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.

Tommi Laitio

In a world of material scarcity and competent people, the right question to ask when designing is not who knows best. Rather, we should be asking what is just and fair.

The world’s problems are rooted in moral bankruptcy that underlies all the systems in which we live and operate. Over 90% of the resources taken out of the ground today become waste within three months. ¹

To avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to cut our carbon emissions to a tenth of the present level. Approximately 75% of the world’s population live in countries where national consumption exceeds the planet’s bio-capacity.² Worse yet, the world’s population is expected to grow by 50% in the next forty years. That will make nine billion of us.

Consuming less will not be easy. In the developed world, the demand for new products, different lifestyles and more active forms of participation grows as people gain new skills, have more expendable time and money, and find themselves looking for meaning in their lives. Meanwhile, basic standards of living are far from being met in many parts of the world. While the developed countries are dealing with hedonistic angst, approximately 50,000 people die daily from poverty-related causes – most of them women and children. One billion people go to sleep hungry every day.

The world as it is, in all its flawed complexity,  TREND is the ultimate design challenge of today. The issues that need to be tackled do not have a clearly identifiable owner or one simple solution. We’ve entered an era of co-existing versions of truth that may not be fully compatible, even to the point of being mutually exclusive. The ultimate problems of this time are results of the way we eat, interact with others, exercise and consume. This is why they are also far too serious to be left entirely to professional designers.

This complex combination of problems calls for open design. So far, professional designers have dealt with material shortages by minimizing their negative impact on production and distribution. Classic approaches to market segmentation no longer function when factors like age or ethnicity no longer define ambitions and desires. Neither professional-led design nor classic approaches will be broad enough to solve pandemic problems like climate change and other worldwide anthropogenic issues, stemming from an absence of moral responsibility. The facts are clear: we need a full paradigm shift; minor tweaks to traditional methods will no longer suffice.  REVOLUTION

The challenge that we all share is to create design that actually solves problems.  SOCIAL DESIGN The questions to be answered become far clearer with this strategic focus. If design is to be used successfully in striving for a fairer place to live, a number of things will be needed, including more participatory tools for understanding the architecture of the problem, quicker ways to test alternative solutions, smarter methods of negotiation and selection, and flexibility in production and distribution.

A Tale of Two Worlds

For the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. According to the UN, in 2020 half of these city-dwellers will live in slums. Aspirations for urban lifestyles are inevitably going to clash. It is harder to build communities when everyone feels they belong to a minority.

Urban freedoms need to be pursued in ways that do not limit other people’s freedoms. Strong local communities  COMMUNITY are fundamental in assisting people in planning their lives, sharing resources and knowledge, developing a sense of home, solving the problems they face, feeling safe, having room to laugh and play as well as building lasting relationships with the people around them. Community structures necessitate government investments as well as new inventions in affordable communication, food production, public transport and housing.

It is in cities that the world of tomorrow is being made, as they build resilience against global turmoil. Issues like local food production are being acknowledged in government programmes. However, in order to share their ideas and resources, people need to feel comfortable and safe. This poses a tremendous challenge, especially in societies where people are most affected by global injustice. When people are struggling to meet their most basic day-to-day needs, the motivation to search for solutions together is small. The same applies to marginalized groups, even in developed societies. When people consider themselves victims of circumstance, opening up to others takes several preparatory steps. Equality, good public spaces and education are fundamental preconditions for open design. The same applies to open design for public services – and equal societies are both happier and more cost-efficient.³

Open design is part of a shift from ‘wow design’ to ‘we design’.

Even if there are many developments that run parallel in developed and developing countries, there are also vast differences. Developing countries urgently need affordable, yet sustainable solutions using easy-access resources. Initiatives like the non-profit International Development Enterprises ⁴ in Nepal allow the local farmers to tap into global information without having to spend their limited resources on personal equipment. The cooperatives share phones so that they can check market prices and avoid being taken advantage of in negotiations.  SOCIAL DESIGN Combining local trust networks and striving for sustainability calls for other, better solutions than poor copies of the systems in the developed world. It also tackles one of the pitfalls that growing economies need to navigate: the risk of spending a disproportionate percentage of increased national revenues on technology instead of health and education. Systems like free text messaging, reliable communication networks and easy-to-build recharging systems become crucial.

The same logic was used in the development of the Open Source Washing Machine ⁵ using solar power, loudspeakers or bicycle tires. The design work started from the available materials and actual needs of the local communities. This approach to design would make it possible for developing countries to become frontrunners in smart recycling.

Smarter Crowds

The greatest potential in open design lies in building from incentives. According to Michel Bauwens, open and peer-to-peer processes have a built-in drive to seek the most sustainable solution. ⁶ When the entire process is a negotiation of the common good, there will be an automatic push to search for a solution that can be applied to various situations. As people twist and turn the matter, analysing it from many different angles, the true nature of the problem becomes clearer. A crowd of people will always be able to subject a problem to more thorough scrutiny than an army of corporate anthropologists.

In a climate of adaptation and rapid prototyping, PRINTING we can test the functionality of various alternatives in a faster pace. This reduces the risk of betting everything on the wrong horse, as is often done in the traditional process. Open design is part of a shift from ‘wow design’ to ‘we design’. Making that shift, however, requires broader access to places of experimentation and learning like Fab Labs.

The new dividing line is the underlying motives of the people involved: whether things are done for benefit (altruistic motives) or for profit (selfish motives). Legislation and education play a key role in the ongoing change. As Michel Bauwens has pointed out, true for-benefit design leaves room for new people. ⁷ New people notice undiscovered errors and contribute new resources and new ideas. A good example of design for benefit is Whirlwind, ⁸ which has in the last 30 years provided thousands and thousands of wheel-chairs to developing countries. Product development collaboration  CO-CREATION between developing and developed countries has guaranteed that the chairs can handle the rough circumstances. The drawings are protected by a Creative Commons license. The biggest success is the RoughRider wheelchair, produced by local manufacturers and already used by 25,000 disabled people in developing countries.

By pooling knowledge and resources, individuals can actually turn the supply chain around. Inspiring examples can be found in the field of architecture. Take Loppukiri, ⁹ a home for the elderly in Helsinki, Finland. Disappointed by the options for assisted living currently on the market, a group of pensioners pooled their funds and selected an architect to work with them on building residential facilities that would meet their specific needs. The Loppukiri cooperative did not limit their design process to their physical surroundings; they also designed structured activities and living arrangements in consultation with numerous professionals. The people in this community split domestic chores, cook lunch for each other and eat together. All in all, they have efficiently solved one of the greatest challenges of aging: loneliness and social isolation. The co-designed architecture of the building supports this community-based ethos and the members are keen to share their lessons with others.

As the example demonstrates, crowds do not make the professional irrelevant. The same approach could be adapted to other groups with special needs. The role of the designer would increasingly shift toward the roles of a trainer, translator and integrator. In order to tap into available resources and the in-depth knowledge held by the group, the designer needs to adapt to their needs and desires. Pooling a number of designers to tackle a bigger community challenge might be a way to win the trust of a new client. In a world where the crowds control the resources, the need for value-driven design grows. This clearly represents a potential growth market for design agencies functioning as a cooperative or a social enterprise.

Time Is Money

Open design requires a re-evaluation of the concept of time. People are willing to contribute more time to shared initiatives when they have a sense of the common good. True happiness comes from feeling needed, valuable, wanted, confident and competent. Open design at its best allows people with skills, experience, knowledge and enthusiasm to contribute their time and energy to building something together – and the desire is there. The recent economic turmoil and an increasingly well-educated population also add potential momentum  OPEN EVERYTHING to the open design movement.

Super-diversity makes it all the more difficult to apply clear distinctions between experts and amateurs. The strategy towards inclusion and trust often acts outside the global monetary world. It means valuing people’s contributions based on the assumption that every individual can have equal value. This is where innovations such as time banks ¹⁰ , the Design Quotient proposed by design agency IDEO, and hyperlocal currencies ¹¹ come in. When people earn credits by participating in a design process,  CROWDSOURCING we give a useful and important reminder that citizens have both the right and the responsibility to take part in shaping their world. Structured participation can accelerate the positive cycle; for instance, each person’ contributions could be tracked in the form of hourly credits, which could then be traded for help from someone else. Systems that foster healthy co-dependency, such as time banks, remind us that everyone has something valuable to share: social skills, technical excellence, catering for a session, or translation. Tools like the School of Everything ¹² – local social media for bringing people together to learn from each other – make it possible to provide a clearer impression of what a community actually can do.

Open design towards sustainable local happiness seems to take a major time investment. Luckily, time is something we have in abundance. The age of ‘useless people’ looks very different in different parts of the world. In Central Africa and the Middle East, the number of young people clearly outnumbers the number of elderly people; in sharp contrast, Japan has nearly five pensioners to every young person. Although many people from both groups will remain in or enter the labour market, the number of people who have nothing meaningful to do is still growing. Whether this time is directed into private endeavours or put to use for the common good is crucial to the well-being of our communities, as well as for the global resource potential. This means serious rethinking, especially in cultures where individual value has been closely linked to gainful employment.

Design for Better Living

Participation in the process is also a strong driver for sustainability. Taking part in the creative process associates the final result more strongly with an experience. Recent studies have shown without a doubt that product consumption has a lower impact on personal happiness than experiences. The sense of ownership generated by participation creates a stronger emotional bond, both between the object and its owner, and between the object and the people in the owner’s network. Objects with an experiential dimension transform into tangible memories, whereas pure objects are subject to material degradation and devaluation. In addition, if we assume shared ownership of the solution as well as the end product, we need more people to be involved in deciding how to handle disposal.

Design stemming from a desire to serve the common good is really about giving people tools to live fuller and better lives and creating objects with a longer shelf life. Inspiring examples of the potential already exist. For instance, Open Source Ecology ¹³ is a project of strengthening self-sufficiency in food production. Sharing the instructions on how to turn a Toyota Corolla into an eCorolla ¹⁴ allows people to improve something they already own.  REMIX The Open Prosthetics Project ¹⁵ shares the peer-to-peer learning curve with all the physically disabled people of the world. The Factor e Farm in Missouri ¹⁶ explores ways to create an off-grid community relying on scrap metal and labour. By putting the results out in the open for everyone to see and adapt for their own use, communities of people can learn from each other. Through copying, prototyping, improving and formatting, the common good can grow. Motives are crucial here: if a person’s intrinsic motives for participating are about solving problems in their own community, the right strategy for growth is sharing the methods openly.

It is difficult to say whether open design leads to better services and products. What it certainly does accomplish is building stronger communities. COMMUNITY It allows people to get to know the people around them while doing something meaningful. It builds bonds and healthy, reciprocal dependencies as people exchange services, equipment and time. As people join in, design is rooted in the DNA of their lives and they keep the end products longer. Open design also builds support for peer-to-peer politics.

