the tutorial is not digital. It also provided a framework for the semester that was constructed around knowledge sharing, documentation and peer learning.

Art and design schools still nurture the image of the genius. Originality is rewarded as a higher standard than communication, and copying is considered a sin.

Tutorial hunting has become a substantial part of the semester, as tutorials become a major source of pooled knowledge. We used a class mailing list where students could submit technical questions and ask for creative feedback. I encouraged them to post their code and questions on the blog and refer their peers to the relevant blog post from the mailing list. However, in many cases, a code snippet was not enough to get the full picture, reproduce the problem and help solve it; we needed to share the full code repository. I was concerned that getting the students on a version control system would be pushing them just a bit beyond the geekdom level that design students could handle in one semester, but it became unavoidable. I set them up on a centralized Subversion code repository, so every student would get every code update downloaded directly to their computers. They shared all the code by definition and could modify each other’s work when needed. SHARING

This worked well, but it had an unacceptable side effect: at the end of each semester, the class code repositories created in that semester would be left abandoned. Symbolically, each class became an abandoned open source project. Obviously, that was not the message I wanted to leave the students with. I recently gave up on the Subversion system, which used centralized version control, and got my students on Git and the Github.com ‘social coding’ site. On Github, the students publish their code in public and other users (not just the other students in the class, but also other users) can easily fork, merge and comment on the code. When the semester ended, the students maintained control of their own repositories, beyond the context of the class.

Pragmatic, Not Altruistic

By that point in the semester, I have managed to convince the students why free and open source content available online is relevant to them and will advance their creative work. But that was the easy part; I have not yet managed to convince them why they should contribute too, why they should give back to the commons.  MANIFESTOS

I initially set up the final assignment of the semester as an arbitrary task: “Find an open source project, and contribute to it as a designer.” I was naïve, to say the least, and this ill-conceived task failed miserably. My students didn’t really understand the projects they chose, and the geek-talk on the mailing lists was incomprehensible jargon to them. The communities they approached did not have a frame of reference to appreciate the students’ contributions and were suspicious of the students’ motives. The first semester of the Open Source Design class ended in disappointment; it was clear we were on the wrong track.

In the following semester, I understood that assigning an arbitrary contribution was the wrong way to go. I had a smaller class that time around, and we chose to work together twice during the semester. First, we took part in the WordPress 2.7 icon design challenge. Later, the students chose to help some of their friends get their portfolios up online using the Indexhibit system. They wrote tutorials, they recorded screen-capture videos, they wrote code examples and style comments. Finally, they posted their contributions on the class blog and on the Indexhibit forums. Back then, the documentation available for Indexhibit was lacking and the students’ work was well received.

The second attempt had worked much better than the first one, but I knew its success had a lot to do with the qualities and personalities of the students in class. They enjoyed working together but at its core, the Indexhibit documentation was still a relatively altruistic contribution to a project that they were not actually planning to use after the class ended. If they were not going to benefit from their own contributions, why should they contribute again once they were no longer required to for a group assignment?

In the following semesters, I guided students to write the kind of tutorials they would have liked to find for themselves. Their tutorials focused on CSS, WordPress, Github… environments they used for their own benefit, in their own work. They not only covered the technical side of the technologies they documented; they also looked at the design aspects. At the end of the semester, the blog featured valuable, peer-reviewed and tested tutorials that benefited the students who had already completed the class. Months and years after each of these semesters ended, these publicly available contributions constantly receive thank-you comments from random users on the web. And still, it was not enough yet.

Toward a Collaborative Design Process

As far as knowledge sharing is involved, the tutorial approach has indeed proved itself. However, sharing technology and design tips is not collaboration. In this context, sharing has been happening post mortem to the creative act. To really challenge the design process and discover whether design can enjoy the benefits of the networked production  REVOLUTION revolution, I needed to focus my efforts on design collaboration.
Writing a wiki and coding software both benefit from a highly collaboration-friendly technology: text. Both types of content generation use a vocabulary predefined by language, which levels the playing field for the various contributors. It poses implicit prerequisites (literacy) and it funnels the contributions through a finite list of the syntax options standardized by language. For better or worse, both visual and behavioural languages are not confined within such rigid structures.  STANDARDS Ironically, it is the openness of these languages that makes networked collaboration harder.

In the last few decades, interface design emerged as an important cultural practice. There have been many attempts recently to coordinate and standardize this new language. The critical discussion of interface linguistics does not happen in the academic arena, it happens in the blogosphere. These interface linguists document design patterns and evaluate best practices for following them. Many of them are advocating semantic content and structured data, claiming such approaches would support efforts to index and process this content. The aim here is to serve artificial systems that are not intelligent enough to derive the meaning without external assistance. At the same time, these index-based and component-based approaches help structure the creative process as well. We see it in Wikipedia, where the way that articles are structured helps to focus and process the collaborative act. We see it in the structure of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), where design decisions propagate through the document’s structure. And we see it in interaction modules, where code libraries encapsulate a single action which can still be modified externally through APIs.

The critical discussion of interface linguistics does not happen in the academic arena, it happens in the blogosphere.

The next frontier for the academic collaborative design lab that my students and I have been leading would have to involve the linguistics of interaction design. We will start drafting characters, then words and then sentences; some might call it building a structured visual language. We will try to define a syntax, then rearrange it and try again; some might call it designing modular systems. We will try to set standards, then extend them, then break them; some might call it developing a design guide. We will try to evaluate the legibility and readability of our messages; some might call it usability testing. We will try to discover a new collaborative paradigm for the design process; some might call it ‘Open Source Design’.

Joos Smiers

It was in 1993 that I started to realize that intellectual property rights – such as copyrights and patents – are steadily privatizing most of the public knowledge and creativity that our communities have developed and cultivated over centuries. Around the same time, I heard that farmers in India were staging massive protests. They faced the threat that seeds they had used for years to plant their crops would be slightly modified (or ‘improved’) by multinational agricultural companies like Monsanto, and that this tiny change would make those companies the owners of this ‘new’ knowledge.  KNOWLEDGE What those farmers and their grandparents, and generations before them, had developed in their communities over the course of centuries could, with a single stroke of the pen, become the sole and exclusive property of a major corporation. These are the selfsame corporations, most of which are based in Western countries, that dominate agricultural markets all over the world.

Is this what IP rights are really doing? Privatizing knowledge and creativity on a massive scale?

I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of cynicism. Is this what intellectual property rights are really doing? Privatizing knowledge and creativity on a massive and unprecedented scale? What could possibly justify such a bold move? It was a small step for me to extrapolate these principles from the seeds of Indian farmers to copyrights on works of art and design, which is another form of privatization. Certainly, it could be argued that every new contributor – every person who modifies or adapts seeds, words, music, design, or chemical processes – adds something to what has been developed by his predecessors. But is this a valid reason to hand over absolute ownership to the latest producer, keeping in mind that we will need this knowledge and creativity for further developments? Privatization in this context means that the product can no longer be used for common purposes, unless the ‘owner’ of this knowledge and creativity grants permission – and we pay the price that ‘owner’ sets for it. Never before in recorded history, in any culture, has intellectual misappropriation taken place on such a grand scale as what we have seen in the Western world over the past century, expanding exponentially since the 1990s.

It soon became clear to me — long before Napster and the increasing popularity of open source software — that we have to seriously question whether or not we really need to have intellectual property rights. My main concern, in the context of copyright for artists, entertainers and designers, was that they should have the chance to make a living. There can be no doubt that the present copyright system is extremely beneficial for a few best-selling artists, and fails almost entirely to benefit the majority of creative professionals. How can the market be improved to include a better financial situation for most of the artists and designers? Moreover, can we achieve that goal by keeping the sources of our knowledge and creativity in common hands instead of privatizing them?

During the 1990s, more people started to feel uneasy with our current copyright system, partly due to the opportunities offered by digitization. Concepts like free culture, open source and Creative Commons became fashionable.  ACTIVISM However, these concepts and the practices associated with them are less than helpful when it comes to creating a fairer market for creative professionals. With such a strong emphasis on ‘free’ access and sharing, how can this be the right answer for artists and designers seeking to earn a living from their work? In addition, these developments do nothing to reform current structures and power relations, in which a few huge enterprises dominate cultural markets. Aside from issues of democratic process, such companies artificially exclude from public view all artists who are not big stars, essentially pushing them out of the limelight. To assure a reasonable income for many artists and to stop the privatization of our common knowledge and creativity, a more fundamental answer must be found for the challenges we face.

What if We Would Abandon Copyright?

Suppose we were to leave copyright law behind us. Would it then be possible to structure a market in such a way that protection by copyright law would become unnecessary? The first question that springs to mind is what we would want to achieve in that cultural market. The answers follow from imbalances in the current structure.

→ Many more artists should be able to earn a reasonable income from their work.

→ The resources of production, distribution and promotion should have numerous owners, and access should be given more liberally.

→ An extensive database of knowledge and artistic creativity should exist in the public domain, freely available to all.

→ Audiences should not be overwhelmed by PR efforts aimed at marketing a small number of top stars. Instead, people should be freely exposed to a wide variety of cultural expressions, from which they can make their own choices.

