Matt Ratto

As noted by other authors in this collection, open design practices, communities, and technologies signal shifting relations in the world of design – between experts and novices, between proprietary and open access to information, and between producers and consumers of media and technologies – to name just a few.  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

In addition to these more obvious shifts, open design also encourages an increasingly critical perspective on the current institutions, practices and norms of technologically mediated society. Open design, particularly in regards to digital hardware and software heralds new possibilities for artists, scholars and interested citizens to engage more fully in a simultaneously conceptual and material critique of technologies and information systems in society. Rather than just bemoaning the restrictions placed on users by institutionalized technological systems, engaged makers have the increasing ability and opportunity to constitute and construct alternatives. Such alternatives do not always replace the existing systems, nor are they often intended to. Instead, these material interventions provide insubstantiations of how the relationship between society and technology might be otherwise constructed. Again, this is particularly true for complex hardware and software solutions  OPEN EVERYTHING that have traditionally been seen to require proprietary and closed development in order to ensure success.

Commons-based Peer Production

For example, the many open hardware and software cell phone projects, such as the tuxPhone project started in 2005, provided conceptual and material guidance for the increasingly open development of cell phone operating systems and applications. If nothing else, such projects demonstrated the institutional and legal hindrances to such open developments, revealing that the problems in creating open alternatives were not just technical in character. WYS ≠ WYG While the technical processes and results of projects like tuxPhone provided various kinds of guidance as to future handheld projects and the availability of open hardware alternatives, another important result of this project involved increasing the visibility of the institutional, organizational and legal arrangements that linked cell phone hardware and handset manufacturers to the telephony service providers – arrangements that made opening up the application and operating system development environments tricky at best. In point of fact, it ultimately took market leaders with a lot of pull – Apple and Google – to begin to untie the closely coupled linkages between cell phone applications, operating systems, hardware, and service agreements, and, in doing so, provide transformative competition in the cell phone market.  ARCHITECTURE Both Apple and Google have done so in very different ways and for their own ends. However, Apple and Google’s process and the technical and social choices that they have made are differently open and understood differently by those designers and makers who followed the open cell phone projects, compared to those who did not experience the open cell phone developments as they unfolded.

Open design heralds new possibilities for artists, scholars and interested citizens to engage in a simultaneously conceptual and material critique of technologies and information systems in society.

Yochai Benkler, writing about open source and open content development initiatives, has described these communities and practices as ‘commons-based peer production’ ¹ – a somewhat more inclusive term than the narrower ‘user-generated content’ that is currently in vogue.  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN One claim he makes is that these practices can result in different products and services than those currently produced through proprietary market forces. For Benkler, commons-based peer production can result in more than just open but substantively similar products and services. Instead, these practices can produce entirely novel results – and more importantly, they can serve audiences and needs that are under-addressed by the marketplace.

The above example demonstrates that open design potentially provides more than just another way of designing and creating novel products and services. Instead, and I repeat the word ‘potentially’ here, open design, when embedded in practices of socio-technical reflection and critique, provides the possibility for truly innovative thinking and making, the result of which is not just more of the same, but includes novel and more comprehensive understandings as to the relationships between social life and technical work. In our own scholarship and teaching, we call such potentials ‘critical making’.

Critical Making

The term ‘critical making’ is intended to highlight the interwoven material and conceptual work that making involves. As a teaching and research strategy, critical making shares an emphasis on ‘values’ with both critical design and other critical practices – such as the critical technical practice ² from which it derives, as well as value-sensitive design ³ and values-in-design. ⁴ I take the exploration of values in society and their implementation and concretization within technical artefacts as my starting point, choosing to explore these through a series of processes that attempt to connect humanistic practices of conceptual and scholarly exploration to design methodologies including storyboarding, brainstorming and bodystorming, and prototyping.

I call this work ‘critical making’ in order to highlight the reconnection of two modes of engagement with the world that are typically held separate: critical thinking, traditionally understood as conceptually and linguistically based, and physical ‘making’, goal-based material work. I see this as a necessary integration for a variety of reasons: first, as a way of overcoming the ‘brittle’ and overly structural sense of technologies that often exists in critical social science literature; second, as a way of creating shared experiences with technologies that provide joint resources for transforming the socio-technical imagination; and third, as a site for overcoming problematic disciplinary divides within technoscience.

While similar in practice to critical design and the other perspectives listed above, critical making has somewhat adjacent goals. As defined by Tony Dunne:

Critical design is related to haute couture, concept cars, design propaganda, and visions of the future, but its purpose is not to present the dreams of industry, attract new business, anticipate new trends or test the market. Its purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the aesthetic quality of our electronically mediated existence.⁵

Critical making, on the other hand, is less about the aesthetics  AESTHETICS: 2D and politics of design work, and focuses instead on making practices themselves as processes of material and conceptual exploration. The ultimate goal of critical making experiences is not the evocative or pedagogical object intended to be experienced by others, but rather the creation of novel understandings by the makers themselves. Neither objects nor services are the currency of critical making. For me, it is the making experience that must be shared. Therefore, critical making is dependent on open design technologies and processes that allow the distribution and sharing of technical work and its results.  BLUEPRINTS In this way, critical making relies on a constructionist ⁶ methodology that emphasizes the materiality of knowledge making and sharing. The ‘objects’ of critical making are intended to be shared making experiences, curated through both material and textual instructions. Such curated ‘making experiences’ have long been the domain of technical and scientific education; any toy store can provide myriad examples, and electronic ‘kits’ are currently experiencing a renewed enthusiasm.  DIY What differentiates critical making is its attention to the interwoven social and technical aspects of modern life – what theorists call the socio-technical ⁷ – rather than being primarily about technical expertise or functional knowledge about the natural world.

These are fine-edged distinctions and might cause some readers to wonder why it is necessary to define yet another term for yet another design-based methodology. In point of fact, much of the ongoing scholarly and technical work associated with critical making was initiated by discomfort around the dissonance of the term – why in fact does ‘critical thinking’ seem such a common-sense term, while ‘critical making’ seems odd to most of us? I believe this stems from a continuing separation in Western society between ‘thinking’, which is understood as happening primarily in the mind or at most through the mediation of language, and ‘making’, which is understood as an a-conceptual, a-linguistic, and habitual form of interaction with the world.

Makers – and that involves most of us in one way or another – understand the fallacy of this position. The phrase ‘critical making’ is therefore intended to signal a deep research commitment to the co-constructed nature of our socio-technical world.

Critical Making Lab and Method

The Critical Making Lab at the University of Toronto is sponsored by the Faculty of Information, and by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It was established as a research, teaching and infrastructure project. Our main focus is the material semiotics of digital information. ⁸ AESTHETICS: 3D In the lab, we explore how addressing information as both symbolic and material object reveals intriguing connections and contradictions in the role of information in individual, cultural and institutional practice. We work to unpack the complexity of information through critical making experiences that link conceptual and physical exploration. These experiences may be curated for pedagogical or for research purposes, but each tends to consist of the following interactive and non-linear steps: a comprehensive review of existing scholarly literature on a socio-technical topic; the development of a metaphorically connected making experience, typically using the ‘kit’ form; the definition of instructions to assist participants in making a technical artefact as well as following a conceptual argument; holding a workshop with stakeholders using the kit and instructions; recording and analysing the results.