Open design is a crucial tool for discovering ‘Us’ again. When successful, it challenges the traditional preconceptions about knowledge, professionalism and democracy. Open design shakes up the current balance of power. It will therefore not come as a surprise that many of the remarks warning against the purported dangers of open design – lower quality, poorer aesthetics, more junk, things that will not work – express the same complaints echoed in every democratization process in history, all the way back to the French Revolution.

The right question to ask is not which process will lead to the best design. The fundamental question is far simpler: what is right and just?

Bert Mulder

Open design for government is a challenge. Not only is open design itself a relatively recent concept, but design and government generally do not interact easily. We do not often talk about governments designing things; we say that governments institute policy and procedures, develop urban planning and create services. Even in a recent Dutch initiative with the grand name of The Hague, Design and Government the tagline reads ‘design for public space, architecture and visual communication’. When design for government is discussed at all, design is mostly seen as functional.

But design will become an increasingly necessary and strategic tool for government at all levels. That is why exploring the relationship between open design and government is not only interesting, but also timely and necessary.

Today’s society requires us not only to create a wider range of diverse solutions, but also to do so faster and better.

Exploring the possibilities of open design for government requires delicacy. Much of open design thinking seems to be in the ‘hype’ phase of Gartner’s hype cycle, where arguments for and against reflect hopes and expectations rather than reality, simply because there is little or no experience on which to base tangible forecasts. This article takes a somewhat analytical approach, outlining several qualities of open design and government and identifying potential challenges. It describes a plan and proposes developments that would stimulate open design in the public sector. Essentially, this article tries to envision what open design would be like as a structural and strategic tool for government.

The Importance of Design

The first reason to consider open design for government is the increasing importance of design across the board. This increase is occurring because our increasingly complex society requires more design. TREND Where supermarkets in the 1960s stocked 1000 products, today’s supermarkets carry between 20,000 and 40,000 items. All these products need to be created, produced, marketed, bought and used. This process is why design has grown from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have’: we need to create more products and services to sustain our society, and to present them in a way that is meaningful to us.

But design is also becoming more important for another reason. Today’s society requires us not only to create a wider range of diverse solutions, but also to do so faster and better. New challenges require fundamentally new solutions; simply extrapolating the past will no longer suffice. And because solutions will have to survive into a future different from today, the ability to design well becomes more important. We need to shape society with the future in mind, REVOLUTION not relying on a past that increasingly has little bearing on the problems we face today; we need to realize better and more sustainable solutions using imagination, innovation and our talent for creativity and creation.

Why Government is Involved in Design

Future-driven thinking is what makes design fundamentally important for government. To face the challenges that the future will hold, the government needs to develop and integrate design competencies into its processes. Analysis and simple extrapolation governed by political processes will have to give way to imagination and more original creation, buildings more sustainable solutions. The development of social innovation serves as an example: design professionals are creating novel solutions in social contexts.  SOCIAL DESIGN This approach involves a more strategic use of design by the government than the simply functional use of design in public space, architecture and visual communication.

A second reason why design capability becomes essential for government is the new complexity of the networked society: government policies and services are increasingly developed in networks that link many different partners. The complexity of a context involving many different stakeholders and regulatory frameworks makes it essential to have a central concept to bind it all together. These considerations also mean that any development in the design field will potentially have relevant applications in the public sector. Clearly, the development of open design for government purposes is an important trend.

Open Design: Requirements and Domains

Current discussions of open design often refer to two related developments: open production and open design. Design(ing) with reference to the ongoing revolution that is triggered by the ubiquitous availability of digital design and production tools and facilities and that reverses the distribution of design disciplines. It portrays design as an open discipline, in which designs are shared and innovation of a large diversity of products is a collaborative and world spanning process.¹ Neither happens by itself and each requires very specific conditions. Analyzing those general requirements will make it possible to achieve a more precise indication of what preconditions would be needed to facilitate open design for government.

DIY  DIY is a good example of how open design gets started. To really take off, do-it-yourself production requires access to appropriate materials, tools and techniques to empower enthusiastic amateurs. For instance, DIY projects around the house require a power drill, easily available wood and fastening techniques that unskilled workers can use. This is how amateurs start designing and making things in any field; every professional started somewhere.In the same way, open design emerges in parallel with the availability of user-friendly and accessible information, methods, concepts, values and tools that allow non-professionals to create their designs. Homebrew electronics materials are available in electronics stores, and the corresponding plans can be obtained from electronics magazines or websites. When all these resources are available, more people may be encouraged and empowered to create their own designs.

Both DIY production and open design empower the user by putting professional tools in the hands of the masses. Those tools are usually available on different levels. At the simplest level, professional solutions are provided as easy-to-use templates   TEMPLATE CULTURE that users can re-use and apply without significant modification. At the intermediate level, tools are available as design templates or generative code that users can modify to create their own designs.  BLUEPRINTS At the highest level, skilled amateurs may access and use advanced design tools used by professionals. When open design for government becomes a reality, it will by necessity consist of a variety of ready-to-use solutions, design templates and advanced tools. Open design should be distinguished from other recent design developments in which users have been more intimately involved in the design process, such as participatory design, co-design or social innovation. In open design, many users are able to design on their own. They are not users involved in a design processes that is initiated and run by professional designers. Open design moves in two directions: outward, when individuals design and produce their own individual products, and inward, when people design solutions collaboratively. The latter faces the additional challenge of coordinating complex systems. Open design for government creates the conditions for many people to design solutions together – and that’s exactly what governments do.

Both DIY production and open design empower the user by putting professional tools in the hands of the masses.

Open design for government may lead to different outcomes than are currently being achieved. These outcomes may include harvesting novel ideas from a larger audience, such as in crowdsourcing; improving the quality of a design; promoting participation and loyalty; or facilitating the creation or composition of actual services. Open design may be used for all or any of these, but will have to be adapted to the desired outcome. There are two roles that open design could fulfil in the private sector. First, it could serve the government in its interactions with the people, as a civic resource that gives citizens the ability to take part in the processes of governing. Second, it could serve the government internally to support and contribute to existing government processes supporting government agendas. Again, it could be used in both directions, inward and outward, but the way open design is used would have to be adapted to the desired outcome. The tools for open design themselves are not affected either way, but supporting a pre-existing agenda means obeying pre-existing procedural constraints, which means that open design is not solely reserved for citizens.

When Open Design Meets Government

When open design meets government, design must adapt to the constraints of government in order for the two to interact. In the same way that architects or industrial designers have a basic understanding of building materials, the forces of physics, and the requirements of production, design in the public sector is subject to its own specific constraints. What would open designers need to operate in a government context?

Open design and government might have been made for each other. After all, doesn’t the government work for all of us, and wouldn’t it be much better if we all contributed? In some sense, democracy at large might be seen as a form of ‘design’ where society is run ‘by the people, for the people’: all of the people are involved in designing better futures for each other. However, the structure of the democratic process as it stands now (whether representative or direct) hardly involves citizens in the process of designing new solutions.  MASS CUSTOMIZATION The government seems to have its own requirements. So how could the characteristics of open design fit those requirements?

Open design for government will follow government activities. The government is involved in setting policies and providing services in such domains as economics, infrastructure and urban design, welfare and healthcare, culture, education and public safety. These are the subjects of government, and open design for government will have to produce useful solutions in those areas in order to be successful.

The government’s agenda mirrors society’s needs. Running a country or a city involves a finite number of activities; one might assume that open design would focus specifically on those activities. It can be compared to having a family, which also involves making a finite number of decisions in consensus: we really only need to sit down together a few times a year to deliberate such matters as buying an expensive household appliance, deciding where to go on holiday, choosing where to move or what school would be best for our children. While the process of open design may involve more people in the discussion, it will not increase the number of issues on the agenda, nor make dramatic changes to its structure.

Public administration works for the public good. Accordingly, open design for government will have to balance the wants and needs of many different citizens while dealing with power, politics and the manufacture of consent. That is why open design does not mean designing individual solutions for individual cases; rather, the process will have to take into account the balance of power between different stakeholders. One of the important elements in that process is fair representation: open design for government cannot be a process taken on solely by the strong and able; it must also involve the weak and underrepresented.  SOCIAL DESIGN

Open design for government needs to support a deep and empathic sense of the needs of ‘users’. The best solutions never consider such concepts as ‘society’, ‘citizens’ or ‘the public’ to be a generic class. One neighbourhood is not the next, one side of town is not identical to the other, and one city does not face precisely the same challenges as another. The same holds true from one generation to the next, and no group in society can be considered a carbon copy of another. Either the open participants, or the process in which they are involved, needs to have the ability to recognize and honour these distinctive qualities and let them ring through in the solutions that are created through open design. In order for open design for government to be effective, it has to be sensitive to the rhythm of government. Policy and development processes have their own dynamic and may take many years to synchronize. To achieve maximum effect, any contribution needs to play its role at the right time in the policy cycle or development process. It will be a major challenge to integrate a complex process of open design, with its own dynamics, without disrupting the necessary tempo and quality of decision-making.

Participation

Open design implicitly assumes that many people will participate once tools and materials become available. However, participation is more complex than that. Participation in today’s political process is a challenge in itself, but participation in online activities is also uneven. On large-scale, multi-user communities and online media sharing sites, user contributions are characterized by participation inequality. Only 0.16% of all YouTube users actually contribute video content; approximately 0.12% of Flickr users contribute their own photos. It’s called the 1% law: only 1% of users contribute, while 9% post comments, and 90% are silent observers.

Doesn’t the government work for all of us, and wouldn’t it be much better if we all contributed?

What’s more, the online communities on those sites are not representative of average web users; actual participation is probably lower if the subset is extended to include all websites on the internet. In itself, the 1% law does not have to be a disadvantage. It closely resembles the state of political participation: only 3% of the Dutch population is actively involved in a political organization; of those, about 30% are active in local politics: about 1% of the population. Early findings on the reality of online political participation show that it tends to be biased, and, just as in real life, the active participants are always the same group of people. Preliminary research on e-petitions for the German Parliament shows this. The online audience is a different group from the people who participated in real life (in this case younger), but online political participants seem to belong to a separate group anyway: highly educated white males.

In open source software development, participation is a major challenge. Projects have a hard time finding enough people who are sufficiently qualified and motivated, and an even harder time keeping those people involved. The current successful examples, such as Linux and Apache, draw their contributors from the 1.5 billion users on the global internet – and only about 1600 programmers among those 1.5 billion users are actual contributors. Scaled down to the level of small cities or neighbourhoods, that level of participation presents a major challenge. Although there are more than 120 million blogs on the internet, it is hard or even impossible to find one good blogger at the level of a single neighbourhood. There is simply too little news content and too few people able and willing to write daily or weekly posts. In the Netherlands, the number of contributors to the Dutch version of Wikipedia is too small to maintain good-quality content. Open design for government may be a good idea, but finding enough people to sustain it will be a challenge.