How might all this be achieved? My starting point, which may come as a surprise, is the cultural entrepreneur. This individual could be the artist or designer himself, or someone who represents him or her, or a producer, publisher or commissioning client. The major characteristic of an entrepreneur is that he or she takes a risk in a chosen field, which in itself presents its own specific opportunities and threats. In this case, our field could be defined as ‘cultural activity’, a sweeping title which could also refer to the entertainment industry or to various forms of content production. The field in which the cultural entrepreneur operates bears some similarities to any other business; the cultural entrepreneur should think and act pro-actively. This individual should, in other words, be capable of staying one step ahead of the competition, try to stay on top of potential threats and opportunities, and be acutely aware of what is happening, both in his or her immediate surroundings and in the wider world.

However, a factor seldom mentioned in the context of entrepreneurship is the conditions that facilitate or obstruct risk-taking behaviour. How could such a market be constructed? How should the balance of power be organized, and what kind of regulations should set the limits and offer opportunities for the scope of entrepreneurship?

The Two Controlling Markets

The present cultural markets exhibit two forms of negative dominance. The first is copyright law. Copyright in its current form gives the owner control over the use of a work, with all the consequences that this entails. As an investment protection, it works well for best-sellers, pop stars and cinematic blockbusters, but at the same disrupts the diversity in cultural markets in ways that are harmful for cultural democracy. The second form of market control, monopolization, is often inadvertently overlooked in debates on this topic. Simply put, a limited number of conglomerates worldwide have a strong grip on the production, distribution, promotion and creation of films, music, books, design, visual arts, shows and musicals, as well as the conditions for how these creative expressions are received. Their influence also extends – even more than expected – into the digital domain.

These two forms of market domination go hand in hand. The exciting challenge is to find out whether eliminating both forms of market domination would create a more normal level playing field – whether it would be possible to achieve an environment in which no single party is able to control or influence the market or the market behaviour of others to any substantial degree. In this context, I feel that it is crucial for many cultural entrepreneurs – creative professionals, their representatives, agents, producers, publishers and so on – to actually be able to fully take part in the market.

What is currently keeping them from this level of participation? There is no single answer to that question. Yes, there are thousands and thousands of artists and designers producing work and therefore theoretically taking part in the market. However, they are often pushed out of public view by the omnipresence of the major cultural conglomerates. They do not have a fair chance to trade. Under these circumstances, it is made extremely difficult, to say the least, to bear the risk inherent in entrepreneurship. In essence, access to the cultural market – and therefore to audiences, clients and the opportunity to earn money – is severely limited for the vast majority of cultural entrepreneurs, but wide open for a few cultural giants, which continue to grow through mergers.

The Power of the Giants

These huge enterprises also hold the copyright to a vast number of the products that they market. As copyright holders, they have an even greater stranglehold on the market, as they are the only ones that can determine whether, how and where a vast quantity of work is used. They decide which cultural products are available in the market; they dictate which kinds of content are considered acceptable and appealing, and can determine the atmosphere in which they are enjoyed, consumed or used. Their works may not be changed or undermined, either, and alternative narratives would be banned.

The majority of cultural entrepreneurs have minimal access. Many, even the mid-level ones, enter a market – if they succeed – where a few giants determine the atmosphere and appeal of what they themselves have on offer, often having to compete against big stars and ‘famous’ designers.  DESIGNERS In this doubly dicey position, where a few major players not only dominate the market but also determine the atmosphere of the cultural playing field, it is not entirely impossible to succeed, but it is very difficult for many smaller and mid-level entrepreneurs to achieve any kind of profitable position in which they can survive.

A Proposal for a New Market

To achieve a level playing field in this cultural market, I see no other alternative than to undertake two simultaneous courses of action: first scrap copyright, and then make sure that no market domination of any kind exists with regard to production, distribution and marketing. So how does this work?

Abolishing copyright means it is no longer attractive for entrepreneurs to invest lavishly in blockbuster films, best-selling books or rising pop stars. After all, there is no longer any protection making those works exclusive. If this system were to be implemented, anyone could, in principle, change or exploit the works the next day. So why make such exorbitant investments any longer? Naturally, it is not forbidden. Anyone who wants to can go ahead, but the investment protection that copyright offered – that privileged exclusivity – is no longer available.

There should be many different players in all markets, and society should be responsible for imposing the conditions.

Does that mean, for example, that there will be no more epic films made? Who knows? Perhaps in an animated form. Is that a loss? Maybe, maybe not. It would not be the first time in history that a genre had disappeared due to changing production circumstances. Historically, as genres have vanished, others have appeared to replace them and become incredibly popular. It is not unthinkable that people will get used to the change very quickly. Moreover, there is no reason to offer investment protection to large-scale productions supported by excessive marketing that, in fact, pushes true cultural diversity to the outermost fringes of the market.

The second course of action I propose is to normalize market conditions. This may be even more drastic than abolishing copyright, a proposition which has become increasingly feasible over the past few years. As stated previously, no one party should control prices, quality, range, employment conditions, market access for other parties, or anything else, in any market. Similarly, no one party should be able to act with impunity, without regard for any other social considerations. In other words, there should be many different players in all markets, and society should be responsible for imposing the conditions under which they operate.

What applies to the economy in general surely applies even more to our human communication through artistic media. What we see, hear and read contributes extensively to the forming of our identities, in the plural. It cannot be stressed enough that there should therefore be many, many enterprises in the cultural field; instead of being pushed away from public attention by excessively strong forces, they should be able to offer their cultural wares from totally different perspective. I view that point as non-negotiable.

The Consequences

If such a dramatic restructuring took place, what would the result look like? There would no longer be any conglomerates dominating the production, distribution, promotion and creation of creative work or dictating the conditions for how artistic works were received. The scale of such enterprises would be reduced considerably, ranging somewhere between medium-sized and small. How could this landslide of change be brought about? Most countries have regulatory tools at their disposal in the form of competition or anti-trust laws, which are intended to level the playing field in every market – including the cultural market.

What should be happening is a fundamental investigation of anything that hints at an excessively dominant position in cultural markets, including design. That investigation should, perhaps, be one of the primary aspects of cultural policy. Imagine that large combinations of capital, assets, market positions, and production and distribution facilities were to be divided into many smaller pieces. After all, this is what we have been discussing for the cultural and media sectors in our societies. It may come as a surprise that this is even more necessary in the highly networked digital world, where it tends to be ‘winner-take-all’.

Suppose that the cultural market could be normalized, that a level playing field could be attained. Can the objectives I formulated earlier be achieved there? I think so. There are no longer any obstacles to many cultural entrepreneurs taking the plunge and accepting the risks. Enterprise always entails risk; it goes with the territory. There have always been some artists and entrepreneurs who have dared to brave those risks. In this new market, many of these cultural entrepreneurs can take risks with more confidence. Irrepressibly, those entrepreneurs will evolve in every corner of the cultural universe, serving audiences with a varied range of artistic creations and performances. What used to be niche markets can begin drawing larger audiences than had ever been deemed possible.

If the cultural conglomerates’ overkill marketing is no longer being dumped onto the populace en masse, then current and potential audiences are more than likely to develop interests in a wider variety of trends. Why not? Man is essentially a curious creature and has individual preferences on how he would like to be entertained or accompanied, as evidenced by the varied expressions of culture that people seek out as comfort in moments of grief. If those preferences are no longer being drowned out by a dominant few, then more room is created for far more individual choice.

Despite that individuality, man is also something of a pack animal.  TREND: GLOBALIZATION People will therefore in all probability cluster more around one particular artist than around others. That artist then becomes a ‘well-seller’. In our imagined scenario, the artist can never take that supreme step up to become a best-seller, since the market conditions that made that possible are simply no longer there. A normalized market for the public domain of artistic creativity and knowledge has turned out to be extraordinarily beneficial in our example. After all, artistic material and knowledge can no longer be privatized, and therefore remain the property of us all. There is not a single company left that can monopolize production, processing and distribution, either.
Now it gets interesting: how well does this thought experiment translate into practice? Could a real, functioning market conceivably be created under the conditions that I have formulated, in which devious thieves will be unable to seize their opportunity before taking to their heels? In other words, can numerous artists, their representatives, intermediaries, commissioning parties or producers earn a good living in that market? Are the risks of enterprise acceptable? Do they also have reason to believe that their work will be treated with the appropriate respect?

Let’s start with the question as to whether it is likely that creative work will be used by others without payment. Is there any reason to assume that another cultural entrepreneur will pop up and exploit it immediately after release? In principle, that would indeed be possible without copyright law. Nevertheless, there are several reasons why this is unlikely. First of all, there is the ‘prime mover’ effect. The original publisher or producer is the first in the market, which gives him an advantage. Naturally, with digitization, that prime mover effect can diminish to a few minutes, but that’s not an insurmountable problem in itself. Most artistic work is not famous enough for free-riders to fall on it like hawks. Moreover, an increasingly important factor is that artists and related entrepreneurs add a specific value to their work that no one else can imitate. Building up a reputation may not be half the work, but it is a significant factor. Remember, we are assuming that there are no longer any dominant parties in the market. There are no longer any big companies to think they could easily ‘steal’ a recently published and well-received work because, for example, they control the distribution and promotion channels. In this scenario, they simply no longer exist.