Critical Making Teaching

The first critical making course was held at the Faculty of Information in 2008. In the winter of this year, we taught a master’s level course that used making to explore critical information issues such as intellectual property, privacy, questions of embodiment, and so forth. In this course, we made use of the Arduino software and hardware development environment due to its open source nature and its active and supportive artist and designer communities. We explicitly chose to use a physical computing platform rather than a mainly software-based development for two initial reasons. First, the material, hands-on nature of the Arduino called attention to the physicality of information, an important aspect of our teaching and research goals. When working in the primarily textual world of software development, it is less obvious that material work is going on. The Arduino makes such work part of the development process, and the ‘push-back’ of the physical electronics – the resistance of reality to our attempts to contain it – is therefore more present. Second, the movement to the material world often seems to be accompanied by a less functionalist, more emotional and embodied reaction to the topics under construction/discussion. Together, the ‘push-back’ of the material and the embodied and affectual nature of students’ responses to it can engender a more invested and involved participant. These aspects of ‘constructionist’ pedagogy have been previously noted by science and mathematics educators. ⁹

However, a third reason to use more material forms of development emerged during initial experiences. The ‘making material’ of digital interactions and experiences soon turned out to be an evocative strategy for unpacking the social and technical dimensions of information technologies. For example, one assignment given to the students was to build a ‘physical rights management’ (PRM) system, a digital system that managed physical objects in similar ways to how digital rights management systems manage digital resources. We had initially devised this assignment simply as a way of ‘de-normalizing’ DRM practices by changing their context and making them unfamiliar – a sort of surrealist move of de-familiarization. The students took us at our word, looked closely at how DRM systems controlled digital resources and created often dramatic analogues (literally) of such control mechanisms.

For instance, one group of students built a model of a photocopy machine that used RFID cards to set permissions on the physical copying of books and journals. If these permissions were not followed, the system would automatically send a message to the appropriate (imaginary) authorities and display a message to the photocopy machine user to stay where they were until the police arrived. In the following year, students constructed an alternative PRM system, one that placed the control mechanism in the book itself. In this version, the books used a light sensor to detect when they were being photo-copied. If permissions on copying were breached, the book would ‘self-destruct’ by popping a balloon containing ink.  GRASSROOTS INVENTION

The ultimate goal of critical making experiences is not the evocative or pedagogical object intended to be experienced by others, but rather the creation of novel understandings by the makers themselves.

The absurdity of these modes of control was not lost on the students, who explicitly designed and built their systems based on an analysis of equally absurd methods that they had picked out from existing DRM systems.  KNOWLEDGE Following this assignment, students remarked that previously they had understood in an abstract way how DRM influenced the use and creation of media. However, by constructing their own PRM system and having to make decisions about how it might function, they not only felt that they increased their knowledge, but they also became more invested and in a sense responsible for the adoption and use of DRM. In previous work on critical making, we have called this the movement from ‘caring about’ an issue to ‘caring for’ an issue. ¹⁰

The course has since been taught in 2009 and will be taught again in 2010. However, teaching a course which is simultaneously technical, social, conceptual and material is not an easy task, particularly when that course is located within a social sciences faculty rather than one of design or engineering. Such faculties are not set up to handle simple requirements such as sinks in classrooms, or ventilation for soldering irons. The material nature of critical making as pedagogy is demonstrative of why such methods are not more integrated outside of traditional disciplines. However, open design tools and processes provide some of the infrastructure necessary to do this work.

Critical Making Research

In addition to the pedagogical goals outlined above, we are also engaged in critical making as a research strategy. This typically involves curating critical making experiences in order to engender insight and perspective on socio-technical phenomena for stakeholders and other participants. Here we draw upon ethnographically informed research methodologies such as action research ¹¹ and more explicitly on the methods and perspectives associated with cultural probes. ¹² Past research that we have undertaken using critical making has addressed the role of materiality in social research ¹³ and current projects address the socio-technical implications of bio-sensors and the labour and organizational dimensions of digital desktop fabrication. As in the teaching strategies described above, open design tools and processes are essential to the development of critical making as research.

Conclusion and Future Work

Critical making is an intensely trans-disciplinary process, one that requires research skills from humanities and social science disciplines and a familiarity with a wide range of scholarly literatures. At the same time, critical making requires some technical expertise on the part of the researcher, who must curate a technical experience for participants with little or no technical background.  AMATEURISSIMO

As a teaching and a research method, critical making is thus dependent on open design methods, tools and communities. To put it most simply, the expertise necessary to create prototypes and engage in processes of software and hardware construction must be open and available in order to allow for the kinds of critically engaged practices described above. Note that this is not about replacing or reproducing designers or design expertise. ‘Critical makers’ (understood broadly) emerge from a variety of disciplinary contexts and only some of them are interested or engaged in the kinds of tasks associated with design.

Equally, critical making requires institutional resources such as space, equipment and access to expertise that is not typical of the humanities or social sciences. We have been lucky to be located in a supportive faculty, university and funding context that is interested in methodological innovation and in trans-disciplinary research. However, problems still arise, with critical making being seen as either too technical for humanities and social science researchers and students, or, on the other hand, as not being technical enough for the development of novel technological skills and products. Open design methods and tools provide some guidance and support in this regard, but more work is necessary to establish making as an intrinsic part of social research.

Ultimately, we see the integration of socio-technical critique and material making as a necessary part of what Latour has called the development of a ‘cautious Prometheus’. ¹⁴ In his keynote address to the Design History Society, Latour lays out a model for acknowledging the interconnectedness of semiotic and material life. He also details design’s role in helping us move from considering material things as given, natural and uncontested objects, e.g. ‘matters of fact’, to thinking of them as being intrinsically political, contentious and open to discussion and debate. He also acknowledges the necessity of this transition for political and ecological reasons, but notes that this move is far from over. Latour raises the issue:

How can we draw together matters of concern so as to offer to political disputes an overview, or at least a view, of the difficulties that will entangle us every time we must modify the practical details of our material existence? ¹⁵

Open design is a necessary part of this development, but not just because it democratizes or ‘opens’ design to the masses. Rather than replacing professional design expertise and skill, our sense is that by encouraging and supporting design methodologies for non-traditional design ends – such as the socio-technical critique that is the main goal of critical making – open design helps bring about a kind of socio-technical literacy that is necessary to reconnect materiality and morality. This, ultimately, may be the most important consequence of open design.

Gabrielle Kennedy

There’s always something special about the top crop of Dutch design graduates, but every once in a while one comes along that makes everyone sit up and take notice. In 2003, that was Joris Laarman. His Reinventing Functionality project at the Design Academy of Eindhoven fused function with ornament and was snatched up by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Design must accept some of the responsibility for creating many of the world’s current problems.