To really participate in a process of open design for government, participants would at least need access to information on aspects like the financial, regulatory and political consequences of their design effort.

Another widespread assumption is that there is a correlation between civic participation and the democratic quality of society. A related assumption is that finding ways to increase online participation will, in turn, contribute to the democratic quality of society. Research does not support that assumption; rather, it shows that the relationship between participation and democratic quality may be more complex.

Quality

One of the challenges of open design for government is quality. Decision-making at a government level is not about individual and small-scale projects, nor is it about short-term, localized projects. Any contributions to the process would have to create the kind of quality that supports large-scale, long-term projects, answering to regulatory, financial and political constraints. Of course such an argument may be focusing too much on the design outcome: the real result of open design for government might be a greater sense of participation, transparency and increased loyalty.

Involving more people does not create better design, most of which comes from individual designers or small teams. In fact, involving more people may be detrimental to the quality of the result. Of course a larger group may produce more unexpected and useful ideas – that is one of the ways that crowdsourcing produces results.  CROWDSOURCING However, turning ideas into a good design requires a completely different process. An illustration may be seen in online petitioning. First results show that e-petitions often fail to contribute serious new policy ideas, though they may increase the people’s feeling of participation and transparency.

Good design requires experience and knowledge of many different aspects of materials, production, marketing and user needs. Design for government is its own domain requiring its own skills. For social innovation, where designers operate in a social context, professional designers estimate that about 5% of their colleagues possess the necessary skills to deal with new and different complexities. Open design for government invites untrained and unskilled participants; the open design process must empower them in a way that compensates for their lack of experience. In open design for government, projects may be active in a wide variety of domains and bring complex challenges on different levels. Open design is simple where challenges and solutions are straightforward and the aim of the process is participation. But when real complexity comes into play, creating the right prerequisites for open design becomes more of a challenge – it will require more extensive information, better tools, more refined methods and deeper shared values.

The Ecology: Information, Tools, Methods and Values

Open design relies on participants who have been empowered with the right information, the right tools, fitting methods and shared values. When done well, these create a constructive balance between the complexity of the design task and the abilities and motivation of the prospective participants. To really participate in a process of open design for government, participants would at least need access to information on aspects like the financial, regulatory and political consequences of their design effort. Then they would need tools to work with that information: visualize it, analyse it, integrate it. They would need methods to support the design process and the manufacture of consent. All of this would be active within a framework of values and concepts that is needed to design appropriate solutions.

New digital tools allow users to create mashups that show the policies and regulations currently in effect on every piece of land and property.

The field of urban design shows the complexity and the power of such an ecology of information, tools and methods. In that field, basic information is becoming available now that datasets of geographic and policy information are open to citizens. This trend is apparent in the DataGov projects in several countries, including the US, UK, Australia and the Netherlands. New digital tools allow users to create mashups that show the policies and regulations currently in effect on every piece of land and property.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Louisiana was in urgent need of immediate community redevelopment, which had to be implemented far more quickly than usual. The Louisiana Speaks Regional Plan was a key part of the response. One of the design tools used in the project was the Louisiana Speaks Pattern Book, a resource used to inspire and empower all those rebuilding their communities. It contained an extensive analysis of Louisianan quality in buildings, communities and regions and provided design patterns for new houses and communities, formulated as easy-to-understand examples with the aim of inspiring better, higher-quality projects. The design patterns incorporated the complexity of historical analysis, the qualities specific to the region and the possible modern interpretations in such a way that it was easier for designers to create quick solutions while retaining good quality.

These efforts were based on another generative model, which aims to bring about a ‘21st-century correction’ of the American urban landscape. Called Smartcode, it outlines the best physical attributes of regions, communities and individual buildings and specifically embodies the views of the New Urbanism movement. It addresses all levels of design, from regional planning and the shape of communities down to individual buildings. Smartcode also outlines a design method in which local citizens are actively involved in calibrating the general design code for use in local circumstances. All this shows that, in urban planning, the general trend is increasingly facilitating the requirements for open design. As basic information becomes available, various tools are developed to use the data, followed by a design method that supports active involvement by citizens; finally, the code clearly describes its value systems. Of course, we may want to influence the trends to ensure that they suit the needs of a real open design for government – but the basic elements of the ‘open ecology’ are being developed.

This is just one example; there are many more, but it illustrates the necessary ‘ecology’ in which different components (information, tools, methods and values) may be necessary to support open design. The necessary support framework may be more readily apparent in urban planning, since it is already a design-based domain. When open design meets government, we should see a similar development in other domains like healthcare, welfare, public safety, economics and education. Creating the same ecology for policymaking in healthcare or public safety will require further development.

Fostering Open Design for Government

Open design is in its early stages and open design for government is a promise at best. What if we not only described the possible preconditions needed to facilitate open design for government, but also developed an agenda to stimulate it? Although some projects embrace new ways of working, such as crowdsourcing to involve citizens, that is far from open design for government. A much clearer practical agenda may help to harmonize relevant developments, creating synergy and better quality.

An agenda for development would require an investment on four fronts: further developing the core concept, outlining its possible implementations, identifying their components and stimulate experience in different projects. We need to ask ourselves what we really mean by ‘open design for government’, what it could be, what it should be and what it needs. Only a more operational view can provide the basis for a practical development agenda. Scientific studies are not the first priority; there is nothing to research yet. What is needed is a design effort to outline what open design for government might actually look like. We need scenarios, concept studies and small projects to refine possibilities and parameters. Such a clearer understanding of what open design actually means would allow us to gauge the current trends (such as open government data, new tools for visualization, new developments in design) and to determine whether they possess the right qualities to support a truly open design process.

We will see open design being used in government, partly because design is becoming more important, and partly because the tools and methods necessary for open design will become more readily available. Open design may serve a range of aims, from creating a sense of participation and harvesting new solutions, to genuinely inspiring better solutions for government challenges. However, in order to realize the potential this presents, we will need to make the move from dreams to reality, despite the serious challenges that arise in considering open design for government. As practical concepts are developed further, creating synergy between new and current developments may provide the parameters needed to support open design for government. Whether all of this will lead to higher-quality design for government will depend on the quality of the tools, methods and values that we come up with. Perhaps it is time to make use of the open design process in establishing open design for government.

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’.

Caroline Hummels

Does training for open design require a different style of education? Current initiatives like Linux, VOICED and Fab Lab show the beauty of open platforms for sharing and learning, without requiring its contributors to follow specialized  AMATEURISSIMO education. Despite this innate advantage, an educational model that is slanted specifically towards open design is needed. This chapter discusses how we can shape that model in such a way that it enables designers to blossom in an open structure. Although I focus on design education, the model can also be applied to other fields of expertise.

The Aim and Focus of Open Design

So why do we need a specific education style to facilitate open design? In fact, we don’t. I do, however, believe that education should reflect upon its own paradigms, and envision what types of designers society will need in the future. Open design is one of the reasons to look critically at current educational models. Society is always changing.  REVOLUTION What that means right now, for example, is that we have to be able to deal creatively and flexibly with large amounts of constantly evolving information. It also means that we currently have to find answers to large societal questions, now that we have reached the limits of our financial and environmental ecologies, among other frameworks. Open design addresses and works with these overall trends.  TRENDS

Open design assumes open access, sharing, change, learning and ever-evolving knowledge and skills. It is an open and flexible platform instead of a closed one. Consequently, open design emerges from the New Science paradigm of quantum physics, relativity and self-organizing structures, developed by such scientists as Einstein, Bohr and Prigogine. ¹ Where Newton’s classical-scientific view is essentially simple and closed – it can be modelled through time-reversible laws and all complexities can be reduced to simplicities – Prigogine’s reality is multiple, temporal and complex. It is open and admissible to change.

Design education based on a New Science paradigm requires a transformative curriculum, according to Doll ². In such a transformative curriculum, teachers discard the God’s-eye view, uniform curricula and tests that are considered objective and predictive. On the contrary, they emphasize and support a variety of positions, procedures and interpretations. Design education for open design could benefit from theories like Constructivism, where learning is the learner’s active construction of meaning in context.

Open design is based on a libertarian relationship between designers and potential users, and not on a rational one in which the designer is seen as superior.

It is possible to postulate what educating for open design could look like, based on a constructivist learning model. The educational model for open design described below addresses attitudes and skills, approaches, and structure and tools. The figures in the text exemplify these topics by showcasing the educational model we use in the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Learning the Attitudes and Skills for Open Design

In his book The Craftsman, ³ Richard Sennett describes the importance of a craftsman’s intrinsic motivation, commitment to doing good work for its own sake, and an ongoing pursuit of mastery in his or her craft. This attitude is the basis for the success of open communities like Linux, where the reward system is based on the quality of the outcome, social appraisal within the group (peer review) and the personal development of the contributors. The success of open communities like Linux depends on a set of attitudes, skills and activities that foster learning from experience, developing skills through doing, curiosity, ambiguity, imagination, opening up, questioning, collaborating, open-ended conversation, experimentation, and intimacy. It is these attitudes, skills and activities that will also determine the success of open design.

I therefore consider it essential that design education focus on forming self-directed and life-long learners, who are intrinsically motivated and who take responsibility for developing their own competencies and delivering high-quality work. Design students should learn to trust their senses and their intuition, and to embrace ambiguity, open-endedness and experimentation, as explained in the next section on approaches to open design. Moreover, design students should develop the attitude geared towards collaboration,  CO-CREATION preferably supported by methods, tools and structures that foster collaboration (as explained in the last section on structure and tools for open design). It is not only designers who are participating in open design; in principle, everyone can participate. The key aspect is that everyone contributes their own expertise, while respecting and building on the expertise of others. This is especially true when addressing larger societal questions and designing systems where expertise is needed from a range of fields, including design, social sciences and engineering.  KNOWLEDGE

Blurring Boundaries

Open design implies that the boundary between designers and users is blurring, at least with respect to motivation, initiative and needs. So what does this mean for the interaction between designers and potential users? On the basis of my organizational classification, ⁴ open design is based on a libertarian relationship between designers and potential users, and not on a rational one in which the designer is seen as superior. Neither is it based on an integrating relationship, in which the designer looks after the interest of the majority of potential users. The libertarian approach emphasizes the freedom and personal responsibility of every individual. This means that the designer is no longer placed above users when determining what is right for them; rather, the designer is part of a larger community. ⁵

To be clear, this does not imply that everyone now becomes a designer, as IKEA and many others are implying.  WYS ≠ WYG The design profession is still something that requires many years of education and practice, like any other profession. It does mean, however, that potential users now add their own experience and specific competencies to the mix.
Based on the aforementioned, I consider it essential for current design education to teach students to cooperate with other experts, respecting their expertise and simultaneously reflecting on their own competencies. This means, for example, that design students need to learn to work as part of multi-disciplinary teams, collaborating with students from other departments and schools, both on the same level and on different levels, e.g. students from a regional training centre, a university of applied sciences and a university of technology working together on projects. Moreover, design students need to learn to collaborate intensively with potential users, not as objective researchers that perform one or several user studies, not merely as facilitators that run co-design sessions, but also as subjective participants in an intensive process in which they themselves are part of the solution.