As a normal market emerges, many artists and designers will be earning better than ever before.

In the absence of copyright, there can now be no question of theft; still, free-rider behaviour is an undesirable occurrence. In fact, there are twenty, thirty, forty, or innumerable other companies that could come up with the same idea. With this reality in mind, it becomes less likely, even very unlikely, that another company will put the money and effort into remarketing a work that has already been released. Should one be concerned that someone other than the initiator and risk bearer merrily walks off with a work that belongs to the public domain? It won’t come to that. Investments go hopelessly up in smoke when numerous parties are willing to take a free-rider gamble. In that case, the first creator almost certainly remains the only one to continue exploiting the work; no one benefits from trying to take it over.

Let me remind you that the two courses of action I proposed earlier have to be taken simultaneously. Abolishing copyright should not be an isolated action. It has to be accompanied by the application of competition or anti-trust law and market regulation in favour of diversity of cultural ownership and content. Only then there will be a market structure that discourages free-rider behaviour.

It can happen that a specific work does really well. In that case, another entrepreneur could include it in his repertoire, make ‘legal’ copies, or promote it in his own circles. Is that a problem? Not really, since he or she will not be the only one able to do so. Moreover, if the first entrepreneur has gauged the market accurately and remains alert, then he will have a good head start on all others. The first entrepreneur can also offer the work in a less expensive version, for example, which doesn’t encourage competition. Nevertheless, successful works will certainly be exploited by others. That does not pose a serious problem, as the work has obviously already generated a lot of money for the author and the first producer or publisher. A legal copy or new presentation then only serves to enhance the author’s fame, which he or she can capitalize on  CREATIVE COMMONS in many different ways.

The Power to the Masses

I already mentioned briefly above that, if the market is structured as I propose, the phenomenon of best-sellers will be a thing of the past. That would be culturally beneficial, as real room is created in the artists tastes of people world-wide, encouraging a far greater diversity in forms of artistic expression. The economic consequence is that a tremendous amount of cultural entrepreneurs, including designers, can operate profitably in the market without being pushed out of the limelight by the big stars. At the same time, it has been established that some artists and designers often succeed in attracting more publicity than others. This will not make them best-sellers, as there are no longer any mechanisms for boosting them to worldwide fame. They become well-sellers. Besides being a nice position to be in as an artist, it would also be economically beneficial for the artists and for their producers, publishers and other intermediaries.

Another appealing effect is that the income gap between artists would take on more normal proportions. Before, the difference between rising stars and the rank and file was astronomical. In my scenario, the well-sellers may earn more than many other artists, but the differences are more socially acceptable. At the same time, another change is taking place, which is perhaps even more drastic. As a normal market emerges, many artists, designers and related intermediaries will be earning better than ever before. In the past, these people generally had a hard life, hovering around break-even point and often ending up in the red. Now, a substantially greater number will sell quite a bit better. This will allow them to scramble up above break-even point. They might not become well-sellers, but they don’t have to.

In the scenario we have explored here, a significant improvement has already been achieved, because their activities have become profitable. That is a giant step forward for the income of the artist and, at the same time, an enormous improvement for the risk-bearing entrepreneur (who may also be the artist or designer). The business is no longer in a permanent state of insecurity, barely making ends meet. Moreover, as the investment becomes more profitable, it becomes possible to build up capital to finance for further activities. It also becomes easier to take a risk on artists who deserve a chance – who should be published, who should have the opportunity to perform and so forth – but have not yet had the chance.

One surprising aspect of the economic and financial crisis that swept the world in 2008 is that, for the first time in decades, the idea of markets being organized in such a way that the structure does not solely serve the interests of shareholders and investors has entered the debate. A high price has been paid for the idea that they knew what they were doing and would automatically work to serve the common good. The neo-liberal notion that markets regulate themselves should be abandoned; it simply isn’t true. Every market, anywhere in the world, is organized in one way or another that serves certain interests more than others. Once this realization dawns, it will be a weight off our shoulders. We can then start constructively considering how we can organize markets – including cultural markets – to enable them to serve a broader spectrum of interests. There are exciting times ahead, not without their potential pitfalls, but with ample opportunity for these ideas to take hold and flourish.

Andrew Katz

We are reaching the end of a great historical experiment. Printing (starting with Gutenberg-style presses  PRINTING and leading to huge industrial Heidelberg printing machines), radio broadcasting, 78s, vinyl, CDs, cinema, television: all these discoveries formed the technological backdrop for this experiment. All are (or were) media based on the principle of one-to-many distribution. To understand how this experiment was initiated, and how it is reaching its end, we need to understand a little of the nature of the businesses involved in these activities, and how the law enabled them to attain, and retain, that nature.  WYS ≠ WYG

As the public grew accustomed to the idea of passive consumption, creativity became increasingly marginalized.

The one-to-many broadcast distribution model distorted our perception of creativity. A key characteristic of one-to-many distribution is the role of the gatekeeper: the corporation which decides what we, the public, get to read, watch or listen to. The roles of creator and consumer are starkly defined and contrasted. As the public grew accustomed to the idea of passive consumption, creativity became increasingly marginalized, at least in those areas covered by copyright.  ACTIVISM Creativity was perceived as capable of flourishing only through the patronage of the movie studios, the record companies or the TV stations.

The industrial technology behind printing, broadcasting and vinyl duplication is expensive. Copyright law grants a monopoly which enables the distributors of media to invest in the capital infrastructure required for their packaging and distribution. These are the businesses which grew fat on the monopolies so granted, and they succeeded in convincing the public that it was the corporations’ role to provide, and the public’s role to pay and consume.

The original social approach to creativity did not become extinct as the dominant producer/consumer mode became established, even for media (like music, for example) where it applied. Andrew Douglas’s film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus shows that a visitor to the late 20th century Appalachians of the American South may well be asked: “What instrument do you play?” If the visitor answers: “I don’t play any”, the questioner will go on to say: “Ok, so you must sing.”

Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From makes the convincing case, based on a mass of evidence, that the social mode is more effective at maximizing creativity than relying on lone inventors and creators sitting in their garrets and sheds. Lone creators make good central figures in a compelling narrative – one reason why this meme is so popular. However, examining the truth behind the narrative often reveals that any creative work has much broader parentage than the story suggests. James Boyle in The Public Domain reveals the story behind the Ray Charles song I Got a Woman, tracing it backwards to Gospel roots, and forwards to the YouTube mashup George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People, which sprang to prominence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To be sure, companies sometimes tried to foster a social model within the organization, but as Johnson points out, the benefits of social creation increase very dramatically with the size of the pool of participants, due to network effects. Until company silos are able to combine, the beneficial effects are relatively small.

Technology is Expensive

The internet has proved hugely disruptive.  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY The sharing and social nature of Web 2.0 has enabled the rediscovery of the natural, human, social mode of creative endeavour. The social side of the internet is dominated by individuals acting in their private capacity, outside the scope of businesses. Companies were initially wary of losing control over the activities of their staff, and regarded internet social activities as time-wasting at best. In the worst-case scenario, businesses saw online social networking as a potential channel for employees to leak the company’s valuable intellectual property, and were therefore often slow to see the benefits of social interaction in terms of benefits to their creativity. As they have seen the benefits accrue to their competitors, however, compa-nies are starting to embrace a more open mode of business.

A return to the social mode is not without its setbacks. The internet radically lowered the barrier to entry for collaborative participation, and consequently increased the number of potential contacts that an entrant can make.  SHARING This immensely powerful engine of creativity comes with a brake that inhibits its full capacity: the effect of unfit-for-purpose copyright laws.

The copyright laws of the broadcast era do more to assist the incumbent gatekeepers (the film companies, music companies and so on) than to promote the social mode of  CO-CREATION collaboration. A side effect of the digital world is that almost every form of digital interaction involves copying of some sort. Whereas copyright law had nothing to say about sharing a book with a friend by lending it to her, in the digital realm, lending her a digital copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four to read on her e-book reader or computer involves a form of copying which may potentially violate copyright law.

The broadcast-model gatekeepers have used this unintended side effect of copyright law to their advantage, taking action against private individuals who had no intention of monetary gain, including mash-up artists,  REMIX home video enthusiasts and slash fiction authors. Incumbent rights holders, fearful of losing their profitable monopoly-based businesses, have sought to extend their rights ever further by lobbying governments (frequently successfully) to legislate for new and increased intellectual property rights, extending such rights far beyond their original purpose and intention. To put the issue in context, it is necessary to ask a fundamental question: what is copyright for?