Since then, he has earned a reputation for himself as a designer with visionary ideas and a concern for societal issues. His first project out of school, the Bone Furniture range, was exhibited in the Friedman Benda gallery in New York, a limited edition series made from marble, porcelain and resin. While he calls it an “annoying coincidence” that much of his work has spawned major contemporary trends, it also testifies to its relevance to the issues that matter.

Furniture That Can Be Grown

Both those early projects clearly expressed Laarman’s highly specific views on modernism. The Bone range DESIGNERS resulted from a cooperative partnership with car manufacturer Opel, using software to design a series of artworks based on the organic way that bones form. Car parts are designed with the help of topology optimization software to increase strength and maximize the efficient use of materials. Furniture, as it turns out, can also be ‘grown’ by adding and removing material to maximize its strength and functionality.

Laarman’s stance is that functionality and extravagance are not mutually exclusive. Where modernism went wrong, and how its core advantages need to be readdressed, are what drive his research. What he is looking for are design solutions that possess a revolutionary quality. Much of his current research repudiates how things are currently done and patiently pursues a better way not just to manufacture, but also to distribute design.

Seen in this light, design must accept some of the responsibility for creating many of the world’s current problems. More importantly, it can play a key role in fixing them. In 2009, Laarman opened his Amsterdam studio to the public for the first time. His purpose was to share his thinking and his process. He wanted to reveal how design experimentation and research can create answers, not just pretty objects.

“In galleries and in Milan, people only ever see perfect pieces,” he says. “In this exhibition, I wanted people to see the research part of design, what is behind all the pretty shapes, and how they could eventually be of use in the world. I wanted people to understand what the future of design could look like using technological progress.”

Laarman hit a wall when he was researching open source design and digital fabrication. He realized that design had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and was now failing society. “I am not necessarily against how design is now,” he says, “but I do think the internet can provide a more honest way to design, make, distribute and sell things.” Not modernism, then; what’s needed is a new -ism. It takes some audacity for such a young designer to criticize the industry. Laarman has gone beyond theoretical criticism, underlining his opinion with some tangible ideas that he wants to try out – hopefully with the support of his contemporaries.

I do think the internet can provide a more honest way to design, make, distribute and sell things.

“I started to think of my work and of design in general as a sort of laboratory,” Laarman says. He explains it as a place where solutions might be found to the predicament created by over-production in the post-industrial age. “I’m not condemning the whole design industry,” he says, “or even questioning it. There is a lot of very good industrial production, and that will never go away, but I think it will soon be joined by another revolution made possible by the internet.” REVOLUTION

Despite its failures and the role it played in creating over-production, Laarman’s research kept bringing him back to modernism – not as an aesthetic per se, but as a philosophy. In 2010 Laarman was selected by Ingeborg de Roode, curator of industrial design at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to participate in the Modernism Today series. “I guess she sees me as a sort of contemporary version of Rietveld,”  DESIGNERS says Laarman. “That is an interesting comparison, and I see some connection.” 100 years ago, Gerrit Rietveld experimented with technology and materials; Laarman does the same today. His aesthetic is not in the tradition of De Stijl, but his values most certainly are.

The Modernist Roots (of Open Design)

In line with those values, it made good sense to fuse Rietveld’s world of ideas and experiments with open source design and digital fabrication; both could be argued to have modernist roots. Open source has been revolutionizing the cultural content universes of music and software for almost a decade, so why shouldn’t it also be able to change the way design is both made and distributed?

“I think true modernists wanted open source design one hundred years ago,” says Laarman, “but back then it wasn’t possible. Rietveld published manuals about how to make his chairs, but nobody could really use that information, because there were no networks of skilled artisans. His designs look simple, but are difficult to construct. These days, we can distribute knowledge in a way that can potentially bring craftspeople back to the centre stage of design – not in an idealistic, naïvely romantic way, but in an economically sound way. All we need are the networks, and cheaper and more accessible digital manufacturing technology.” One of modernism’s core flaws was the huge amount of power that ended up in the hands of a few big factories and design firms. The movement was supposed to be about the democratization of design – that was their big idea – but somewhere along the line it became nothing more than an aesthetic. Of course there are some obvious differences between modernism and open source design. Modernism produced an international and generic style. Industrialization led to mass production, which meant production had to be centralized and its products transported across the globe from countries with the lowest wages at great environmental and economic expense. Information and knowledge were kept closed and protected by copyrights; even if they had been accessible, it would have been impossible for an individual to use the design data without access to exorbitantly expensive production tools. The quality of design produced was and continues to be guaranteed by the producer; in turn, the producer and the retailer divide the majority of sales revenues.

I think true modernists wanted open source design one hundred years ago.

Open source design, on the other hand, has the capacity to conserve culture and decoration as well as traditional skills by utilizing new technology.
Digital production makes mass customization possible. Open source makes information and knowledge public; in addition, it has low entry costs, quality control takes place in the form of peer review by the public, and revenues are divided between craft and creativity. Also, because the products of open source design can be produced locally, transportation costs are drastically reduced.

What open source design does is redistribute knowledge  KNOWLEDGE and the means of production. It has the potential to change everything that we know about design, from manufacturing to education. Open source design is anti-elitist insofar as it can create fairer and more honest prices. It is democratic and helps to create self-determination in an individual’s immediate environment. Ultimately, it takes power away from the huge multinationals and from production hubs like China and India and hands it back to craftspeople – those individuals rendered irrelevant by industrialization. In short, open source design could feasibly become this century’s new -ism.

Ultimately, it takes power away from the multinationals and production hubs like China and hands it back to craftspeople – those individuals rendered irrelevant by industrialization.

“This does not mean that anyone can make good design or that more rubbish can be produced,” Laarman says. “Just because everyone has a digital camera doesn’t mean that everyone is a photographer. I am not in favour of amateurism, but the way I envision the system working, the good will eventually be filtered from the bad.”  AMATEURISSIMO

Less Production Is Needed, Not More.

Statistics show that up until the Industrial Revolution, a similar amount of products were being produced every year. With industrialization came increased wealth and prosperity, which lead to massive increases in production. The result was more waste, more environmental damage  TREND: SCARCITY OF RESOURCES and a surge in unemployed artisans. The average Western person today has access to more things than Queen Victoria owned during her reign. “The tragedy is that the vast majority of what is being today made lacks creativity and quality and isn’t really needed,” Laarman says. “The over-production of mediocrity for the middle classes has created a difficult economic situation, and there is nothing that can be done about it within the current system.”

If digital design went local, imagine what this would mean for small producers. “Right now, most people are just talking about digital fabrication,” says Laarman, “but it is happening, and I think can eventually take over. I am not going to say it will change the world, but it will change the way things are made. 3D printing is still very limited,  AESTHETICS: 3D
especially in terms of materials, but as digital manufacturing technology evolves, anything is possible.”