The Approach to Open Design

Due to the flexibility, open-endedness and often innovative character of open design, students should have first-hand experience with the fact that design decisions are always conditional; such decisions are always based on insufficient information, are but taken to the best of their and the community’s experience and knowledge at that point. They can use two strategies to generate information to support these decisions, which reciprocally provide focus: design making (synthesizing and concretizing) and design thinking (analysing and abstracting).

Since open design depends highly on different people and expertise, including the element provided by potential users, tangible solutions that can be experienced are essential throughout the design process to validate ideas and to guide further developments.  STANDARDS Moreover, design-making opens up new solution spaces that go beyond imagination, especially in group settings and when focusing on innovative, disruptive products which lack a well-established frame of reference for users or the market. It recalls the adage ‘quality through quantity’.

I consequently advocate that design students learn to use a highly iterative process of generating dozens of solutions and testing them in situ, in their proper context.  The Reflective Transformative Design Process ⁶ offers such a flexible and open process that it regards the act of designing not only as thought, but as a generator of knowledge. The process supports developing a vision of social and societal transformation, exploring solutions in situ with others, as well as offering moments of reflection.

Structures and Tools for Open Design

Open design requires a place to co-operate. That said, a hybrid design environment would both take advantage of a digital space that is always available all over the world, while making use of the intensity of collaborating in a physical workspace, making things, exchanging ideas and knowledge, and testing designs in context with potential users. A beautiful example of such a hybrid community is Beppe Grillo’s blog, ⁷ which enables people to share digitally  COMMUNITY and to meet each other all over the world. What does this mean for design education? Faculties, departments and schools have to think both physically and virtually about workspaces that enhance collaboration.  CO-CREATION At the Department of Industrial Design here at Eindhoven University of Technology, we have structured our workspaces thematically to provide areas in which students can work together, share expertise and learn from each other. In addition to a supportive structure, open design would benefit from tools that support designing and sharing, for a variety of contributors. Design education can support students in exploring these tools through methods such as participatory design, co-design or rapid prototyping equipment at Fab Labs. Universities and schools can also develop open design tools and methods, such as Skin 2.0, ⁸ the Fab@home printers or design tools developed by former ID students at Studio Ludens.

Conclusions

Open design not only forces designers to think about their profession, role, attitude and competencies, but also challenges design educators to scrutinize their educational system. In this article I have discussed what open design means for the designer’s attitude, skills and approach as well as for the educational structure and tools offered. Since we have stressed the flexibility, open-endedness and often innovative character of open design, the educational model for open design will also be flexible and open, and will need continuous development and testing with all parties involved to become a truly open design system.

Dick Rijken

Life in this network society  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY is complex. We are involved in many different kinds of fluid relationships with friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers, project partners, companies, brands, websites, platforms, clubs, schools, and many other kinds of communities. More often than not, we maintain these relationships using digital media like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and plain old email. We connect, communicate and share like our lives depend on it – as, increasingly, they in fact do.  SHARING

In his article, Paul Atkinson talks about the demise of the grand narrative of modernist design. While this is very true, it is not solely applicable to design; it applies similarly to all grand narratives, and to modernism in general. Where we were once infatuated by concepts like universal truth and linear progress, we now find ourselves in a chaotic maze of anecdotes and interconnected ideas. Linear progress has become perpetual change with no shared direction. Within that change, we are on a perpetual quest for personal meaning, no longer seeking truth. All this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make life difficult and unpredictable. If we can learn to improvise and to adapt, life can be deeply meaningful and rewarding. We are not there yet, though; there is still a lot to learn.

We connect, communicate and share like our lives depend on it. As, increasingly, they in fact do.

This article deals with the changing position of knowledge  KNOWLEDGE and expertise in open networks. Digital tools and media are generic infrastructures for creating, sharing and transforming information. They enable and facilitate personal learning on a massive scale. Anything that can be converted into a digital format can also be stored, shared and used by anyone, anywhere. This changes everything that has anything to do with ideas – and therefore also changes design. It changes how we design, it changes what we design, it changes how we think about design, and it changes how we learn and teach design. Ultimately, it will also change who designs. Web 2.0, with the concept of user-generated content at its core, will not leave the design discipline untouched.

Fundamental Paradoxes

In order to understand what is happening to design, we need to understand two strongly related paradoxes that are fundamental features of networks: the paradox of identity, and the paradox of choice.

The paradox of identity arises from the fact that networks are made of nodes and links, i.e. identities and relationships. Nodes have their own unique identity, but that identity is meaningless without links to other nodes. We have become more independent from others through the development and actualization of our own unique individual self. But at the same time, we have become more dependent on others, since who we are depends to a large extent on who we relate to and interact with. We feel a need to stand out in a crowd, but we are nothing if not connected.  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

We depend on fluid networks around us for our daily lives’ activities. Parties are announced on and communicated through Facebook, and the fun is later shared  SHARING through pictures on Flickr. We find jobs using LinkedIn, where we present our professional résumés, and ask people we’ve worked with in the past to write positive testimonials about us. We don’t exist if we have no visible presence in the networks we want to be involved in. If you are what you act like, you better make sure you act like who you are – or who you want to be.

This makes the network society an essentially cultural place. This is true not just in the anthropological sense that everything we learn is seen as ‘culture’, but in a very instrumental sense as well: activities like ‘expression’ and ‘reflection’ that are at the core of art and related cultural activities give form to the networked life of an individual. And this brings us to the second paradox, the paradox of choice. We are the designers of our own lives through the choices we make, and there are more choices open to us now than ever before. At the same time, this freedom has a dark side to it: we must choose, whether we like it or not.  MASS CUSTOMIZATION The freedom of choice that we have is also an inescapable obligation. With choice comes responsibility. The ability to reflect and give form to our lives within given constraints is just as important for an individual as reading, writing or arithmetic. In this context, we move from ‘design as culture’ to a culture of design, where design is part of our natural mode of being.

Atoms and Bits

There is help at our disposal. Digital tools, digital media and the vast resources on the internet collectively create a massive open and accessible infrastructure for individual and communal expression and reflection. In some domains, we have seen an explosive amount of activity (music production, digital photography) that has turned whole industries upside down.  OPEN EVERYTHING Other domains are just getting warmed up. This is particularly true for three-dimensional objects. As different technologies for 3D printing are becoming affordable, Fab Labs (‘fabrication laboratories’, a concept developed at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms) have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the far north of Norway. Activities in Fab Labs range widely, including technological empowerment; peer-to-peer, project-based technical training; local problem-solving; small-scale, high-tech business incubation; and grassroots research.

There is a production infrastructure in the making that works with standardized formats for specifying 3D designs, so that our ideas for objects can be published, shared and modified just as easily as video clips on YouTube.

There is a production infrastructure in the making that works with standardized  STANDARDS formats for specifying 3D designs, so that our ideas for objects can be published, shared and modified just as easily as video clips on YouTube. Do-It-Yourself is no longer a matter of wood and nails; DIY  DIY is becoming more refined in terms of possible forms and construction concepts. In other fields, technological impulses like this have created an explosion of creativity among experts and amateurs alike. Accompanying that surge of creative expression, there is an awareness of the fact that technological facilitation is only meaningful at a very basic level. Anything that is fundamentally expressive or reflective derives its value from ideas and values that are embodied – and ideas and values come from people, not from technology. Again: anything is possible, but what do we want? Before we can rearrange atoms, we have to rearrange bits. Ideas! A richer palette of possible material forms requires a richer imagination than ever before. Buying a guitar does not make me a musician. Access to 3D design tools does not make me a designer.

Why Keep It Simple?

The concept of self-organization is an intriguing idea. Online media environments like YouTube, Flickr and Blogspot prove that well-designed (!) infrastructures
ARCHITECTURE can indeed facilitate personal expression on a mind-boggling scale, but they have one thing in common: simplicity. The media formats are simple (‘upload a picture here’, ‘this is a heading, type your text here’), and the media produced and shared by these tools are simple (a picture, a movie clip, a piece of text). But real life is not always that simple. As I’ve argued above, in networks, life can be annoyingly complex and most of us are not born with sufficient imaginative capacity to fully utilize the potential of the production technologies that are currently available. Most of us need help. When it comes to more complex media or artefacts, rolling out infrastructures and expecting self-organization to take care of the rest is simply not enough. Organizing self-organization is a lot of work, and does in fact involve a great deal of design and inspiration.

We are designers of our own lives through the choices we make. this freedom has a dark side to it: we must choose, whether we like it or not.

Traditional DIY stores know this very well. They don’t just sell basic construction materials anymore, but increasingly also offer ready-made lifestyle products: lamps, furniture, various semi-manufactured products, and so on. What’s more, they know that they need to help amateurs when it comes to making choices. Most websites for DIY stores  DIY feature some form of assistance. Besides tips and suggestions from famous designers, there are online tools that help buyers figure out their personal preferences for interior design. I’ve even seen moodboard tools for interior decoration. For people who feel completely adrift in the sea of choices, there are style coaches to help buyers find out who they are and what choices to make.

Design Literacy

When it comes to more innovative or complex designs, inspiration and imagination are just as crucial as production technologies. This holds true for seasoned pros and enthusiastic amateurs. When motivated prosumers want to express their identities, they need different kinds of knowledge and skills, which together make up what we can call ‘design literacy’. I suggest we conceptualize this at the following three levels:

Strategic vision
Know what you want, based on knowing who you are and what you want to achieve. This is about an awareness of personal goals and values. It can be very explicit, translated into formulated criteria, or very implicit, in which case there is an intuition that can be used to judge examples and design choices. Both approaches can work; more often than not, they co-exist in some form. Whatever it is that you’re going to make, you have to feel its soul and formulate its mission. There is probably no better example here than Steve Jobs, who has always had a very specific vision about using computing technology for personal goals, as opposed to serving the needs of businesses or governments. Apple was founded in 1979; over 30 years later, his vision has become a reality. Every product Apple has produced under Jobs’ guidance was a conscious materialization of that vision. On a more intimate level, amateurs who want to redecorate their homes will be stifled rather than liberated by all the choices and possibilities if they do not have some kind of understanding of what kind of ‘vibe’ or ‘atmosphere’ they want in their house. They, too, need a vision. There is no other way.