Thomas Jefferson was one of the most lucid writers on the topic. He understood well the unique nature of knowledge:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” ¹

A Monopoly is a Bad Thing

Jefferson did admit that creative people should be given a limited right of exclusive control over their creations. A monopoly is inherently a bad thing, a fact that was recognized in the late 18th century, as it is today. Nonetheless, a monopoly of control in the form of copyright or a patent was the most convenient way of enabling the creators to be remunerated for their work. And once the monopoly expired, the idea would be freely available to all and would become part of the common heritage of mankind, to be used without restriction by anyone. The necessary (but limited) monopoly includes ‘copyright’. The principle that the restrictions should be the minimum possible to achieve that aim should be copyright’s golden rule.That golden rule has been repeatedly ignored. The scope of protection has increased steadily over the last three hundred years, to the extent that the protection granted in Europe to the author of a novel, for example, lasts for seventy years after his or her death. Materials that are not restricted by intellectual property are considered to be ‘in the public domain’. Commentators have become increasingly strident in arguing that the public domain is a public good; it is likely that Jefferson would have agreed. In the same way that common land is an area where anyone can allow their animals to graze, the public domain has been described as a commons of knowledge, where potentially anyone can graze on the intellectual creations of others. The public domain has one crucial difference from a commons in the tangible world: a meadow open to all can easily be over-grazed and ruined, so that it becomes of use to no one (sometimes referred to as the ‘tragedy of the commons’). It is impossible to exhaust the commons of knowledge and ideas.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The modern ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that, just as the internet makes it easier to pass ideas and knowledge  KNOWLEDGE from one person to another (for “the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition”), it seems that legislation and the more extreme activities of the rights holders are making it more difficult for those ideas and knowledge to enter the commons in the first place. This is because the duration of intellectual property is constantly being extended (will the early Mickey Mouse films ever enter the public domain?), and so is its scope, as evidenced by the patenting of genes or plants. Increasingly, people are becoming aware of the value of the commons and are seeking to protect it. At the same time, we are gradually realizing that the monopoly granted by intellectual property laws is a blunt instrument, and that people are prepared to create for reasons other than the expectation of payment for the use of their creation. Copyright law does not always have to work against the commons. Free and open source software has been an undeniable success. Gartner confidently states that all businesses today use at least some free software in their systems; the Linux Foundation is predicting that free software will underpin a $50 billion economy in 2011. Following from these and other successes, the applicability of the open source model has been considered in other contexts.

The Creative Commons Licenses

One of the most prominent open source models has been the Creative Commons  CREATIVE COMMONS movement. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons has written a suite of licences which were inspired by the GNU/GPL, but which are intended for use in relation to a broad range of media, including music, literature, images and movies. The licences are drafted to be simple to understand and are modular, in that the rights owner can choose from a selection of options. The attribution option requires that anyone making use of the work makes fair attribution to the author; the share alike option is akin to the GPL, in that if a licensee takes the work and redistributes it (whether amended or not), then the redistribution needs to be on the same form of licence; the no derivatives option means that work may be passed on freely, but not modified, and the non-commercial option means that the work can only be used and distributed in a non-commercial context.

There are now millions of different works available under a Creative Commons licence: Flickr is just one content hosting site which has enabled Creative Commons licensing as a search option. There are, at the time of writing, nearly 200,000,000 Creative Commons-licensed images available for use on Flickr alone. Similar sites provide music and literary works under a Creative Commons licence. Creative Commons provide a legal infrastructure for designers and other creatives operating within the digital domain to adopt this model. They also offer an effective choice as to whether an appropriate model is GPL-style share-alike, or BSD style. Where designers’  DESIGNERS work moves into the physical world, matters become much less straightforward. The movement of hardware design into the commons has been difficult. The fundamental issues can be summarized as follows:

→ In the digital world, the creator has the choice of whether a GPL or BSD model is appropriate. This choice does not translate well to the analogue world.

→ Digital works are relatively easy to create and test.on low-cost equipment. Analogue works are more difficult to create, test and copy, which creates barrier-to-entry problems.

→ Digital goods are easy to transport; analogue goods are not. This creates a barrier to the communication necessary to get the maximum benefit out of network effects.

The barrier to entry for any participant in a digital project is remarkably low. A low-cost computer and basic internet access are all that is required to have a system capable of running the (free) GNU/Linux operating system, accessing (free) project hosting sites like sourceforge.com or koders.com. A vast range of tools required to develop software (such as GCC – the GNU Compiler Collection) are also available as free software. Copying purely digital works is trivially easy. Physical (or ‘analogue’) objects are a different matter.

Hardware development is likely to require more intensive investment in equipment (including premises in which the hardware can be placed), not just for development, but for testing. Electronic digital hardware is probably closest to software in terms of low barrier to entry: for example, the open-source Arduino microcontroller project enables an experimenter to get started with as little as $30 for a basic USB controller board (or less, if the experimenter is prepared to build the board). Arduino’s schematics, board layouts and prototyping software are all open source.  BLUEPRINTS However, Arduino-like projects represent the lowest barrier to entry in the hardware world.

Complications of Analogue

An Arduino-style project is essentially a hybrid of the analogue and the digital domains. Prototyping software makes it possible to develop Arduino-based hardware in the digital domain, where it retains all the characteristics of the digital world: ease of copying, the ability to upload prototypes to fellow contributors for commentary, assistance and the chance to show off. These are characteristics which enable network effects, and which make the open source model very powerful. It is only when the project is implemented as a physical circuit board that these characteristics are lost.

The analogue world is not always so simple. One of the most ambitious open source projects is the 40 Fires/Riversimple hydrogen car project, which has developed a small urban car (the Hyrban) powered by hydrogen, using a fuel cell/electric drivetrain. Elements of the design (such as power control software or the dashboard user interface) can be developed largely in the digital domain, but the development of motors, brakes, the body shell and so on are strictly analogue only.  WYS ≠ WYG Not only do these analogue elements present a large barrier to entry for interested tinkerers, but they also tend to restrict their ability to participate in the development community: a necessity if network effects are to work. It is, clearly, difficult to upload a car to a development site and say “can you tell me why the windscreen leaks?”

Copyright protects the expression of an idea. Retaining the same idea, but recasting the expression of it in a different form, does not infringe on the copyright.

Another significant issue is the lack of access to design software at a low cost. Software developers have access to high-quality tools like development environments and tools available for free under free software licences. There is no similar suite of CAD software, and proprietary CAD software is notoriously expensive. The barrier to entry is raised once again.

Many of these issues are surmountable, given time. Ever-improving simulation software means that more and more testing and prototyping can be undertaken in the digital domain. The introduction of 3D printers PRINTING like the RepRap means that it is becoming increasingly affordable and feasible to print physical objects, such as gears, from a variety of plastics. The lack of suitable CAD software is being addressed by a number of projects.

For designers, progress in open source tools, increased connectivity and so on makes the establishment of open source communities ever more feasible. The legal issues, however, are less straightforward.

So far, we have concentrated on copyright issues. In some ways, other forms of intellectual property pose greater challenges. Copyright protects the expression of an idea. Retaining the same idea, but recasting the expression of it in a different form, does not infringe on the copyright. The story of two people from warring tribes meeting, falling in love, and dying in tragic circumstances can be told in a myriad of different ways, each with their own independent copyright, none of which infringes on anyone else’s copyright. This has two practical consequences. The first is that if a creator creates something which he or she has not copied from something else, then the creator will not be in breach of copyright, even if their creation turns out to be very similar, or even identical, to someone else’s. The second is that if a component of something is found to be infringing on a copyright, it is possible to salvage the project by recasting the same idea in a different expression.  REMIX

Design Rights

Copyright also has the advantage of being (reasonably well) harmonized worldwide, and has also proved amenable to hacking (e.g. by Richard Stallman)  HACKING so that it can be used to guarantee openness in the code it covers. However, other forms of intellectual property protection are more problematic for designers.

This issue is linked to the distinction between the analogue and digital domains. Designs almost invariably start with some sort of drawing or description, which is protected by copyright as a literary or artistic work. Often, this material will be digital in nature. At this point, it is similar to software. Licensing options include the suite of Creative Commons licences. Once an item is created in the physical world, a different set of legal considerations applies.

The most obvious is design right. Unfortunately, design right is complex and uncoordinated. There are many different types of design rights, and they differ from country to country. In the UK, for example, there are four separate design right regimes operating simultaneously. Depending on the right in question, they cover aspects such as shape, texture, colour, materials used, contours and ornamentation. Registered designs are in many ways similar to patents; in fact, they are sometimes called petty patents or design patents. Infringement can be unintentional, and independent creation is irrelevant. Unregistered designs are more in the nature of copyrights, and are vulnerable to infringement only where copying has taken place. The very fact that registration of design rights is required in itself provides a barrier to entry for collaborative projects, whereas copyright arises automatically and without the necessity of registration. On a collaborative project, who will pay for the preparation of a design registration, and who will make the application and maintain it?

Patents

Patents provide a particular problem for both programmers and designers, as they can impinge on both the digital realm and the analogue realm. Patents are a protection on the idea itself. Regardless of how that idea is expressed, its expression would represent patent infringement. Independent invention does not excuse patent infringement. The only way to be sure that an invention does not infringe a patent is to do an exhaustive check in patent offices worldwide. Such checks are very rarely carried out, since the expense is enormous and creates a vast barrier to entry for small businesses. US law in particular applies a positive disincentive to search: if a search is undertaken, then the searcher can be deemed to have knowingly infringed a patent – even if their reasonable determination was that the patent was not infringed – and will be liable to triple damages as a consequence. Pressure groups are lobbying worldwide for a reform of the patent system and process, but at present it is clear that the system benefits incumbent large companies with an existing patent portfolio.