One possible scenario would be for local communities to invest in technology. “There are already all kinds of initiatives popping up that give individuals the opportunity to start their own small production facilities,” Laarman says. “We are looking into setting up a sort of professional Fab Lab, for instance, where any design based on a digital blueprint could be mass-customized and made.”

It could work. The RepRap machine, for example, is an open-branded DIY 3D printing machine.  HELLO WORLD The RepRap is a machine that you can make yourself (and that can reproduce itself!)  REPRODUCTION that can in turn make other gadgets. “Right now, this sort of thing is the domain of geeks for geeks, but once it becomes more professional, it will be ready for more general usage,” Laarman says.

The average Western person today has access to more things than Queen Victoria owned during her reign.

Open source design and local digital fabrication could also revolutionize education, which has mostly become outdated and irrelevant. “We could tie the platform into trade schools,” Laarman says. “Education has fallen behind and kids are not being taught what is needed. Digital manufacturing should be taught in schools, especially at the vocational school level.”
These developments are slow, however, because open source design remains the great unknown, with many unanswered quandaries. The new, innovative nature of the ideas works both for and against them; instead of inspiring images of a world less controlled by branding and regulations, open source design ends up sounding chaotic, with too much choice and an over-abundance of experimentation and waste. Issues of copyright and profit-sharing scare off many, leaving a lot of the earliest experimental platforms looking unprofessional and insecure.  MANIFESTOS

But the problem for most of the current websites selling open source design is they lack professional participation. What’s needed is more of the best and most visionary design minds debating and devising ways to make it all work. “What is happening so far isn’t really making a difference, but it does show that there is huge potential,” Laarman says.

Creative Commons  CREATIVE COMMONS has made some interesting inroads. It is a new type of copyright that protects a designer (or anyone else) so that they can make licensing agreements with suitable producers or limit use of their ideas to personal use only. “It works in an idealistic sense if everybody plays nice,” says Laarman. It is still limited, though, and resembles a small-scale iTunes dominated by amateur musicians playing a limited number of instruments. What is needed next is a professional digital platform, or a network where people can meet, access and share information about how and where to have design digitally manufactured.

Digital manu­facturing should be taught in schools, especially at the vocational school level.

Make-Me .com

One exciting project already under way, albeit in its nascent stages, is Make-Me.com, a cooperative venture involving Laarman, the Waag Society, Droog Design and some early internet pioneers. For designers, it means uploading their design for general distribution. For consumers, it means being able to access and customize design. For local producers, it means using licensing agreements to make the things that people want. “It reduces our carbon footprints and allows for more customization,” says Laarman.

That is what we do. We take something from the past and shape it into something new.

Make-Me.com plans to operate like an app store. You go there to get what you want. Some of it is free and some of it is paid for; some are designed by amateurs and some by professionals. “The amateurs and the professionals have to compete against one another,” Laarman says. “You find the chair you want online via us and you go to the local Fab Lab to have it produced on the spot. The platform is linking consumers to craftspeople and digital fabrication tools.”

Make-Me.com as an open source platform is not limited to design. “It is for journalists, architects, businesspeople, scientists – even a place you could go to for a new haircut,” says Laarman. Big pharmaceutical companies, for example, don’t want to invest in research on diseases that only affect small numbers of people, because there is no money to be made. An open source platform could open up possibilities for DIY bio-labs where scientists and doctors could access research and make their own medicines. “Anyone can use Make-Me.com to distribute information in a new way.”

Designers, however, fear what all this means for them in terms of copyright. They think production companies protect their intellectual property, the quality of their designs, and guarantee them an income. What that fails to recognize is that copyright is a complicated question. Who really owns an original idea? Is anything truly and completely original? Every creative person pilfers and borrows ideas from everywhere; referencing what came before is a natural part of the creative process. “That is what we do,” says Laarman. “We take something from the past and shape it into something new.”  REMIX Via Creative Commons licensing, it might become possible to profit from someone stealing your idea.

What limits the scope of open source at this point goes beyond legal concerns. For it to work, a whole new economic model would need to be devised and accepted. Under the current system, a designer takes his or her design to a manufacturer, who makes it and then takes it to a shop that sells it. “If he is lucky, the designer gets 3% ex factory,” Laarman says. “The brand adds 300% and the shop doubles that again. It’s ridiculous how little of the cut a designer gets. If we used digital tools and changed the way stores work, the ratio would be able to favour creativity and the craftsman.”

However, test-driving a new model will require a platform like Make-Me.com. It has to be large scale, and it will need to attract big-name designers and brands so that people can see it working. It’s a tough chicken-and-egg situation: unless designers feel that their financial income and copyright dues are guaranteed, they are not going to take the risk – and without enough designers taking the risk, it will be virtually impossible to erect the solid infrastructure to ensure smooth, safe and legal operations. It will take a coordinated leap of faith from educational facilities, designers and craftspeople for anything like this to work.
None of these obstacles are insurmountable. What Laarman wants is to be a part of the experiment and to be a contributing member of that generation who will be defining the parameters and creating the way forward. It is that vision which distinguishes him from a lot of his contemporaries – he has the commitment and the patience. He knows that this is something big and wants to do whatever it takes to make it work. “Right now, I am making very expensive, limited-edition designs,” he says. “That is a good way to fund the experiments and start a business, but eventually what I’d like to be able to do is provide open source versions of my work for everyone. That is my goal.”

He knows he doesn’t have all the answers, but Laarman is working through all these problems one by one. “I don’t want to say that this idea could take over the entire production world,” he says, “but it can certainly help craftspeople to make things that are not standardized or mass produced. If a world-wide network of craftspeople grows, then this could potentially really change things.”

Closed Societies Fail

Whichever way you look at this, design cannot continue as is. Design reveals a lot about society, and closed societies fail; like organisms that shut themselves off from their environment, a society that shuns reality will eventually die. Likewise, closed design is outdated. Open source, whether it can be what designers want or even understand at this point, is one way for design to play a real role in building a new, more honest economy. A world with less mass production, less waste, less transportation and less standardized design  STANDARDS can only be interpreted as a win-win situation for all concerned.

Another decade of discussion is needed before open source design will ever be able to make a tangible difference. Interestingly, the same arguments being used against the phenomenon now are the very same arguments that were once used against the introduction of democracy. The ruling elite will always feel threatened by the idea of giving power to the people.

What I’d like to be able to do is provide open source versions of my work for everyone.

Bre Pettis

2007: Pizza around the Clock

In 2007, I was actively recruiting hardware hackers in New York City to be part of NYCResistor, a hackerspace where we could make anything together. I met Zach at an NYCResistor microcontroller study group. After hearing about self-replicating robots, I spent the autumn in a corner of a film studio, where some friends of his were letting him work on RepRap robots  REPRODUCTION when films weren’t being made. We spent a lot of time working on the McWire RepStrap, a 3D printer  PRINTING made out of plumbing pipes. We would meet up, solder some new boards that he had designed from tutorials on the internet, swear at broken traces, and in general just have fun. One of the things to come out of this time was a commitment to LEDs. I remember him turning to me and remarking that he had not put LEDs on a PCB. At that point, we made a solemn vow that no electronics board would ever make it through the design process again without blinking LEDs.