Tactical choices
Be able to make choices that determine what it is that you are making. What you are making is ultimately a design that can be produced, in order to make the vision a reality. We are caught between heaven and earth here, and this is the true level where design takes place: crucial decisions are made on a conceptual level that will eventually determine the details of the end result. Choices about content, structure, behaviour and form are made and fixed. This is where professional design becomes a profession, and craftsmanship begins to play a role. The question is: how much professional expertise is needed? Can this be done by an amateur?  AMATEURISSIMO It’s hard to have to start from scratch. Tweaking something that’s already close may be a better way to go. Open design to the rescue! If you see something you like, just download it and modify it to represent your vision. We’ll return to that later.

Operational skills
Be able to use available production tools and infrastructures. This can range from knowing how to point and shoot with a digital camera or upload a video to YouTube to making a final mix of a song that sounds good on different speaker systems or specifying a design with 3D modelling software for a 3D printer.

These are the pillars of what we can call ‘design literacy’: the development of vision (strategic), the formulation of a design (tactical), and technical production (operational). There are interesting interactions between the three levels, however. Ultimately, available production tools and infrastructure determine what can be made in the first place, so operational skills and tactical choices are often strongly aligned. There are also crucial links between tactical choices and strategic vision. If a 3D modelling tool is very user-friendly, very responsive, and well connected to the production tools (possibly through data standards), then the boundary between a sketch and a final design starts to blur, and users can work in a state of flow, where all three levels are active simultaneously.

Online environments prove that well designed infrastructures can facilitate personal expression on a mind-boggling scale, but they have one thing in common: Simplicity.

The distinctions between the three kinds of literacy are epistemological: they involve different kinds of expertise. All three involve mentality, knowledge, and skills – three very familiar pedagogical concepts. Thus, design literacy can be learned, just like many other things, but there’s more to it than learning to work the tools.

Becoming Literate

Professional designers  DESIGNERS have all the necessary expertise. They have an important role to play in the large-scale development of design literacy. They can be heroes when their high-quality designs inspire eager amateurs. They can produce examples to be shared on online platforms that can be used, modified and re-distributed. They can explain how they work, e.g. as teachers in face-to-face courses and online videos. In working towards the advancement of design literacy, professionalism is still our starting point.
Going back to the three central concepts of design literacy mentioned above (vision, design, and production), there are interesting opportunities and challenges in the organization of design literacy:

Strategic vision
The development of a personal vision can be facilitated by presenting, explaining and discussing high-quality designs from professional designers. The development of vision can be a vulnerable and intuitive process, and seeing how pros do it (in a video interview, for instance) can be very helpful and inspiring. Formulating the right question is often the best way to try and find a solution. Inspiration is the keyword here: designers can be inspiring through what they make, but also through showing how they came up with the right vision to begin with.

Tactical choices
The formulation of a design can be facilitated by the same high-quality examples, when they are published in ways that allow for inspection, modification and sharing. Open design plays a crucial role in this. Online environments that feature collections of high-quality examples that can be analysed, used, modified, discussed and re-published hold immense potential. Users need to be able to inspect the internal structure of a design, and then modify and share it. Designers can produce these examples and share their methods and insights in interviews or debates, and design teachers can develop new pedagogical methods and formats. In the world of digital media, users make mashups,  REMIX devising new combinations of chunks of information found elsewhere to create coherent new constructs. Open design allows for a similar approach to 3D objects, physical equivalents to mashups that can also be shared and discussed with others.

Operational skills
Technical production is the easiest skill, since all it requires is decent interface design for the relevant tools, supported by access to technical knowledge in the form of instruction manuals in print, video, or other formats. Many people can teach themselves how to do this and help each other using social media, such as forums or blogs.

Not everything can be done exclusively in the digital domain. There is definitely a need for face-to-face encounters with ‘designer heroes’, design teachers and fellow design amateurs. There is a potential here for existing cultural institutions like public libraries, archives and museums to organize the exchange of knowledge  KNOWLEDGE between pros and amateurs, as well as but just as much between amateurs and other amateurs. They can become hotspots in the real world where amateurs go to work on their expertise. STEIM is an example of such a hotspot.

Design into the Future

The STEIM story below illustrates a shift in the focus of skilled professionals: from high-quality production to high-quality coaching and education in order to facilitate expression and reflection in a larger community of passionate amateurs. Such a significant shift does not happen out of the blue; it is a deliberate choice and it takes real work, based on an informed awareness of how our world is changing.  REVOLUTION This new mentality is the ideal complement to the exchange of information and ideas that is made possible through open design and new technological infrastructures. This calls for an ecosystem of people, institutions, relationships, tools and open infrastructures, where design becomes a natural activity for all those involved. Deliberate initiatives to foster design literacy need to address the three levels discussed above. Open design is essentially a highly social affair: amateur users will gather in online environments that help them by offering good examples in the form of available open designs, which are accompanied by interviews with heroes that explain how they navigate through all three levels of literacy. Heroes are attractors; people will flock around them, learn from them and from each other. Some parts of this ecosystem will grow and flourish autonomously, but others will need to be very consciously designed and planned in order to create a vibrant and living environment. It will help us find inspired ways to deal with tough issues like identity and choice in complex and unpredictable networks.

THE STEIM STORY

STEIM is a laboratory in Amsterdam that experiments with electronic musical instruments for live performance. This was a very specialized affair in the 80s and in the 90s. STEIM’s instrument designers would develop personal instruments and user interfaces for musicians. They became world-famous for their expertise in connecting musical goals (strategic) to technical solutions (operational) through skilful design (tactical).

During the 90s, however, sensor technology and software became more widely available and more affordable. At the same time, the internet became a widely used platform for sharing knowledge and solutions among musicians. STEIM’s core activity became a DIY craze. STEIM consistently supported this trend, being one of the first organizations to hack cheap Wii controllers for musical applications and publishing electronic diagrams for its best-known musical instrument, the crackle box. But as this was happening, STEIM and its professionals had to reorient themselves to the changing situation.

Nowadays, STEIM is an important node in a world-wide knowledge network. There are more workshops than ever before. Moreover, starting in 2011, STEIM will offer a master’s degree in ‘Instruments and Interfaces’ in collaboration with the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. It has become a vibrant hub for learning about DIY instrument design and meeting other people with similar interests. There is a strong co-creation culture. Musicians are challenged to develop their personal ideas about the kind of music they want to make (strategic vision), and STEIM helps them develop their ideas, through co-design (tactical choices) and co-production by means of software configuration and the building of physical objects (operational skills).

Many people who visit STEIM don’t just leave with an instrument; in their time there, they have learned how an instrument is made. And the instrument is just the beginning; there needs to be substantial time spent in learning to play it, as well as resisting the temptation to tweak it further. This represents a big risk at the tactical choice level: know when to stop modifying and start using a product! This is expertise that transcends the operational level. This is years and years of experience feeding into how musicians are currently coached and educated.

www.steim.org

Pieter Jan Stappers Froukje Sleeswijk Visser Sandra Kistemaker

Open design has numerous aims; some of the most important ambitions include breaking down the barriers between designers and end-users, making it possible for non-designers become designers, AMATEURISSIMO and cutting out the middle-man by having end users fabricate the products they need. Inspiring examples have been presented in the domain of craftsmanship. New, craft-based industries are visibly taking off, either locally oriented or operating globally over the internet. However, the feasibility of open design for more complex products, such as washing machines, cars and jet planes.

The Creative Guy

As yet, it is unclear where the limitations of a user-centred approach to user involvement lie. Despite these complicating factors, the roles of designer, client, user and end user are being shaken up in these more complex areas of design and product development. ¹ Traditional caricatures of the designer as ‘the creative guy’ and the user as a recipient, a ‘passive, un-critical consumer’ have been questioned and surpassed in a growing variety of ways.

One example mentioned frequently is the ‘lead user approach’, ² in which select subgroups of dedicated, tech-savvy users contribute to the process of generating solutions, and develop new features for products. This presents a clear challenge to the traditional division of roles in the design process, but it only serves the needs of specific subgroups in the user populations. Other approaches, such as generative techniques and contextmapping ³, try to involve end users as experts in their own experience by taking them through a carefully orchestrated and supported process of fostering awareness, reflection and expression, in order to help them become competent partners within the design team. In commercial practice, the use of focus groups critiquing proposed new product designs, usability tests, or marketing consultations can also involve users in more active ways than have been practised so far. It is important to define the distinction between co-creation  CO-CREATION and co-design; co-creation indicates a collaborative creative effort, either large or small, and often localized, while co-design refers to co-creation used in the course of the design process, preferably from beginning to end. In this article, we focus on contextmapping, a specific aspect of co-design, in which end users are assigned the role of expert informant, and are supported in that role through access to dedicated tools for observation, reflection and expression. The production of these tools and facilitation of the process have become design research activities which are carried out by professionals with a background in design and/or research.

The Traditional View in Transformation

The traditional view of design identifies three roles: the user, who buys and will live with the product, the designer, who conceives the product, and the client, who manufactures and distributes the product. Popular visual representations of these roles, as well as training materials used in several types of design education, show the connection as a chain of single, narrow links. In this view, the client takes the initiative. For instance, the client conducts market research, spots an opportunity in the market, gives a brief to the designer which specifies design requirements, and expects to receive a concept design in return. A number of trends are chipping away at this linear, unintegrated model from all sides. In co-creation, roles and responsibilities which had previously been thought of as separate are interacting, merging, or even being swapped back and forth between the parties; some roles are disappearing in the form in which we knew them, and new roles are appearing.

There are several reasons for this shift. First, as our lives get more complex, people are more informed, and they need to be more informed.

Users are getting savvier
The internet has made it possible for users to be more informed, giving them opportunities to be involved and have a say in what is made for them. TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

Designers are getting savvier too
As the design process incorporates more and more areas of expertise from different parties, managing this process increasingly calls for research skills and a talent for facilitation. In some places, including our own school, design education is starting to include those vital skills in the curriculum; elsewhere, people with backgrounds in organizational management or social sciences are specializing in addressing those roles.

The designer-client relationship is no longer as simple as a brief stating a clearly defined problem.

Design clients are diversifying
Some areas of human endeavour are adopting design perspectives. As a result, principles and practices of design are being used to address increasingly complex problems. Projects such as the design of hospitals, services, or policies generally involve multiple stakeholders and areas of expertise. As the structure of design processes shifts, design techniques are being recognized as supporting these very different people by facilitating shared, solution-oriented thinking. Referred to collectively as ‘service design’ or ‘design thinking’, such larger-scope problems are being claimed for the design profession (or at least the design procedures).