The upshot of the intellectual property issues is that the BSD model is the only viable option in the hardware, analogue world. In contrast, those operating wholly in the digital domain (which includes programmers, but which can also extend to digital creatives such as filmmakers, novelists or graphic designers) have the ability to choose whether they prefer the GPL model to the BSD model, for a number of reasons. In brief, the two main reasons are as follows:

Copyright, being largely universal, automatic, unregistered and long-lasting, is better suited to the development of a copyleft model than other forms of intellectual property. The difference in cost between copying and reverse engineering  WYS ≠ WYG (which is vast in digital world, but much smaller in the analogue world), makes the copyleft a less compelling problem. A more detailed discussion of these reasons is needed to clarify why they are pertinent.

The system benefits incumbent large companies with an existing patent portfolio.

If a GPL model were applied to hardware designs, in order to be effective, it would need to impinge on the ideas underlying the design (patents), or on the visual characteristics of the design (design rights). A GPL-style model based on patents would likely fail because of the cost, complexity, and time involved in applying for the patents – not to mention the necessity of keeping the invention secret prior to its publication, since part of the application process squares badly with the open source ethos. If the model were based on design rights, it would fail in relation to registered design rights, for the same reasons as for patents. If it were based on unregistered design rights, it would be unlikely to work because the scope and length of protection would be too short, and because the rights are insufficiently universal (although there is some scope for a limited GPL-style model in relation to unregistered design rights). Even if a GPL model were feasible in the world of hardware, there is an economic reason why it would be unlikely to work. The reasoning is as follows: the digital world makes things extremely easy to copy. Imagine a programmer wants to create some software based on a program with similar functionality to a word processor released under the GPL. The options are either to take the original GPL program, modify it, and release the result under the GPL; or to take the GPL program, reverse-engineer it, and rewrite a whole new program from scratch, which would be unencumbered by copyright restrictions. There is a vast difference in the amount of work involved in the two scenarios, and any programmer is likely to consider very seriously adopting the easier, cheaper and quicker option (modifying the original), where the ‘cost’ is licensing under the GPL. However, to offer a different example, even if there were a functioning mechanism for applying share-alike to a mechanical assembly, an engineer wishing to reproduce the mechanical assembly would, in effect, have to reverse-engineer it in order to set up the equipment needed to reproduce it. Copying a digital artefact is as simple as typing:

cp old.one new.one

Copying an analogue artefact is vastly more difficult. REPRODUCTION Consequently, there is little difference between slavish copying, which would invoke GPL-like restrictions, and reverse-engineering and re-manufacturing, which would not. In this case, it is much more likely that the ‘cost’ of GPL-like compliance would be greater than the benefits of having a GPL-free object. In conclusion, even if GPL-style licences were effective in the physical world, economics would tend to disfavour their use.

It can therefore be stated that designers operating in the analogue realm are likely to be restricted to an openness model more akin to BSD than to GPL. Their challenges are to make this model work, and to discourage free riders with a combination of moral pressure and a demonstration that playing by the community norms will be beneficial both to them, and to the community as a whole.

Benefiting from Connected Creativity

Designers and creators are increasingly able to benefit from the promise of the connected, social mode of creativity. The way was paved by free software pioneers, who skilfully hacked  HACKING the copyright system to generate a commons which has not only generated a huge global business, but also provided the software which runs devices from mobile phones through to the most powerful supercomputers. It provides the software which gives the developing world access to education, medical information and micro-finance loans and enables them to participate in the knowledge economy on similar terms to the developed nations.

Designers and creators are increasingly able to benefit from the promise of the connected, social mode of creativity.

The challenge for designers and creators in other fields is to adapt the model of software development to their own field of work, and to counter the extensive efforts of incumbent beneficiaries of the broadcast era to use ever more draconian legislation to prop up the outmoded business models. Ultimately, the social mode will win: it takes one of humanity’s defining characteristics, the fact that we are highly social and community-oriented, and uses it as the foundation of the entire structure. One-to-many works against this fundamental trait, but Nature will ultimately triumph.

GNU/GPL AND BSD LICENSES

In the late 1980s, computer programmer Richard Stallman realized that copyright law could be turned inside out to create a commons of computer software. The method he proposed was simple, but brilliant.

Software is protected by copyright. The software business model used in the 1980s involved granting customers permission (the licence) to use a specific piece of software. This licence was conditional on the customer not only paying the software publisher fee, but also adhering to a number of other restrictions (such as only using the software on one computer). Why not, Stallman reasoned, make it a condition of the licence that if you took his software and passed it on (which he was happy for people to do), then they had to pass it on, together with any changes they made, under the same licence? He called this sort of software ‘free software’: once a piece of software has been released under this sort of licence, it can be passed on freely to other people, with only one restriction: that if they pass it on, in turn, they must also ensure that it is passed it on in a way that guarantees and honours that freedom for other people.

In time, he reasoned, more and more software would be released under this licence, and a commons of freely available software would flourish. The most widely used version of the licence is the GNU General Public License version 2, known as the GPL. In the 19 years since it was issued, it has become the most commonly used software licence. The GPL is the licence at the core of Linux, the computer operating system which powers Google, Amazon and Facebook, and which enabled Red Hat to forecast revenue in excess of $1Bn in financial year 2010-11.

The software commons envisioned by Stallman not only exists; by any measure, it has been an overwhelming success. Its success can be measured in countless ways: the number of participants creating software for that GPL commons, the number of open source software programs in use, or the environments in which such software can be found. More than 90 of the 100 most powerful computers in the world run on GPL software, not to mention mobile phones and in-car entertainment systems; open source software is at the core of the business offerings of such large companies as IBM and Red Hat.

The Commons Analogy

The success of free software cannot be solely attributed to the GPL. The GPL extracts a price for using the commons. To risk taking the analogy too far, a landowner who has property adjoining the GPL commons and who wants to use it also has to add his own land to the commons. (Remember, this is the magical land of ideas which cannot be ruined by over-grazing.) This will have the effect of increasing the size of the commons as more and more adjoining landowners want to make use of the commons and donate their own land in the process. However, many of them may not want to join this scheme, either because they do not want to add their own land to the commons, or because they have already pledged their land to another commons.

Is it possible to generate a commons of ideas without forcing participants to pay the price of entry; without requiring that they add their own adjoining land to the commons? Is the compulsion of the GPL necessary, or is the social and community dynamic powerful enough to allow a similar commons of ideas to spring up on its own?

The software industry has given us several outstanding examples of this. Apache, the most popular web server software in the world, used by many of the world’s busiest web sites, is issued under a licence which does not ask users to pay the GPL price. Anyone can take the Apache code, and modify it and combine it with their other software, and release it without having to release any sources to anyone else. In contrast to the GPL, there is no compulsion to add your software to the Apache commons if you build on Apache software and distribute your developments, but many people choose to contribute in return even without this compulsion. FreeBSD, to take another example, is an operating system bearing some similarity to GNU/Linux which is licensed under a very liberal licence allowing its use, amendment and distribution without contributing back; nonetheless, many people choose to do so.

Free Riders

A parallel development to the GPL was the BSD licence, first used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). As opposed to the GPL, the BSD licence only requires the acknowledgement of the original authors, and poses no restrictions on how the source code may be used. As a result, BSD-licensed code can be used in proprietary software that only acknowledges the authors.

The GPL tackles an issue called the free rider problem. Because BSD does not compel people to contribute back to the commons, those who take advantage without contributing back are called free riders. The question is whether free riders really are a problem (as the GPL band would maintain), or whether they are (as the BSD band would maintain) at worst a cost-free irritant, and at best, a cadre of people who will eventually see the light and start to contribute, once they recognize the benefits. Supporters of both the GPL and BSD models of licensing have similar aims. In both cases, they seek to support a software commons which will enable the social mode of creativity to flourish.

While the BSD model could subsist in the absence of copyright, GPL relies (perhaps ironically) on copyright law to enforce its compulsion to share. It still remains an open question as to whether the better model is to use licensing to compel people to participate in the software commons, thus reducing the free rider problem (as with GPL), or whether voluntary engagement will result in a more active community (as with Apache). Designers working outside the digital domain will rarely have the chance to choose a GPL-style option.

RIGHTS AND LICENSING SCHEMES

The re-use of designs is governed mainly by copyright, design rights and patents. Traditional open licensing schemes have been based on copyright, as this is the main intellectual property right which impinges on software, the most fertile ground for openness.

Software licensing schemes include the GPL (which enforces copyleft) and BSD (which doesn’t). Software licences rarely work properly when applied to other works. For literary, graphic and musical works, the Creative Commons suite is more effective. They allow both copyleft (share alike) and non-copyleft options. They may work well when applied to underlying design documents, which are covered by copyright, and control the distribution of those documents, as well as the creation of physical objects from them, but (depending on the jurisdiction) their protection is unlikely to extend to copying the physical object itself. Some efforts have been made to create licences that cover hardware; the TAPR Open Hardware Licence is one example. However, these efforts have frequently been criticized for their lack of effectiveness.

www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

CREATIVE COMMONS AND DESIGN RIGHTS

Creative Commons licensing is fundamentally based on copyright, and there is little clarity or consensus on how such licenses would operate in relation to design rights across the myriad different jurisdictions and types of rights.