We did not have a working machine yet, but for months on end, we seemed just hours away from getting it to work. We were close enough that I ordered my own plumbing pipes and bent aluminium to take to Vienna, Austria, where I had an artist-in-residence spot with Monochrom, an artist collective in the Museum Quarter. I enlisted the help of the local hackerspace; the entire crew there, including Marius and Philipp Tiefenbacher, and Red, helped out for a week straight. Back in those days, we had to make our own wiring harnesses for everything, and it took forever. The code wasn’t working yet, but it was constantly very close to working. We ate pizza round the clock.

2008: Printing Vodka Shot Glasses

This first Austrian experiment was beautiful.  HELLO WORLD It worked for about a minute before the first-generation electronics burned traces and let the magic smoke out. The extruder was made from a mix of ballpoint-pen hardware and angled aluminium that was ground down with a Dremel, a handheld rotary grinder. We pulled stepper motors from old disk drives and scanners found in the depths of the Metalab archive. We had planned to print out shot glasses at Roboexotica, the cocktail robotics festival  EVENTS  in Vienna that happens every winter, but our machine failed completely; we couldn’t even print out swizzle sticks. Even more shame was heaped on our failure when we were awarded the ‘lime’ award, which is reserved for non-functioning robots. I left the machine in Vienna with Marius and Philipp. By the next year’s Roboexotica festival, they had fixed it up and got it working. Through a combination of brute force and alchemical magic, they spent the cocktail festival of 2008 printing out shot glasses that they promptly filled for visitors with a horrid Scandinavian concoction of vodka and Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges. Robots and alcohol are a fantastic combination.

Finally, the ordinary person is in the unique position of being able to make almost anything with off-the-shelf modules, parts, community and shared code.

Back in the States, after I had left the McWire machine in Vienna, NYCResistor had found a location and the hardware hacking club was in full swing. Starting with nine people, we created a wonderful clubhouse for hardware hackers. The NYCResistor motto is ‘Learn, Share, and Make Things’. Early on, we chose to collectively share our tools, and we pooled our money to buy a $20,000 laser cutter. The team at NYCResistor is a special group of people who are not afraid to push technology forward and with a tendency towards the absurd; almost anything is possible. Electronics have gotten to the place where creating the electronics of your dreams has become a real possibility. Microcontrollers like the Arduino are accessible. Blogs like Make Magazine and Hackaday, as well as countless personal blogs, are fantastic resources for tinkerers. Finally, the ordinary person is in the unique position of being able to make almost anything with off-the-shelf modules, parts, community and shared code.

On a Saturday in August 2008, Zach and I started Thingiverse to give people a place to share digital designs for things. We had been telling people that downloading designs would be possible someday. Since nobody had created a library of digital designs that allowed people to share their work under open licences, we created it ourselves. Thingiverse is now a thriving community where sharing runs rampant and creativity is found in abundance.

Later that year, Zach got a Darwin up and running, but that design had so many flaws that getting it to work was a challenge. It extruded plastic for a few minutes before this model joined the ranks of machines that release the magic smoke. It was very disappointing. He had spent years trying to get a machine working, and then it worked for only a few minutes before failing completely. We had developed a taste for 3D printing by working on the RepRap project, and we wanted more. That early McWire machine and the RepRap
Darwin  REPRODUCTION showed us that creating an inexpensive 3D printer was possible. We promptly quit our jobs.

That winter, in December of 2008, Zach and I were at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress.  EVENTS Zach gave a talk about RepRap and I spoke about living a prototyping lifestyle. We got home and somehow came to the conclusion that we should start a company to make 3D printers that could be made with the tools we had at hand (the laser cutter) and as many off-the-shelf parts as possible. In January of 2009, we formed MakerBot Industries. Adam Mayer, another friend from NYCResistor, got involved; since he had spent 10 years working on firmware and software for embedded devices, he was immediately charged with making the software functional and friendly.

2009: MakerBot Industries

When we started MakerBot, we set different priorities than RepRap had done. Rather than focusing on self-replication, we wanted to make our first MakerBot the cheapest 3D printer kit that anyone could put together and have it actually work. Those first few months of MakerBot were intense. While prototyping during the first two months, we rarely left NYCResistor. We went through two whole cases of Top Ramen instant noodles and drank countless bottles of Club Mate, a carbonated and caffeinated soft drink from Germany. Powered by caffeine and carbohydrates, we used the tools we had at hand, a laser cutter, and off-the-shelf parts to create the MakerBot Cupcake CNC kit. We went to our friends for funding: Jacob Lodwick, who started Connected Ventures, and Adrian Bowyer, who initiated the RepRap project. They invested some money in us so we could start ordering the electronics, parts, motors and other things we needed to get the first kits together.

We worked hard on those first prototypes. After two months of work, we got the first machine to work at 8:15 on the 13th of March, 2009. As soon as it worked, we threw it in a Pelican case and took off to SXSW, the big music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas, where we shared it with the world for the first time. I set up shop in bars and printed endless amounts of shot glasses and twelve-sided dice. The machine printed flawlessly for the entire week. We had been able to pull together 20 kits; we expected to sell 10 of them that first month and have 10 in stock to sell the next month. When all 20 sold out in two weeks, we started staying up late running the laser cutter making the parts.

WE MAKE 3D PRINTERS TO OFFER AN ALTERNATIVE TO CONSUMERISM.

The buyers of those machines were brave. The electronics came unassembled and required SMD soldering, not a trivial task even for seasoned tinkerers with Heathkit assembly experience. Still, they were putting them together and they worked! The MakerBot Google group buzzed with chatter, shared pro tips and stories. Thingiverse, which up until then had been mostly a repository for DXF files for laser cutting, started seeing more and more 3D-printed designs.

Our mission at MakerBot is to democratize manufacturing. We make 3D printers to offer an alternative to consumerism. A year and a half after we began, there are now 2500 folks with MakerBots, and those people are living in a future where they can 3D print the tangible products of their imagination. They get to make a choice between buying something and 3D printing it.  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN Kids that grow up in a household or classroom with a MakerBot have the option to 3D print the things they want as an alternative to shopping. If a MakerBot Operator needs a doorknob, they can check Thingiverse to see if someone else has made it. (There are 22 things tagged ‘knob’ on Thingiverse. ¹ ) If you don’t like the knobs made available by the community of digital designers, you can download the designs and modify them if they are shared under an open licence, or you can design your own. This idea of sharing and being able to customize and modify other people’s designs is a powerful force in the universe. It goes beyond doorknobs to all sorts of practical and beautiful objects.