Partly as a result of these developments, the relationships between the parties are changing.

→ The designer–client relationship is no longer as simple as a brief stating a clearly defined problem and the concept design proposing a single solution. In the Dashboard User Guide, Stevens & Watson distinguish five degrees of how the client is served by the designer, ranging from prescribing (one concept to deliver on the brief), through menu (several concepts to choose from), co-creation DIY (collaboration as equals), and assistance (the client receiving design coaching and help), to DIY (the client does the design while the designer observes and interjects comments as needed). ⁴

→ The client–user relationship is opening up in open design and meta-design. In open design, manufacturing options are becoming widespread and widely accessible, and resources for sharing design ideas are available (open movement). In meta-design, ⁵ products are made with sufficient adaptability to leave a number of final design choices to the user.

→ The designer–user relationship is opening up strongly throughout the entire design process. In several industries, competition on technology and price has saturated the market, and clients are taking a closer look at the user experiences and contexts of use in order to improve their products. Elsewhere ⁶ we called this the “contextual push”, a force in product development that complements the classic forces of ‘technology push’ and ‘market pull’. Users are being involved increasingly early in the design process, not just in the post-conceptualization phases (e.g. usability testing and concept testing), but also in the fuzzy front end of strategic planning, information gathering, and conceptualizing. The challenge here is not only the timing of when different players are involved, but also the responsibilities and powers granted to them. Frequently, users can participate in informing design, providing ideas for solutions, or evaluating proposed concepts; however, at this stage, they are rarely involved in deciding what will be made (as would be the case in fully fledged participatory design).

In small and medium enterprises, the separation has always been less clearly defined: individuals often take on several roles in the process, with the benefit that several viewpoints are more smoothly integrated than in larger corporations.

The list above shows how some of these developments are unfolding. The traditional view, with its clear separation of roles, seems too restricted to address the current complexities, but its influence has not yet been lifted from design-speak, from thinking, or from practice. In our experience, the separations between these roles are more entrenched in the larger industries, where roles are often separated over many specialized individuals or departments. In small and medium enterprises, the separation has always been less clearly defined: single individuals often take on several roles in the design process, with the benefit that several viewpoints are more smoothly integrated than in larger corporations.

Co-creation with Users in Industrial Practice

User involvement is progressively moving toward the front end of designing. The people controlling the design process are seeing that the user can be a source of valuable input, not just a channel for directing output.

To generalize somewhat, it would seem that the complaints department in many companies was the place that received most input from the users, in the form of returned products. In many cases, the product was returned not because of a product defect, but because the user could not figure out how to operate it, or discovered after purchase that the product completely failed to fulfil his expectations. In the 80s and 90s, consultations with users moved up earlier and earlier, first advancing through sales and marketing, then usability testing, and finally concept evaluation. What happened in these three phases is that users were called in after the concept had been developed to test the products in practice, hopefully revealing any mistakes. This helped companies launch better products by eliminating problems earlier in the design process.

In the 90s and 00s, user involvement was solicited from the other end of the process, bringing in users in increasingly active ways for contextual informing, idea generation, and concept development.  KNOWLEDGE Although the participatory design movement had shown that intensive collaboration with users can be effective throughout the process, progress in the industry in this half of the cycle has been slower and often limited to incidental involvement (short, local contributions).

Contextmapping: Informing Design

Contextmapping methods help users to observe and reflect on parts of their lives, and to use these reflections in making a ‘map’ that reflects the various facets of their experiences. This map provides the design team with information, inspiration and empathy, feeding further development of the concept design into a product. ⁷ The approach is built on four main principles:

→ Users are involved as the experts on their own experience.

→ The user’s expertise can be coaxed into expression by applying appropriate techniques, which typically involve self-observation and reflection.

→ The information gathered on the context of use should be like a map: it should provide multifaceted, rich and supportive leads for the design team to explore the experiential context. This requires both empathy with the users (a concrete, holistic, feel for the context) and an understanding of the context (an abstract overview of what could be generalized to other users, other situations and future developments).

→ Facilitating this process requires a mixture of design competencies and research skills.

In a series of some 100 design research projects, ranging from individual student graduation projects to larger collaborations  CO-CREATION in consortiums of academic researchers and industrial partners, these methods were developed to fit both user needs and industrial practice. In some cases, user participation has gone beyond informing the process, moving into the realm of idea and concept generation and development.

The client involved in this project offers a large range of hearing protectors for private users, for use in a range of situations: swimming, working, flying, making and listening to music, sleeping or riding a motorcycle. The focus of this project was to gain insight into the life, experience and context of amateur musicians.

Despite our hopes and ambitious rhetoric, design is often not at the forefront of companies’ attention.

The company did not have its own design department; most of the innovations were developed internally with people from the existing team, who came from different backgrounds. The CEO and other people responsible for innovations were highly involved and were part of the research and design team during the entire project. The initial study and the idea generation brainstorming sessions were conducted and facilitated by design agency Muzus, resulting in a concept that was further developed by a second, technical, design agency, and handed back to the company (so we already see several separate design agencies at work).

Process and Techniques

The techniques support designers, helping them to develop empathy for this user group, learn about their lives, understand their context and be able to step into their shoes. COMMUNITY The client already had longer-standing relations with users, but felt that the existing relationship had not led to new ideas for a while. In the contextmapping study, seven musicians who played in amateur bands formed a fresh band and played their instruments in a three-hour session. The participants prepared themselves with a sensitizing package during the week before the test session. By taking part in creative assignments, explaining the artefacts and discussing the different topics, the user group of musicians painted a rich and detailed picture for the research team. Employees from the client company observed the session, took notes from their perspective and subsequently engaged in a discussion with the musicians. An immediate result of the session was the reassessment of several stereotypes; the design team went home with plenty of ideas to for further innovation.

Insights, Ideas and Concepts

Three substantial new insights emerged from the session and subsequent analysis. First, hearing protection is currently geared toward individual usage, but it has an adverse effect in a band: if one band member is using hearing protection, volume will be increased and all other members will suffer. Second, many musicians are ignorant of the risk of hearing damage, and are completely unaware of the decibel threshold for damage. This lack of awareness was new to the client. Third, this group is different from all user groups that this company serves. In contrast to, for instance, construction workers operating heavy machinery, these musicians actually want to hear the sound, even while they are protected from the full impact of it: they love their music and want to be able to experience it to the fullest.

Based upon these user insights, the client conferred with users and the research and design team to generate new ideas for innovative hearing protection that is appropriate to the context, experience and needs of amateur musicians. The resulting concepts covered several different levels: helping musicians become aware of the danger of high volumes;developing new ways of communicating with musicians in their familiar context and fitting their tone of voice; redesigning marketing for this specific user group; developing concepts for new innovative products.

Although this company had already had contact with their users over a longer period, they found that that they had often asked the same people for feedback over and over, only requesting confirmation of their own ideas and asking users to reflect on existing ideas. The experience of opening up, adding a fresh perspective and stepping into the shoes of a specific user group led to new directions for innovation at different levels.

Where Is This Going?

The traditional view is splitting at the seams. In many industries, the traditional separation of roles is recognized as no longer inevitable, effective or desired. However, the evolution to new forms of designing has by no means produced a stable and unified view of how the roles are distributed now. Moreover, these processes are not easy to implement. Despite our hopes and ambitious rhetoric, design is often not at the forefront of companies’ attention due to such factors as budget constraints, insufficient awareness of what a design approach can contribute and should cost, and a lack of innovative user-driven attitudes. The same holds true for the newer trends of doing research within design, especially user research; the concept of opening up design processes to end-user participation  HACKING DESIGN is often not even considered.

In our experiences with large and small industries, we see a variety of formats being used, combining ingredients in different constellations and using different degrees of separation or specialization, depending on the object of design. Moreover, we see a greater need to orchestrate these processes in the large design projects currently gaining attention under the label of ‘service design’; some design professionals are shifting into this new role.

In many industries, the separation of roles is no longer recognized as inevitable, effective or desired.

Clients (or providers, from a user’s perspective) need to become aware of what is possible, and consider how they can become more flexible to accommodate the new design paradigms. The paradox here is that this may be more difficult for the larger industries, which already include user participation in their research budgets, than it is for smaller companies, who have much smaller budgets, but often build a stronger relationship with their users. In large companies, different phases of the design process are often split up, connected only through formal documents that are too limited to convey the full richness of user contexts. These overly structured transitions cause valuable insights to be lost because they are not handed over effectively to the new team. On the other hand, smaller companies, who have a longer-standing relationship with users, are often not aware that their users’ expertise can be brought to bear more effectively with the aid of appropriate methods.  STANDARDS

The role of designers is becoming more varied: part creator, part researcher, part facilitator, part process manager.

The role of designers is becoming more varied: part creator, part researcher, part facilitator, part process manager. We see graduates of design schools specializing in these roles to varying extents. Users’ roles are also changing. A side effect of co-creation
CO-CREATION which we have often observed is that the participating users do not lose their awareness of their own expertise once it has been identified; indeed, they are eager to develop it further. In our own experience, we find that participants are eager to return months after their initial participation, having continued to develop the expertise that was awakened in the study. ⁸ Gawande recounts a series of similar participatory studies in the area of hospital hygiene, where various participating users discussed and suggested solutions. ⁹ One effect was that after the sessions, these users would take initiatives to change their work environment in ways that they had never done before in their traditional roles as nurses, cleaners, or doctors. Awakened expertise can lead to confidence, inspiring users to take increased responsibility and initiative. It is likely that this effect can be found in all areas of co-design and co-creation OPEN EVERYTHING in particular, and open design in general: the act of taking part in the creative process, and becoming aware of the expert within, gives people the confidence to take initiative.

Roel Kaassen Peter Troxler

Roel Klaassen: Looking at recent and future developments in design in the Netherlands, Droog has played an important part, perhaps even a key role. One of your latest projects is about design that can be downloaded. Are you giving your designs to users so they can modify them?

Renny Ramakers: We started the Downloadable Design DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN project together with Waag Society because we saw that designers these days make products that could be downloaded very easily, but aren’t available for download. Take Jurgen Bey’s design for our store in New York, for example. Even though it’s based completely on laser cutting, it is constructed from so many parts and its assembly involves so much manual labour that it is not possible at this stage to offer it as a downloadable design.

We’ve seen the idea of flat-pack products that you assemble yourself, and are seeing the growth of the 3D printer,  PRINTING which can now be used to create physical objects from various designs. These concepts looked interesting, so we thought: let’s see if we can build a platform for these kinds of designs. Together with early internet pioneer Michiel Frackers and designer Joris Laarman, we are now working on the realization of this platform, which will be released as Make-Me.com.