Those designers operating purely in the realm of copyright will find that there is already an existing structure of support in terms of Creative Commons licences and associated communities. Where other forms of intellectual property impinge, matters are far more murky. The Creative Commons licences are arguably drafted to be sufficiently broad as to cover unregistered design in certain circumstances. However, since they were not drafted with design rights in mind, it cannot be assumed that the copying of a three-dimensional object will automatically fall within the scope of such a license.

www.creativecommons.org

STRUCTURE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The rule of thumb for intellectual property is that all works are considered to be in the public domain, with intellectual property protection as the exception. However, this exception is highly diversified. Copyright protects the creative, original expression of an idea, whereas patents protect the idea itself and its technical specifications. Design rights cover aspects such as shape, texture, colour, materials, contours and ornamentation. Other forms of protection include trademarks, database rights and performers’ rights.

Jos de Mul

At the 2010 edition of PICNIC,  EVENTS an annual Amsterdam event that aims to bring together the world’s top creative and business professionals to develop new partnerships and opportunities, Tom Hulme talked about ‘Redesigning Design’ ¹ : “The design industry is going through fundamental changes. Open design, downloadable design  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN and distributed design democratize the design industry, and imply that anyone can be a designer or a producer.” The subtext of this message seems to be that open design ² is something intrinsically good and should therefore be promoted. Though I generally view open design as a positive development, it is important to stay alert to potential obstacles and pitfalls in order to avoid throwing out the (designed) baby with the proverbial bathwater. Like other fields influenced by the ‘open movement’, such as open source software, open science, and open technology, open design is closely connected with the rise of computers and internet. In view of this intrinsic association, the fundamental characteristics of the digital domain are worth examining further. To develop the positive aspects of open design without falling prey to its pitfalls, the designer should not abandon his activities as a designer; rather, the designer should redesign the activities themselves. The designer of the future has to become a database designer, a meta-designer, not designing objects, but shaping a design space in which unskilled users can access user-friendly environments in which they can design their own objects.  TEMPLATE CULTURE

Design as Open Design

Openness is a fundamental part of life – and so is closedness. Although organisms have to remain separate from their environment in order to retain their discrete identity, they also need to open themselves up to their environment in order to nourish themselves and to dispose of the by-products of their essential processes. However, whereas the openness of other animals is limited in the sense that they are locked up in their specific environment (their niche or Umwelt), human beings are characterized by a much more radical openness. Their world is unlimited in the sense that it is open to an endless supply of new environments and new experiences. This makes human life incredibly varied and rich, compared to the life of other animals, but at the same time it also imposes a burden on us that animals do not share. Animals are thrown in an environment that is just given to them (which does not exclude, of course, that their environment may sometimes undergo radical changes due to forces beyond their control or understanding), but humans have to design their own world. Dasein, or ‘being-in-the-world’, as Heidegger characterizes the life of human beings, is always design – not only in the sense that they have to shape an already existing world, but in the more radical sense that human beings have to establish their world: they always live in an artificial world. To quote German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, humans are artificial by nature. ³ This is a never-ending process. Over the past few decades, accompanying the development of computers and the internet, we are witnessing the exploration and establishment of a whole new realm of human experience that leaves hardly any aspect of our lives untouched, including the world of design. Although human beings have, from the very dawn of humanity, been characterized by a fundamental openness, the concept of ‘openness’ has become especially popular in the last couple of decades. Wikipedia – one of the most successful examples of an open movement project – offers the following definition: “Openness is a very general philosophical position from which some individuals and organizations operate, often highlighted by a decision-making process recognizing communal management by distributed stakeholders (users/producers/ contributors), rather than a centralized authority (owners, experts, boards of directors, etc.)”. ⁴ In the global information society, openness has become an international buzzword.  OPEN EVERYTHING One of the recent developments has been the emergence of open software, from operating systems to a variety of applications. However, the demand for open access not only concerns software, but also extends to all possible cultural content, ranging from music and movies to books. All information (enslaved by copyrights) wants to be free.  MANIFESTOS Moreover, open access is not limited to the digital world. An increasing number of scientists are pleading for open science and open technology. They cooperate with the public and demand open access for their publications and databases. The Open Dinosaur project, for example, which advertises itself on its website as ‘crowd-sourcing dinosaur science’, involves scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution. ⁵ However, in this case, the demand for open access not only targets the results of their research, but also extends their objects. The OpenWetWare organization not only promotes the sharing of information, know-how and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering, it also tries to prevent efforts to patent living matter, such as DNA. I could list many more examples of the open movement, from open gaming to open love. We seem to be open to everything. In the presence of so many trends towards openness, it does not come as a surprise that we also are witnessing the emergence of an open design movement, albeit slightly later than in many other domains. It seems to be part of a shift in the world of design from form via content to context, or from syntax via semantics to pragmatics. ⁶ But what does ‘open design’ actually mean? In his article The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing, ⁷ Michel Bauwens distinguishes three different dimensions of open design:

Input side
On the input side we have voluntary contributors, who do not have to ask permission to participate, and use open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright  ACTIVISM so that it can be freely improved and modified. If no open and free raw material is available, as long as the option exists to create new one, then peer production is a possibility.

Process side
On the process side, it is based on design for inclusion, low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives (peer governance).

Output side
On the output side, it creates a commons, using licenses that insure that the resulting value is available to all, again without permission. This common output in turn recreates a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration.

Making Almost Anything

At the Fab Labs, founded by Neil Gershenfeld at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, these three dimensions are merging. Fab Labs give individuals access to tools for digital fabrication; the only provisos are that you must learn to do it yourself, and you must share the lab with other uses and users. Users can use the Fab Lab ‘to make almost anything’. This sounds exciting – and indeed, it is. However, there are also some serious problems connected with open design, three of which are associated with the open source movement in general. The designer of the future has to become a meta-designer, shaping environments in which unskilled users can design their own objects. The first problem is particularly linked with open source movements that deal with the production of physical objects. Where any immaterial project is concerned, as long as there is a general infrastructure for cooperation, and there is open and free input that is available or can be created, then knowledge workers can work together on a common project. However, the production of physical goods inevitably involves costs of raising the necessary capital, and the result at least needs to recoup the costs. Indeed. such goods compete with each other by definition; if they are in the possession of one individual, they are more difficult to share, and once used up, they have to be replenished. Thanks to the 3D printer, this problem seems to become less urgent every month. The first consumer 3D printer has been announced for this autumn, produced by Hewlett-Packard.  PRINTING Although it will still cost about 5000 euros, it is expected that the price will soon drop below 1000 euros. Nevertheless, the laws of the physical economy will remain a serious constraint, compared to open source activities in the digital domain. A second problem for the open design movement is that many people are not able or willing to join the open design movement. Human life is an eternal oscillation between openness and closedness, and this holds true for design. Many people do not have the skills, the time or the interest to design their own clothes, furniture, software, pets, or weapons (see below, under the fourth problem). Third, we should not automatically trust those who think that they are able to design. As long as the individual is happy with the result, this issue does not seem like a big problem. But as soon as the crowd starts sourcing,  CROWDSOURCING the varied input might affect the reliability, functionality or the beauty of the design. Unfortunately, crowdsourcing does not always result in wisdom; quite often, all it produces is the folly of the crowds. In You Are Not a Gadget, ⁸ Jaron Lanier argues convincingly that design by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos – embodied by everything from Wikipedia to American Idol to Google searches – diminishes the importance and uniqueness of the individual voice, and that the ‘hive mind’ can easily lead to mob rule, digital Maoism and ‘cybernetic totalism’. ⁹ Fourth, I want to address an additional problem. We should not forget that the 3D printers and DNA printers  PRINTING in the Fab Labs and homes of the future probably will not be used solely to design beautiful vases and flowers; they could also be used to engineer less benign things, such as lethal viruses. This is not a doomsday scenario about a possible distant future. In 2002, molecular biologist Eckhard Wimmer designed a functional polio virus on his computer with the help of biobricks and printed it with the help of a DNA synthesizer; in 2005, researchers at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington reconstructed the Spanish flu, which caused the death of between 50 and 100 million people in the 1920s, roughly 3% of the world’s population at that time; to understand the virulent nature of that influenza virus, consider this: if a similar flu pandemic killed off 3% of the world population today, that would be over 206 million deaths. Although we have to take these problems seriously, they should not lead to the conclusion that we should avoid further development of open design. It should urge us not to ignore or underestimate the potentially dangerous pitfalls of open design, and invent new strategies to face up to them.

Design as Metadesign

In the digital era, we have moved from the computer to the database as material or conceptual metaphor. It functions as a material metaphor when it evokes actions in the material world. Examples of this are databases implemented in industrial robots, enabling mass customization (e.g. ‘built-to-order’ cars) and bio­technological databases used for genetic engineering. Conversely, it functions as a conceptual metaphor if it expresses a surplus of meaning that adds a semantic layer on top of the material object.