Designing things for 3D printers is still at an early stage. The programs have traditionally been set up as CAD programs, with a learning curve similar to Photoshop. Only recently have we seen programs like openSCAD that are designed for programmers who are interested in programming dynamic and parametric objects. Software engineers are now able to transform code  AESTHETICS: 3D into real physical objects.

MakerBot operators report that fixing things around the house is a point of pride for them. Thingiverse user Schmarty created his own shower curtain rings when his local store was out of stock. He shared the design on Thingiverse, and now nobody with a MakerBot
REPRODUCTION will ever have to buy shower curtain rings again. On the thing page for the curtain rod rings, Schmarty says:

“It’s a story that can happen to anyone. You move to a new town and leave your shower curtain behind. ‘No problem,’ you think, ‘I’ll just pick up a new liner at the pharmacy down the street.’ So, you trek to the local pharmacy and find the shower curtain liner you were looking for, only to discover that they are out of shower curtain rings, hooks, anything made for holding up a shower curtain! Facing down defeat and the very real possibility that you will have to take a dirty, inefficient bath, you come to a stunning realization: You’re a MakerBot owner. You live for these moments.”

Schmarty made his curtain rings in openSCAD and shared the source files, so you can download them and make curtain rings to your own specifications. One Thingiverse site user has already uploaded a design for a derivative variation with spikes. ²

When we made the MakerBot, we were limited by the size of our laser cutter.  AESTHETICS: 2D That meant that the first model, the MakerBot Cupcake CNC, can only make things that are 100x100x120 mm. That size is big enough to make things that are slightly larger than a coffee mug. Architects in particular complained about this, until Thingiverse user Skimbal created an amazing modular cathedral. ³ There are 10 different cathedral pieces that can be modularly connected to make your own customizable and expandable cathedral! This print pushes the limit of what a MakerBot can do. One of the limitations is in regard to overhangs. A MakerBot can do overhangs of around 45 degrees. It will still print things with overhangs, but they’ll turn out ‘fluffy’ and require cleanup and trimming after printing.  AESTHETICS: 3D

The MakerBot is open source. You can download the schematic and board files, the DXF laser-cutter files, and the software, firmware and parts lists. This allows MakerBot users to truly own their MakerBot inside and out. Charles Pax was one of the first to take advantage of this. He wanted to put the electronics on the inside of his MakerBot, so he modified the DXF laser-cutter files to accommodate an alternative power supply and gave his MakerBot a clean form factor. Unsatisfied with having to reset the machine after each print, he developed the MakerBot Automated Build Platform. Charles now works in the R&D department at MakerBot Industries, pushing the technology of personal fabrication forward.

Because it’s an open platform, you can swap out the tool heads easily. Besides the MakerBot plastruder, which extrudes plastic to create a programmed 3D shape, we’ve launched the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter, which artists can use as a drawing tool. We also created the MakerBot Frostruder so that anyone can use their MakerBot to decorate cupcakes or print with anything that you can fit inside a syringe. This opens up a whole new range of possibilities for artists, chefs and DIY bio-experimenters. MakerBot operators have also used the stepper motors to create beautiful music. Bubblyfish, an 8-bit artist, has composed music for the MakerBot; many others have converted midi files to play their favourite music on the MakerBot.

MakerBot Operators are a great community for each other. When Cathal Garvey (creator of the DremelFuge ⁴ ) had a mouse problem, he wanted to catch the mouse without killing it, so he put a bounty out for a better mousetrap. He said that he would pay $25 to anyone who could make a MakerBottable mouse trap that actually caught his mouse. The day after he made the call for a MakerBot operators to design a better mousetrap, eight new designs for a mousetrap showed up on Thingiverse!

2010: Thing-O-Matic

Throughout 2009 and 2010, we have constantly updated both the software and the hardware of the MakerBot Cupcake CNC. Now, in autumn 2010, we’ve launched our second machine, called the Thing-O-Matic, which incorporates all the updates. This new machine has a new way of moving the print bed, which moves down along the Z axis as an object grows in height during printing. All the tolerances are tighter, and we have increased the build area to allow users to make bigger things.

At MakerBot Industries, we are excited about the future. This new industrial revolution is still in its early days.

At MakerBot Industries, we are excited about the future. This new industrial revolution  REVOLUTION is still in its early days. Ordinary people are taking up the tools of manufacturing, fabrication and production. I love to check Thingiverse.com to see what new possibilities have emerged during the night. There are so many opportunities for anyone who has the passion and interest to explore the frontier of personal manufacturing. With the tools at hand and the community of sharing that has developed around the MakerBot, the future is bright. Exciting innovations and amazing things are emerging.

2011: 2,500 MakerBots

When we first started MakerBot, we would wonder, “What will people do with it?” We knew that anything could happen; sure enough, we’ve shared the excitement as people shared their work. Now, with 2,500 MakerBots in the wild and more shipping every day, I am curious what the community will do together. What kinds of problems can 2,500 MakerBots solve? What kind of projects can we, as a worldwide community of sharing,  SHARING do together?

Paul Atkinson

The concepts of open design – the collaborative creation  SHARE of artefacts by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals – and of individualized production – the direct digital manufacture of goods at the point of use – at first sound like something from a utopian science fiction film. And yet, here we are. We can now easily download designs  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN from the internet, alter them at will to suit our own needs and then produce perfect products at the push of a button. Magic.

Back to the Future

In many ways though, there are huge similarities here to much older practices of production and consumption. The emergence of Do It Yourself  DIY as a necessity for many is lost in the mists of time, but defined as a leisure pursuit, a pastime, it emerged from a perceived need to ‘keep idle hands busy’. In the hours following a long working day, it acted only to bring the Victorian work ethic from the factory into the home. DIY = productive leisure.

In promoting DIY as an amateur pastime, the profes-sional practices of design (which had themselves only appeared a short while earlier) were democratized. The printing of instructional manuals in the form of popular DIY handbooks and magazines enabled anyone having developed the necessary hand skills (which were then passed down from generation to generation) to engage with creative design and production processes and make functional items for themselves.¹ This process of democratization was not all plain sailing – it was one which was strongly rejected by the institutional bodies of various professions, all seeking to protect the livelihoods of their members, and was a source of tension in the relationship between amateur and professional which remains to this day.²

At first, technological developments in the design of tools and the development of new materials aided this opening up of professional practice. Some of the key turning points included the emergence of domestic versions of professional power tools, beginning with the electric drill,³ DIY and the ready availability of new materials such as hardboard, plastic laminates, ready-mixed paints and adhesives. At a time when many products in the home, from furniture to kitchen fittings and from radios to standard lamps, were produced in relatively small numbers from materials such as wood and metal, these developments effectively de-skilled production processes, meaning that the individual handyman could fairly easily design and build many of the products of everyday life. However, as the professions became more and more specialized and further removed from everyday activities, technology became more complex and esoteric and the mass production of injection-moulded plastic parts became the norm, the design and manufacture of many products moved beyond the capabilities of all but the most dedicated of DIY practitioners, and the creative process moved further away from the hand of the individual. Allied to this, the lack of free time in increasingly busy private lives, and the economies of scale involved in mass production provided further disincentives. Why bother to build a bookcase yourself, when a professionally designed, perfectly well made and highly finished self-assembly version can be bought for less than the cost of the raw materials?