We set up the project with the aim of achieving a number of goals. First, we wanted to eliminate some of the many steps between design and production, so the products become cheaper, similar in a sense to what IKEA has done. Compressing the process is an important reason. We know from our experience with producing designs that it may take up to two years before a finished product reaches the shops. Two years is a tremendously long time, so it’s interesting to explore whether designers would be able to design products without this second part of the process. It could be a very interesting development. Second, if you produce locally, you cut down on the need for transport. Reducing transport adds an ecological benefit. Third, local production on demand means that you don’t need to have your products in stock. This constitutes an economic advantage. From the consumer’s perspective, providing everybody access to design products also has value. Design is everywhere: even the most inane magazines feature design. However, a high level of design isn’t available to most end users; our products are just too expensive for the people who read those magazines. As a result, people end up going to stores like IKEA. We think that Downloadable Design will make it possible for us to bring our products within reach for people who would not otherwise be able to afford them. All these end users would have to do is assemble the product themselves.

Take Jurgen Bey’s design for our store. Even though it’s based on laser cutting, it is constructed from so many parts and its assembly involves so much manual labour that it is not possible at this stage to offer it as a downloadable design.

This leads me to another aspect: do it yourself, or DIY.  DIY There are countless DIY shows on TV; DIY is everywhere. So we thought: what if we not only made design products cheaper, but also introduced more variety. How many times have you found almost the perfect table, but it’s only 80 cm wide and you need a table that’s 90 cm or 120 cm wide to fit in your living room? In so many cases, your house is too small or too big for the standard sizes. What if you could adapt all these measurements to suit your space? That would be hugely practical, much more functional. Or you could choose your own colour, to make it your own thing. Downloadable design is also a form of co-creation.  CO-CREATION

Challenging the creativity of designers is yet another reason, and a very important one. Designers have to adapt their design process to the platform. They have to figure out which parameters of the product can vary, while still earning a profit. What we did here was not just to ask the designers to design a product and have the consumer choose a colour or a pattern; that’s already been done. We asked them to be creative and think of completely different ways for consumers to interact with the design. We also challenged designers to consider how they would make money on their design. We asked them to be creative in what they would offer for free and what they could be offering for an added fee. What if there could be layers in a design? For example, a product could be more expensive if it bears the designer’s signature. The business model requires creativity, too, and it is the most challenging part. As I said, we were inspired by laser cutting and digital technology, but our focus is not limited to digital technology; we also want to revitalize craftsmanship.

We plan to set up a whole network of small studios for highly skilled crafts; as I’ve discovered, it is not easy for small-scale workshops to survive. This network of craftspeople is as important to us as the 3D printers and laser cutters. The emphasis on craftsmanship is crucial, particularly since Ponoko and Shapeways are already offering 3D printing and laser-cut products. AESTHETICS: 2D I think that including crafts gives us a distinctive edge. It also facilitates cross-pollination by introducing digital technology into crafts workshops and vice versa. Finally, using local materials is also important to us; local sourcing is a high priority.

Let me zoom in on making money. Designers have to come up with new business models. Do you have ideas or examples from your experience with the Downloadable Design platform?

At this stage, the designers are not there yet; they are just getting started. One designer came up with an interesting suggestion: as you download a product, say a chair, you receive more and more pixels. If people could stop a download half-way, they could get the design for free, but it would be incomplete or low-resolution. If they decide to download the whole product, they would have to pay for the privilege.
Another idea was to offer an interior design service, so customers could have their interiors custom-made to suit their individual needs, based on variable designs that would be available on the platform. They would pay for the customization rather than for the products. Rather than buying a ready-made cupboard, they would pay to have the basic design adapted to their individual requirements.  MASS CUSTOMIZATION

In so many cases, your house is too small or too big for the standard sizes. What if you could adapt all these measurements to suit your space?

I asked the designers to think of different stages, different levels or different services; to think of a way to create a need for their services. While this is the most obvious idea, it’s not easy for a designer to conceive a product that generates demand for a service. It’s easy to do that with something like a phone, which comes with software, but it becomes a real challenge when you’re working with purely physical products. But there is another difficulty: customers have to get used to customization. Take the example of Blueprint, a physical blueprint of a home — or rather parts of a home — in blue Styrofoam which Jurgen Bey designed the Droog shop in New York. The idea was that people would buy the products but could specify the materials to their own liking. There’s a display model of a complete fireplace in blue foam, with a chimney and everything. If somebody wants to have this fireplace in their home, they could have it that shape done in tiles or bricks. But people don’t dare to buy it like that; they first want to see it for real, as a tangible object. They want to know what material it is made of, what it looks like, how it feels. We’ve learned that a project like that could only work if you produced an actual, physical specimen and offered that for sale.

Similarly, people don’t want to make all their clothes by hand themselves; they want to try the garments on in the shop to see how they’ll look. We’ve also discussed whether we would want to offer a separate category of designs: to expand what we offer, not only for download but also for sale. But what would be the point of a platform for downloadable design if you also have a web shop? Not having a standard web shop is one of the important reasons why I’m working on this project, so we’re not going to have one. However, the fact that this topic keeps cropping up is certainly a sign of things to come.

What do you feel it signifies? Is it just laziness on the part of the consumer?

No, it’s a lack of confidence. Changing the colour of your sneakers at Nike ID is less of an issue.

I’ve done it once; it was quite fun.

But now try doing that for a whole cupboard or bookcase, a design that would become a physical object. Imagine that you could change all the parameters. Not just an option for customization, but a required part of the process. You would have to specify each and every aspect. So the question is, wouldn’t people rather go to a shop and simply buy a cupboard?

It may have to do with lack of confidence. Also, not everyone is an expert in interior design. That’s also why standard furniture exists. Not everyone starts out with an empty floor plan. All those consultants and home decoration centres are there to help people define their interior design preferences. This is a separate issue from the presumed lack of confidence; you could call it ‘assisted design literacy’: how to design your own world.

We would be willing to help people. All these design magazines offer plenty of advice on home decoration, and there does seem to be a demand for it. But then we need to consider the extent to which design can be open. I remember modular furniture in the 60s. People wanted to see examples, too, back in those days; they wanted to see a visual impression of the best way to combine those modules. These are investments that people make. Downloading something that’s purely digital doesn’t cost much.

And if you don’t like it, it’s not a big deal.

But with downloadable design,  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN people really need to take the next step. It means that they would have to go to a workshop to have the product made, or they would need to make it themselves. You say that it sounds like fun, but I doubt it would be fun for the majority of people out there; they wouldn’t want to take the time. That even holds true for me; I wouldn’t want to do it either. I’ve got other things to do.

This trend, this movement, this development: how does it change the design profession?

Designers have always wanted to work for the general public. in the 1920s and ‘30s, it was products for the masses that they wanted to design. Designers gave directions for how to make things that were good for the masses, and the belief was that the masses needed to be educated. Then, in the 1960s, there was an emancipation of the masses. The re-industrialization led to incredible market segmentation, so the masses had more choices and could buy more. As a result, designers started to follow the preferences of the masses. When the market is saturated, it becomes segmented; it’s a logical progression.

If you download music, You can start listening to it immediately. Design is different; you still need to go somewhere to have it made, or you have to make it yourself.

After that, a counter-movement emerged, as evidenced by Memphis and Alchimia, who got their inspiration from the choices of the masses and used it to design highly exclusive products. The inspiration from the masses has always been there, always. However, design is always a top-down process.

In the 1990s, some designers started to turn away from an overly designed environment; they reached a saturation point. They were interested in the fluidity of form. These designers would initiate a process, then stop the transformation at an interesting point and produce the result. It was presented as a free-form exercise, but it was very much directed by the designers.

New opportunities are emerging from the Internet and from digital fabrication, which means that the masses can start to participate in design.

That seems like a logical next step, at least from your perspective. But when I look at the products showcased on sites like Ponoko and Shapeways, I am concerned that the result will be a huge volume of unattractive and clunky design. This trend will not end well.  AESTHETICS: 2D

You say this as an expert in design?

I say it as a human being. I am worried that this trend will spread like a virus. In my opinion, the internet has brought us a lot of ugly stuff. There have been a lot of beautiful things, too, but a lot of ugly ones. Leaving people to their own devices… I don’t oppose it on principle, but it’s not my thing.

The design world draws inspiration from these developments, but these trends are not all that’s going on. Looking at what’s going on in the design world, the designers we work with and the projects we work on, I see two things happening. On the one hand, there is the open source story, which is about trying to find possibilities for participation; that goal is in line with the principles we espouse.

The other side is a devotion to local sourcing, a type of anti-globalism.  MANIFESTOS Many designers are concerned about the transparency of production processes and would like to see more use of local materials and local sources. That is part of our platform, too, since we want to encourage working with local sources and local workshops. Another important issue at the moment is sustainability, the concept of relying on renewable resources.

Designers are becoming entrepreneurs. By telling them to create their own way to make money, we relate to their sense of entrepreneurship. However, the concept of finding their own innovative ways to earn a profit has not yet been developed. This is a real challenge; they really have to make that mental shift towards entrepreneurial design.

On the one hand, there are designers like Tord Boontje,  DESIGNERS who distributed the design of his chair as a file as early as the 1990s. These digital designs were the start of a growing trend, but the content was static. There wasn’t much you could do with it, other than possibly choosing a different upholstery fabric; the idea was simply to distribute it as-is. It was essentially a predecessor of open design. As a designer today, I can imagine that I would have to get used to deciding what to give away for free and what to keep. I would define the parameters, but to what extent would I really have to relinquish control of my design? It is an interesting dynamic, and designers do need to maintain a creative focus on it.

Another issue that I’ve noticed is that designers do not really believe that consumers would download their designs. If you download music, then you have it and you can start listening to it immediately. Design is different; you still need to go somewhere to have it made, or you have to make it yourself. That’s more onerous.

People are too scared to add their own contribution to a lamp they bought for about 100 euros.

The Downloadable Design platform is a learning process for us, too. We started it as an exploration of a concept, and we want to investigate it thoroughly. It is important for us that the platform is curated, that we have a certain amount of control over what is put on the platform. We are playing around with ideas for allowing people to upload things, but I’m still undecided about whether or not I want to do it. In any case, I would want uploads to be related to the designs being posted by our designers. Maybe people could upload how they made the products they downloaded, so it would remain within the parameters defined by the designer.

Open design as a new way of designing. What does that mean to you?