The psychologist Maslow once remarked that if the only tool you have is a hammer, it may be tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. ¹⁰ In a world in which the computer has become the dominant technology –more than 50 billion processors worldwide are doing their job – everything  is becoming a material or conceptual database. Databases have become the dominant cultural form of the computer age, as “cinema was the key cultural form of the twentieth century”. ¹¹

They are ‘ontological machines’ that shape both our world and our worldview. In the age of digital recombination, everything – nature and culture alike – becomes an object for manipulation. The almost unlimited number of combinations that databases offer would seem to prescribe some form of limitation imposed on the possibilities. In the case of open, database-mediated design, this calls for a new role for the designer. The designer should not give up his role as a designer (or restrict himself to his traditional role as designer of material or immaterial objects).

Instead, he should become a metadesigner who designs a multidimensional design space that provides a user-friendly interface, enabling the user to become a co-designer, even when this user has no designer experience or no time to gain such experience through trial and error.

Designing Models

The task of the metadesigner is to create a pathway through design space, to combine the building blocks into a meaningful design. In this respect, the meta-designer resembles the scientist who no longer creates a linear argument, but a model or simulation that enables the user to explore and analyse a specific domain of reality, or a game designer who designs a game space that facilitates meaningful and enjoyable play, if he is successful.

The Tower of Babel

This implies that the designer’s task is to limit the virtually unlimited combinational space in order to create order from disorder. After all, like the infinite hexagonal rooms in the Library of Babel postulated by Jorge Luis Borges ¹² , most of the (re)combinations of design elements will have little or no value. To some extent, the designer will create these design elements himself, while others will be added by the co-designer. The recombination of the elements will also take the form of an interaction between the possible paths within the design space on the one hand, and the choices of the co-designer on the other. Of course, data mining and profiling algorithms will also play a role by suggesting or autonomously adding design elements (depending on the metadesign). You might ask yourselves what makes the metadesign presented here essentially different from forms of mass customization that already exist, for example on the Nike website. The answer is that mass customization is part of the project of metadesign, but only part. In the main article I referred to the three dimensions of open design.

In the case of mass customization, as with Nike, the aspect related to openness only exists in the output dimension, and even there the openness is rather limited: a customer can choose from a small range of available colours. It would naturally be impossible to offer a detailed blueprint or road map for exactly what metadesigns  will look like; this discussion is merely my reflections on the topic – or perhaps my considerations of a development yet to come. Creating them will be the task of the meta-designers of the future.

Designability

Some time ago, Kevin Kelly published an article called ‘Better Than Free’ ¹³ which advocated a new business model, based on free copies in almost every domain – from music, books and films to your DNA – which should be supplemented by added value. He lists eight ‘generative values’ that might enhance the value of the free copies, and for which people will be prepared to pay: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. I think we should add one more value: designability. It is my belief that this value will encompass all the others, presenting a great challenge for the meta-designer.

The 20th century was the unfortunate era of hyper- consumerism. You know the stats: basically, the world is ending, and we, the insatiable consumers of the world, are at fault. Traditionally, there are two solutions for what to do with all the junk we buy and collect. You can dispose of it, or you can store it. Yet both options bring their own set of troubles, be it overflowing landfills or premium rent on storage.

Michelle Thorne

As Bruce Sterling says, every moment devoted to stumbling over and tending to your piled debris are precious hours in our mortal lives, and time not spent with family, friends, your community, yourself. The things you own end up owning you.¹ So, with all this doom and gloom, is there any reasonable way to take action?Can we even make ACTIVISM a difference? There is one clear advantage we have in our generation: the power of the network.

We can leverage our networks. Unlike any generation that came before, we can provide and share infrastructure better thanks to network technology. We can buy, build, and collaborate locally and efficiently. We can shop smarter, share better, and use our networks, both online and off, to reduce waste, improve the economy and environment, and spare our bank accounts, and even have a good time and make new friends doing it. COMMUNITY

That’s Collaborative Consumption

Think about co-working spaces, for example. You can rent a desk and share office infrastructure together with fellow digital nomads. No one, besides the people who actually run the space, have to own any of the equipment, and even they can lease or rent it from other companies. A huge advantage of a co-working space is that it makes it easy and attractive to share these resources, and by doing so, they make it more efficient (and let’s be honest, more fun and social) for all of the people working here.

Let’s think about other types of resources. Who needs to actually own a moving van? Not many folks. That’s why services like Robben & Wientjes, a moving truck rental company in Berlin, are successful. The same holds true for platforms like the US-based car sharing service Zipcar, or airbnb and Couchsurfing – or even the Bahn bikes, Mitfahrgelegenheit, and stuff-sharing sites like NeighborGoods.² All of the many, many sites out there now make it easy to offer, find, and share goods and services: flexibly, agilely, and socially. SHARE

Here’s another example: the common household drill. Do you own a drill? If so, can you even remember the last time you used it? Did you know that on average, a household drill is used a total of just 5-10 min its entire lifetime? That gives you what, like 20 holes max? Is that really an efficient object to purchase, maintain, and care for? What if instead of all that time it spent idling on the shelf, it could be generating value, either by renting it out for cash or just helping out a neighbour?

Products like household drills, or moving vans, or a bike in a city you’re visiting aren’t necessarily desirable to own. Instead, isn’t it just better to access them? Aren’t the rights to use and access more important than owning it? This is a mantra for our times, for the century of collaborative consumption: Wealth as a whole consists in using things rather than in owning them. ³

Design Challenges

Here are a few design challenges for collaborative consumption:

Create open layers. Think about interoperability across key components. How can you use open standards to enable remixing, modification, and improvements across products? REMIX How can open layers be applied to motors, power cords, outlets, connectors, joints, nibs for maximal customization and range of use?

Build modularity. Similarly, shared objects should be easytorepair REPAIR andmodify.Youshouldn’thaveto throw away your entire phone because it’s scratched. Building modularity means fostering generativity.

Value added through usage. I think this is one of the most powerful design challenges. Think about an object that doesn’t depreciate with use, but is instead improved by it. One example is a baseball mitt. When you first buy it, it’s very stiff and hard to catch a ball with. Over time, with use, it becomes more flexible and a better product. That’s just on the physical layer. What about value added on a data layer? Think about how objects can learn from behaviours the more they’re used. Like by collecting more data points. Or where the user contributes metadata, like marginalia, reviews, and fact-checking for books.

Personalize shared objects. Are you familiar with these phones that hold multiple SIM cards? Those are really common in places like Africa where one device is used by multiple people. Each person inserts their own SIM card and all their address books and personal settings are ready for them. The personalization follows the user, not the device. Can we apply this to other devices and services? Cars, printers, refrigerator, coffee machines, or even drills?

Diversify libraries. Libraries are not just for books. Think about other ways to pool resources, be it for commercial or community aims. You could have libraries of tools, or libraries of electronics, cooking appliances, moving boxes, jewellery and accessories, holiday decorations, toys, you name it. BLUEPRINTS It has huge potential. There are many business opportunities here, as well as many challenges to be solved by creative and adventurous people.

Let’s break the mould. Don’t design for the dump. RECYCLING Don’t design for 20th-century hyperconsumption. Design for things to last, to be shared, and to be part of the future: a future of collaborative consumption.

Link: coworking.com

COPYLEFT FESTIVAL 2008: ‘BE RIGHT, BE COPYLEFT’

Author unknown, source: www.bibliotecarezzo.it

COPYLEFT COMMIES FLAG

Illustration: Xeni Jardin. Source: boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill_gates_free_cult.html

COPYLEFT IN GREECE

Author unknown, source: www.copyleft.gr

CREATIVE COMMIES

Illustration: Jaime Source: www.boingboing.net/2005/01/06/creative_commies.html

COPYLEFT ON INDYMEDIA ➝ AUTHORS AND OWNERS / ANDREW KATZ

Author unknown, Source: www.indymedia.ie

MYCREATIVITY CONVENTION, AMSTERDAM 2006

Author unknown

FUNDACIÓN COPYLEFT, MADRID

Source: www.mediateletipos.net

KIDNAPPING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Source: www.p2p-blog.com/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2007-06

ANARCOPY

Illustration: Roderick Long (‘Either intellectual property means slavery, or it means nothing at all.’)

NO COPYRIGHT ➝ NO MORE BESTSELLERS / JOOST SMIERS

Author unknown, source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:nocopyright.png

COPYLEFT PIRATE SYMBOL

Author unknown

Marleen Stikker

In his novel The Man Without Qualities, Austrian author Robert Musil describes two ways of thinking and interacting with the world.

“If you want to pass through open doors you have to respect the fact that they have a fixed frame: this principle is simply a prerequisite of reality. But if there is a sense of reality then there must also be something that you might call a sense of possibility. Someone who possesses this sense of possibility does not say for example: here this or that has happened, or it will happen or it must happen. Rather he invents: here this could or should happen. And if anybody explains to him that it is as it is, then he thinks: well, it probably could be otherwise.”  ¹.