DO IT YOURSELF CAN BE SEEN AS: PRODUCTIVE LEISURE.

This distancing of the professional from the amateur in part contributed to the cult of the connoisseur: the idea of the professional designer as one who knew what was best for everyone, no matter who they were. The grand narrative of modernist design sought singular perfection and brought an elitist view of ‘good taste’ to the forefront of any design debate. This view held sway and did not even begin to be dismantled until the realization in the 1960s that a single design solution could not possibly fulfil the requirements of such a wide and heterogeneous market, and that the relevance of any particular design was determined by its user, not its creator.⁴ Slowly, the opinion of the user grew in importance and more enlightened design practitioners began to promote user-centred design processes, where the observed requirements of the user formed the starting point of creative product development. The logical progression of this view can be seen in the more recent emergence of co-creation design processes, where the user is finally fully involved in the creative process leading to the products they eventually consume. It is a short step from co-creation  CO-CREATION or co-design to a position where users take on the responsibility for creative and productive acts in their entirety – a step which technology has now enabled everyone to make. In open design, the cult of the connoisseur has given way to the cult of the amateur:⁵ those who know themselves what is best for them.

The processes of technological development that have variously brought amateur and professional closer together or driven them further apart are now acting to potentially remove the barriers between the two completely.⁶ The open distribution network of the internet promotes an interactive and iterative process of creative design development amongst a globally dispersed group of potentially anonymous participants: a virtual band of individuals who can coalesce around a particular design problem, and who may or may not include design professionals.  COMMUNITY After ‘solving’ a particular design problem, the band dissolves, only to reform with a different membership around a new problem. Furthermore, the people in this virtual band have at their disposal advanced manufacturing capabilities.

The appearance of Rapid Prototyping  HELLO WORLD technologies in the mid-1980s, at first high-level and hugely expensive machines, allowed mass production processes requiring investment in costly tooling to be neatly sidestepped, making it possible to produce one-off products cost-effectively. Low-cost descendants of these – the designs for which are themselves disseminated and downloaded via the internet and made by hand – now enable the desktop manufacture of individualized products in the home.
DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN Technology has moved the goalposts from a position of co-creation to one where the user has the capability to completely design and manufacture products by themselves. It is a return, if you will, to a cottage industry model of production and consumption that has not been seen since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. What at first glance appears to be a futuristic fantasy is revealed, in fact, to be just the opposite: a recurrence of past ways of doing things.

Orchestral Manoeuvres

We have seen how this situation of open design and production occurred through the technological development of tools and materials, and a change in the standing of the individual’s opinion. Both factors increased in importance with the introduction of wide accessibility to the internet and low-cost machines for direct digital manufacture. We can safely assume that open source versions of these machines, such as the ‘CupCake’ CNC rapid prototyping machine produced by MakerBot Industries⁷, the desktop rapid prototyper ‘Model 1 Fabber’ from Fab@Home⁸, or the self-replicating rapid prototyper the ‘RepRap⁹’, will continue to grow in capability, becoming more and more efficient, more accurate and able to use a wider range of raw materials. Such is the nature of open development.¹⁰

IN OPEN DESIGN, THE CULT OF THE CONNOISSEUR HAS GIVEN WAY TO THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR – THOSE WHO KNOW THEMSELVES WHAT IS BEST FOR THEM.

It appears, then, that there are two physical aspects to be considered in making such technologies more acceptable to the wider public: the development of more user-friendly interfaces, or more intuitive systems for creating three-dimensional designs in the first place; and the distribution of materials in forms suitable for use in such machines. No doubt web-based supply infrastructures will appear as a matter of course as the demand for materials increases, but many current open design systems still require fairly high-level CAD modelling skills  KNOWLEDGE in order to produce designs in a digital form.

Since 2002, I have been leading research projects within the Post Industrial Manufacturing Research Group, initially at the University of Huddersfield and since 2008 at Sheffield Hallam University. This work has explored the development of effective user interfaces to enable the open design of products, with the express intention of increasing amateur involvement in the design process and reducing the distance between amateur and professional. It has pushed such technologies through projects by the industrial designer Lionel T. Dean¹¹ and by the artist/maker Justin Marshall.¹²

Future Factories

The web portal of FutureFactories allowed observers to watch computer models of organic forms for products such as light fittings, candlesticks and furniture randomly mutating in real time, freeze the design at any point and save the resulting file for later production by rapid prototyping. Marshall’s Automake project went a stage further, and gave the user more ability to interact with the design by allowing them to manipulate various computer-generated mesh envelopes within which selected components would randomly be placed by the computer until a finished form appeared, which could then be printed. PRINTING Depending on the mesh chosen and the scale selected, the finished results could range from fruit bowls and vases down to bracelets and rings.

The exhibition I curated at the Hub National Centre for Design and Craft in May 2008  EVENTS  showed the results of both these projects and allowed visitors to the exhibition to try out the Automake software for themselves. The outputs created were first printed out as colour photographs, becoming part of a growing display wall. A selection of those photographs were printed in 3D  AESTHETICS: 3D by the industrial sponsor each week and added to the exhibition. Visitors returned again and again to see the expanding displays, with those whose work was selected and manufactured proudly bringing friends and relatives to see the results of their endeavours. These people said it was the first creative thing they had ever done, and that they could not have achieved it without the Automake system. The system enabled them to engage in a form of design and production that questioned their familiar relationship with the object.

Generative Software

Numerous systems that employ generative software and allow users to manipulate designed forms for pieces of jewellery and then have them produced by lost-wax casting or laser cutting followed soon after. One of the best known is ‘Nervous System’.¹³ Visitors to their site can either buy ready-made pieces created using their software, or run various simple interactive applets and manipulate screen designs based on organic structures such as amoebas, orchids, lichen and algae to create their own unique pieces, which can then be saved and manufactured by the supplier.
AESTHETICS: 3D The result is a growing open design library of unique but closely related forms. The code for the software is also released under a Creative Commons licence to encourage others to produce similar work.

THE graphic designer’s role has moved from creating fixed products to A more fluid digital presence, where they may not be totally in control of the content constantly being added to their original creation.

These examples underline the value of systems that allow complex three-dimensional forms to be created by users who, for very valid reasons of lack of time and inclination, are unlikely to develop the type of Computer-Aided Design skills and 3D design awareness required on their own. The development of systems to help and support such people in the creation of their own designs should not be seen as a threat to professional designers – who might see their widespread adoption as an affront to their creative expertise and high-level training – but as an opportunity to retain key roles in the design of products. It would seem certain that the role of the designer in this situation will change rather than disappear altogether, and that this change in role will bring with it the requirement for a change in the attitude of the designer with respect to their relationship with the finished object, as well as in their relationship to the amateur user. Traditional models of authorship and ownership and the existing legal structures over rights and liabilities do not sit well with open systems of design and production, and trying to maintain them will only lead to heartbreak and disappointment. These lessons have already been learned in the allied creative industries of graphics, film and music production as they have tried to protect their income streams, and need to be heeded here.¹⁴

Graphic designers have had to learn to cope with the fact that anybody with a computer and the right software has access to the means to create and produce high-quality, finished pieces of graphic design (although the nature of the systems in place often fails to help lay users create anything that would be mistaken for ‘professional’ work). In many instances, the graphic designer’s role has moved from creating fixed, printed products to originating and possibly maintaining a much more fluid digital presence such as websites, where they may not be totally in control of the content constantly being added to their original creation.

The issues that the music industry has had to deal with include not only the enormous and unsettling changes to the processes of how their end products are distributed, but also the opening up of the existing processes of sourcing new, original material. The role of the A+R (Artist and Repertoire) person – acting as a ‘professional’ arbiter of taste and a filter between the plethora of bands aiming to get recording contracts and those that actually get them – has been replaced by the self-promotion and distribution of music by bands acting as their own producers, which is then filtered first-hand by potential listeners as part of a global online audience. Similarly, film studios have been subjected to huge amounts of ‘amateur’ AMATEURISSIMO material being made widely available through websites such as YouTube, which is filtered by enormous numbers of viewers rather than by a director.

The analogy alluded to here, between the role of the designer and the role of the film director, music producer, or orchestra conductor for that matter, is a good one. While the director is recognized as the creative force behind the film, it is widely understood that the process of film production is intrinsically a team effort of co-creation  CO-CREATION involving a large cast of equally creative individuals. Likewise, an orchestra cannot function well without a conductor, but while the conductor’s role is key, the quality of the orchestral music produced relies on the active involvement of all the musicians. Perhaps what we are seeing here is the transition of the designer’s role (which in reality has more often than not been one of co-creation in any case, working as they do with teams of engineers, ergonomists, marketing experts and a host of others) to a role more akin to that of a film director or orchestra conductor – with the cast or orchestra in this instance including every end user. The professional designer, I suspect, will become an agent of design, with the audience of end users selecting which designer’s system they wish to employ.

The professional designer will become an agent of design, with the audience of end users selecting which designer’s system they wish to employ.

This anticipated change of role would potentially have a huge impact. The relationship between the designer and the objects they initiate will change, as they might never see or even be aware of the results of their endeavours, changed as they will be by users to suit their own needs.  HACKING DESIGN The relationship between the user and the products they own changes too, as they move from being passive consumers of designed products to active originators of their own designs. Indeed, the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ may well disappear as we move into this ‘post-professional’ era. Design education will also have to change its curriculum, perhaps moving closer to the learning style used in craft training – teaching students to create more meaningful, individual pieces rather than huge numbers of identically mass produced products. Designers will have to learn to develop systems that will be used by others rather than trying to remain the sole author of their own work. And while it might seem daunting for the designer to be further removed from the end product they design, it is in fact a huge opportunity for the designer to become far more closely involved with the process of production than before, with all the associated knowledge and awareness of material quality and behaviour that implies. The challenge will be to create systems that enable the design integrity of the end result to be retained and perhaps the identity of the original design intention to be perceived, while still allowing a degree of freedom for individual users to adapt designers’ work to their own ends.

These orchestral manoeuvres in design will change everything for everybody, but while there may be troubles ahead, it is not all doom and gloom. The innate ability of design to adapt to change will surely be its saviour.

NOTES
1 See Atkinson, P, ‘Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design’, Journal of Design History, 19(1), 2006, p. 1-10.
2 “[P]rofessional attitudes to [amateur design] activities have continued to oscillate between fear and admiration.” Beegan, G and Atkinson, P, ‘Professionalism, Amateurism and the Boundaries of Design’, Journal of Design History, 21(4), 2008, p. 312.
3 Wilhelm Emil Fein invented the first electric hand drill in 1895. (www.fein.de/corp/de/en/fein/history.html, accessed 30 September 2010) The device was developed into the ‘pistol grip’ format common today by Black & Decker in 1916, as they were simultaneously working on producing the Colt pistol. After noticing war-time factory workers were borrowing electric hand drills to do jobs at home, they launched a lightweight domestic version in 1946 (www.blackanddecker100years.com/Innovation/, accessed 30 September 2010).
4 Sir Paul Reilly, Head of the Design Council in the UK, wrote in 1967: “We are shifting perhaps from attachment to permanent, universal values to acceptance that a design may be valid at a given time for a given purpose to a given group of people in a given set of circumstances, but that outside these limits it may not be valid at all.” Reilly, P, ‘The Challenge of Pop’, Architectural Review, October 1967, p. 256.
5 ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ is the title of Andrew Keen’s polemic 2007 book, which urges caution in allowing the user too much authority in any creative field if the status quo is to be maintained.
6 See Atkinson, P, ‘Boundaries? What Boundaries? The Crisis of Design in a Post-Professional Era’, Design Journal,
Vol. 13, No. 2, 2010, p. 137-155.
7 makerbot.com
8 fabathome.org
9 reprap.org
10 Charles Leadbeater, in his seminal book on open design We-Think, gives a variety of examples (including an excellent case study of the Cornish Steam Engine) where collaborative open development has created a much stronger and more successful end product than a protected, closed design. See Leadbeater, C, We-Think: Mass Inno­vation, not mass production, Profile Books, (2nd Ed. 2009), p. 56.
11 futurefactories.com
12 www.automake.co.uk
13 n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com
14 As Tadeo Toulis wrote: “Failure to appreciate DIY/Hack Culture is to risk having professional design become as irrelevant to the contemporary landscape as record labels and network television are in the age of iTunes and YouTube.” Toulis, T, ‘Ugly: How unorthodox thinking will save design’, Core 77, October 2008
(www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/ugly_how_unorthodox_thinking_will_save_design_by_tad_toulis_11563.asp, accessed 30 September 2010).

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Elodode Beregszaszi ➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/popupology

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Mattl ➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/lewis

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Sarah le Clercl➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/sarah_jane

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Windell Oskay➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/oskay

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE  ➝ REDESIGNING DESIGN / JOS DE MUL

Photo: Hung Che Lin➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/erichlin

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Robin Capper➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/robinzblog , 3d-print by Gonzalo Martinez

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Colby Jordan➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/kolebee

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: Martin Kleppe ➝ www.flickr.com/Photos/aemkei

RING DESIGNED WITH GENERATIVE ALGORITHMS USING GENETIC CODES

Design: Michal Piasecki, Krystian Kwiecinïski — Photo: lupispuma, alexander karelly

3D-PRINTED GENERATIVE STRUCTURE

Photo: core.formula @ flickr

3D-PRINTED SCIENTIFIC MODELS  ➝ FORM FOLLOWS USER/ DEANNA HERST

Photo: Michael Forster Rothbart, University of Wisconsin-Madison