Possibilitarians think in new possibilities, and get all excited when things get messy and life becomes disorderly. In disruption, possibilitarians see new opportunities, even if they do not know where they might lead. They believe, with Denis Gabor, that “the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented” ² .

Realitarians are operating within a given framework, according to the rules that are given, following to the powers there are. They accept the conditions and the institutions as given, and are fearful of disruption.

Whether a person is a possibilitarian or a realitarian has nothing to do with their creativity. People representing these frames of reference can be found in all professions: entrepreneurs, politicians, artists. In fact, art and design are not avant-garde by definition, and it would be overstating the matter to claim that innovation is an inherent quality in the arts – or science, for that matter.

It would equally be wrong to think that all realitarians are reactionary. There are many different kinds of realitarians. Some play with the given rules, finding better ways to use them, making them more efficient, increasing their moral justice and fairness. Others want to cover all eventualities, seeking to keep everything under control in neatly written scenarios that contain no surprises whatsoever.

When it comes to open design, possibilitarians are enticed and enthused by the new opportunities it could bring, even if they do not know exactly what open design will become, or where it might lead. ACTIVISM Possibilitarians see the disruption that open design brings to the design world, and respond by embracing the potential that is inherent in that disruption.

Possibilitarians engage in open design as a process, trusting their own abilities to guide that process. And as possibilitarians, they pursue strategies to be inclusive, to involve others, to build bridges between opposite positions: North-South, old-young, traditional-experimental. Possibilitarians represent a sharing SHARE culture which is at the core of open design. As such, they trust others to make their own contributions and to build upon what has been shared. Trust, responsibility and reciprocity are important ingredients in an open, sharing culture. These factors have been discussed at length in relation to software development; the debate has been revived in the context of the ongoing informatization of society. As with open data, open design will have to address these questions. And as with open data, open design will have to involve the actual end users, not organizations, panels or marketers. Design will have to identify the fundamental questions, which supersede the design assignments issued by mass-producers or governments. And design will have to develop a strategy of reciprocity, particularly when objects become ‘smart’ parts of an interconnected web of things, similar to the emergence of the internet.

OPEN DESIGN WILL HAVE TO INVOLVE THE ACTUAL END USERS, NOT ORGANIZATIONS, PANELS OR MARKETERS.

Open design will have to develop its own language for trust. What are its design principles, its ethics, the responsibilities it entails? MANIFESTOS Although a clear answer to these questions is currently lacking, this absence does not prevent possibilitarians from engaging with open design. They know that this trend is not about a dream of the world as a better place, a dream which could too easily be stigmatized as naive and utopian. Possibilitarians also know that only by taking part in the process, by participating and by giving it a direction can those answers be found.

OPEN DESIGN CAN BE VIEWED AS THE LATEST IN A LONG LINE OF SIMILAR DEVELOPMENTS, STARTING WITH THE FIRST PCS – THE ATARIS, AMIGAS, COMMODORES AND SINCLAIRS – THE ARRIVAL OF THE INTERNET, OF MOBILE COMMUNICATION.

Realitarians, in contrast, respond to open design with fear and mistrust. When a fretwork artist recently realized that a laser cutter could achieve within hours what took her four months to cut, she was extremely disappointed and angry with the machine. The positive effect that the machine could have on her work only occurred to her later. This is the Luddite revived, the fear of the machine that might threaten a person’s livelihood, that could render irrelevant an individual craftsman’s contribution to culture and society.

Realitarians fear that all the energy it costs to create something might be wasted; that the time and effort it took e.g. to write a book would be pointless, that anyone could just go and copy it. Fundamentally, they fear that someone else could commercially utilize something that they have contributed to the public domain. Even Creative Commons CREATIVE COMMONS takes on a threatening aspect in this context, creating a concern that the author will no longer be able to control fair use. Or a designer might argue that open design could result in loads of ugly products, expressing a concern that if anyone can do it, amateurs AMATEURISSIMO willpollutethebeautifulworld of design. This is the realitarian speaking.

We’ve had this discussion in other domains, in other areas: it arose in relation to hacking, and we’ve experienced it over and over in media and journalism – in the 1960s with the pirate radio stations, in the late 1990s with the advent of blogging. Now it has emerged in the domain of design.

Open design can be viewed as the latest in a long line of similar developments, starting with the first PCs – the Ataris, Amigas, Commodores and Sinclairs – the arrival of the internet, of mobile communication. TREND:NETWORK SOCIETY It is often the same people who are involved in these initiatives again and again. These are the pioneers of our time, people with that hacker- artist-activist attitude. They are not taking the world at face value, a given from outside; rather, they see the world as something you can pry open, something you can tinker with.

So they started to experiment. GRASSROOTS INVENTION The first computers gave them a feeling of autarchy. 17 Suddenly, they were able to use desktop publishing; they produced their own newspapers, they were typesetters, they took responsibility – they got organized and put their opinion out there. This was the first DIY DIY movement that was a parallel campaign. In contrast to the Parallel aktion in Musil’s novel, it happened beyond the confines of discussion circles: squatting became a parallel movement to the housing market, and they established their own, alternative media infrastructure. In all likelihood, the dynamic of the internet helped it happen. Indeed, in the Netherlands, the first opportunity to experience the internet was created by a possibilitarian movement – De Digitale Stad (the digital city) in Amsterdam. Commercial internet access became available much later.

Open design is rooted in information and communication technology, giving us all the instruments to become the one-man factory, the world player operating from a small back room. Despite this semblance of easy access, many of these resources require the user to be extremely tech-savvy. In addition, purposeful and effective utilization of these resources requires considerable social skills and expertise in social engineering. This combination of technical and social skills is extremely interesting and very rare. Tech-savvy usually carries the connotation of nerdy, socially handicapped and awkward at communication, while the socially adept are generally assumed to lack technical skills.

A similar schism is strikingly evident in education. As a media student, you might finish your degree without ever having made anything yourself, or being responsible for a product. You may have spent your time studying games made by other people, instead of learning to make good games. As a vocational student learning a trade, you might end up sitting at old machines the whole time, never getting to see a 3D printer, or only encountering these relevantly recent developments at the end of your education, or in an external module instead of in the core programme.

In fact, it may be argued that there is a fundamental dichotomy in society, an essential separation between the field of making and the field of science. There is too little science in making, and too little making in 18 science; these two fields are far too disconnected.

Examples of the opposite are emerging, and the connection between modern technology and craft traditions is sometimes aptly named hyper-craft. The implications for education are huge, and hyper-craft broadens the perspectives in education – not only for design, but for all crafts. Hyper-craft as a practice of open design is not primarily concerned with the objects that are being made. Its focus is on the process of making itself and the responsibilities that makers take – for the monsters they may be creating, for the process of creating, and for the ingredients used. PRINTING

Recently, a vocational school in the Dutch province of Brabant took the idea of the Instructables Restaurant and used it as a blueprint for a cross-over programme that combined elements of their hotel and catering education and their design education. Together, they realized an Instructables Restaurant for the CultuurNacht event – students created furniture based onblueprints BLUEPRINTS theyhaddownloadedand cooked meals prepared according to online recipes. The restaurant served 1500 people that night. The school made a smart addition to the very classical trade of cooking, adding more dimensions, more layers, and creating their first open curriculum.

The agenda of open design – increasing transparency in the production chain, talking about responsibility – is certainly a political agenda. Open design is part of today’s possibilitarian movements, such as open data provided by governments seeking greater transparency. The potentially extreme effects of open information initiatives like Wikileaks are becoming apparent in the enormous backlash affecting the people involved. This is a manifestation of the clash between two worlds: the people operating within the bounds of ‘reality’ fighting back against the challenge to their system.

WHEN ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE STARTED TO DISAPPEAR BEHIND THE PAYWALLS OF LARGE PUBLISHERS, THE OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT CREATED NEW WAYS TO MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE AGAIN FOR EVERYBODY.

Open design may appear less extreme: designing is seen as more friendly, more creative, more playful. Much of the unfairness in the field of open design is ‘petty injustice’. These incidents include small production runs that are impossible or prohibitively expensive in a mass-production environment – or manufacturers accustomed to mass marketing who decide what will be included in their collection.

These forms of petty injustice are certainly not the only problems in open design, however; there are also profit-driven corporations limiting technical and design solutions, preventing new possibilities from being put to good use. This immediately invokes the global dimension of open design. When international trade agreements become a guise for Western corporations to privatize indigenous knowledge, activists ACTIVISM and librarians deploy open design strategies, documenting and codifying this knowledge and developing protection mechanisms such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Archive Protocols in Australia.

When sustainable solutions are locked away in patents, initiatives such as the GreenXchange started by Creative Commons and Nike facilitate easy licensing schemes. When academic knowledge started to disappear behind the paywalls of large publishers, the Open Access movement created new ways to make it accessible again for everybody.

When transnational supply chains blur the provenance of raw materials and the labour conditions of mining, harvesting and manufacturing, fair trade campaigns advocate transparency and propose alternatives, for example the Max Havelaar product range or the Fairphone project.

Disrupting these macro-political movements that privatize the commons or control access to the public domain is the major challenge for open design. An effective response to that challenge starts with understanding and reflecting on what we are doing when we make things.