At Droog, we’ve been doing open design all along, right from the start. Our work has always been connected to projects or events.  EVENTS We’ve always been interested in the interaction with consumers. Consistently, one of the key elements in our work has been that consumers could personalize a design, that our designs had an element of fun, pleasure or interactive co-creation.  CO-CREATION

A very good example is do create, a concept that we realized in collaboration with the KesselsKramer PR agency in 2000. ¹ One of the projects was do scratch by Martí Guixé, a lamp that’s covered in black paint. People were supposed to scrape patterns in the paint to create their own drawing. This lamp has been sitting around in the shop for seven, eight years, and nobody has ever bought one. People are too scared to add their own contribution to a lamp they bought for about 100 euros. Even when we added sample drawings that people could copy onto the lamp themselves, nobody would buy it. We only started selling the lamp when we had artists do the drawings. After that experience, we decided not to continue this product. This type of interactive design did not seem to work.

Then, in 2008, we did Urban Play in Amsterdam, which also involved a contribution by Martí Guixé. ² It was a large cube built from blocks of autoclaved aerated concrete or AAC, a low-density, non-toxic material that can be carved very easily. The idea of this Sculpture Me Point was that everybody could add their own sculpture. Everybody chopped away from day one, but after six weeks the result was deplorable. So we ended up with two questions. A, are people willing to do something? And B, what happens when people actually do it; is the result interesting?

Did you do further research on co-creation involving interaction with users? What did it reveal?

One of the projects that started from the Droog Lab is a digital platform for co-creation invented by Jurgen Bey and Saskia van Drimmelen. That comes fairly close. It is about co-creation,  CO-CREATION but it provides a platform for designers to work with other designers. Jurgen and Saskia moderate participation; only people they find interesting can get involved. It is extremely curated; they decide who gets in, who stays out, and who will be making something together, but they also allow room for people’s individual development. We are also working on a different platform which is about ‘upcycling’ dead stock from producers. The aim here is to make dead stock accessible for designers. It’s got nothing to do with using digital technology; it is about all the material that would otherwise simply be thrown away. In point of fact, most of these discarded products get recycled.  RECYCLING But the point here is that all those designs vanish into thin air. Thousands of shavers just disappear. A designer designed them; a certain amount of development went into them. Costs were incurred, and a lot of energy was spent. That’s another development we’re pursuing: we try to direct design towards re-designing what already exists.

China, for instance, might be coming to the end of its tenure as a cheap manufacturer pretty soon. That’s one of the reasons why we started Downloadable Design: to invent new systems.

Again, this is about the creativity of designers. In some sense, it could be considered co-creation, since a designer is building on something created by another designer. The challenge here is whether it is allowed. Somebody designed it, but now it’s dead stock that the company would rather throw away than have us picking it up and putting designers to work on it. There are very loose links to co-creation, to bottom-up design. More importantly, however, these are all developments that are part of what is happening now. So much more is going on now; the bottom-up part is only a small proportion of it.

You talked earlier about services, mentioning the example of interior design. The interesting thing is that you link the designer to the consumer directly, rather than through a middleman or organization.

That truly is a development that is happening right now. Take the fashion collective Painted, for example; they would love to make products for the user. The designers would prefer to make clothes for real people, not averaged-out stuff in shops; they would much rather make things one-on-one, in direct contact with the user. And I think that this really what’s going on in design at this very moment.

Distribution and the middle links in the production process are issues that IKEA has started addressing. We have first-hand experience with how much energy, money and time it costs. Everyone is trying to invent something to mitigate this problem, be it Downloadable Design or a designer who works directly for the customer. That’s where everybody is looking for solutions at the moment. It has to do with the current system; the whole production chain is starting to fall apart. There are environmental questions, economic questions, questions about production in developing countries. Not long ago, everybody was starting to have their stuff made in developing countries, but people in those countries are starting to earn more. China, for instance, might be coming to the end of its tenure as a cheap manufacturer pretty soon. That’s one of the reasons why we started Downloadable Design: to invent new systems.

Our other answer is a resolution of the dead stock issue. If we develop a system in which products are not thrown away, but instead are ‘upcycled’ and brought back into circulation, then we would not need to use so much new raw material; we could use what we already have. There are a few things that need to happen before people start adopting the concept, but we are interested in exploring systems to see how we could create new incentives for creativity, but also how we could start to fix the ecological and economic problems.
In the Droog Lab we are addressing yet another issue: the problem of globalization.  TREND: GLOBALIZATION You see the same stuff everywhere; you get the same retail chains everywhere; you get shopping malls everywhere. High-rise buildings are springing up all over the place; food travels all over the planet with no consideration of what’s in season. These examples are part of an incredible and very special aspect of globalization that makes people forget where things come from. People start to take everything for granted and lose touch with what is part of their own culture. That’s why we set up this lab, as a system to develop creativity based on local conditions, based on how people live and work. We want to develop creative ideas that come from talking to normal people – a taxi driver, a hair dresser – not graduates from an arts academy.  GRASSROOTS INVENTION This approach allows us to get to the heart of the matter, achieving a comprehensive understanding of how creative ideas are viewed by the end users. The aim is for designers come back with so much inspiration that they are able to develop new ideas in a global context.

We want to develop creative ideas that come from talking to normal people – a taxi driver, a hairdresser – not graduates from an arts academy.

Led by Jurgen and Saskia, the Droog al Arab team came back from the Droog Lab project in Dubai with the idea for a platform for co-creation.  CO-CREATION After seeing all these shopping malls, they have seen how the current system of mass production is a one-way street that leaves consumers in the dark about how things are produced. On their platform, they want to show how things are designed, especially how they are designed collaboratively, and they want to establish contact with customers and producers on that single platform.  MASS CUSTOMIZATION

In another project being done in the suburbs of New York, the team led by Diller, Scofiodio + Renfro wants to bring new life to these emptying satellite towns by turning residents into entrepreneurs. An amateur chef might start a sideline as a restaurant owner, or a person might open an informal library because they have a lot of books. Our designers are not at all interested in downloadables and the like, but they are investigating what happens at that level and developing ways to react to it creatively. At that point, they step back let the residents do their own thing. It’s such a fun project. Imagine going to visit a suburb, and discovering that one house has become a restaurant, another one a library, and another one a café. Imagine that somebody opened a cinema simply because they had a projector. All the fun things are available again, and people don’t have to leave the neighbourhood to find them. It creates a renewed sense of community.

Imagine that somebody opened a cinema simply because they had a projector.

On the one hand, I am fascinated to see what those people are actually going to do. On the other hand, I am interested in how we are blurring the boundaries between public and private; essentially, we are asking people to fulfil a public role in their private home. Accepting that involvement could even have an influence on the architecture of these people’s homes. What will houses look like if suburbs develop in that direction? If everybody, or at least a significant part of the population, becomes entrepreneurs, then their homes will look differently. Their private residence will include a public section.

That’s exactly why I do these things. I always return to the challenge of inventing a system, a method of generating innovation, regardless of how it happens. Downloadable Design, innovating the designer, upcycling dead stock, working within the local context, whatever. For me, these are all parts of the same story, facets of one whole entity. Maybe, two months from now, I will have dreamed up something else, have had yet another idea.

Those are a few of the projects we are running at the moment. All these initiatives are born from the same motivation: a sense of curiosity about the user, and a drive to bring innovation to design in a different way, by developing fresh methods while never forgetting that design is also fun.

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.

Peter Troxler

“I’m smelling the beginning of a beginning of a beginning of a trend,” Ronen said to me when I visited him at his Berlin Mitte flat in September 2009. He moved to the city “with his wife and dog to work on Open Design”, to explore how today’s products could regain their contemporary relevance in relation to “the grand vision of human society”, as expressed in the internet. “You don’t get to have many adventures as a professional designer”, DESIGNERS he said in his lecture at Premsela’s Unlimited Design Forum, 11 May 2010. “I’d say this is a good adventure. A revolution REVOLUTION in product development, production and distribution is imminent due to the disruptive nature of the internet and the easy access to CNC machines. Open Design is a proposal to make it happen. Its aim is to shift industrial design, making it relevant again in a globally networked information society.”  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

MY AIM IS TO MAKE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN RELEVANT AGAIN IN A GLOBALLY NETWORKED INFORMATION SOCIETY.

I first heard about Ronen Kadushin at an event showcasing projects using CC licences, ¹ which was held in a former military barracks in Zurich in January 2009. It was not until August 2009 that I first met Ronen in person; we were launching the first (Un)limited Design Contest in Vierhouten, the Netherlands, at Hacking at Random, the 2009 international technology & security conference.  EVENTS This big family get-together of European hackers was attended by over 2000 people. The contest was intended to promote open design; as its number-one proponent, Ronen seemed just the right person to kick it off. Unknowingly, we were inviting Ronen into a community he had only recently discovered for himself; his memories of the event still bear the glow of his first explorations in open design.

Ronen gave a fascinating talk on Open Design on that occasion; it was only his first stop on a series of subsequent talks that took him to Vienna, Tallinn and London. In the time that I have known him, Ronen has developed his view of “Open Design” (the capitals are his) quite a bit, from the early 2009 Introduction to Open Design ² to the Open Design Manifesto ³ of September 2010.  MANIFESTOS

Ronen’s interest in open design stems from his Master’s thesis, which he completed at Middlesex University in 2004. Before that, Ronen had studied industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Design in 1991. He went on to work in furniture design in Tel Aviv at Studio Shaham and for Znobar, and in London at Ron Arad’s One-Off studio. In 2005, he moved to Berlin to found his open design venture and to become a lecturer at the Universität der Künste (UdK). In 2010, he taught open design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, as a visiting professor.

I looked at other design fields, such as graphic design and game design, and they were having a field day on the internet! Creativity was booming. But industrial design wasn’t even a blip on the radar.

Ronen has been preoccupied with bringing the ideas of open source software to the world of industrial design: sharing the source code for designs over the internet, allowing anybody to download, copy and modify it and to use it to produce their own products. “I looked at other design fields, such as graphic design and game design, and they were having a field day on the internet! Creativity was booming. But industrial design wasn’t even a blip on the radar.” Sharing CAD files on the internet under a permissive license is the first condition of Open Design. The second condition is that Open Design products must be able to be produced on CNC machines, directly from the CAD file, without requiring specialist tooling such as moulds or matrices.

We’re talking about a new movement in its infancy here: People are Taking their first steps with the technology, producing the stuff they just need.

Designs that adhere to these two conditions – and the associated derivative designs that evolve from them – are continuously available for production, in any number, with no tooling investment, anywhere and by anyone. For Ronen, this is no longer just an aspiration. “We’re talking about a new movement in its infancy here. People are taking their first steps with the technology, producing the stuff they just need.” Yet these early adopters are more into making things for the sake of making, regardless of what they create, whether it’s some mechanical toy or a decoration for their laptop.

Perhaps just for the sake of validating the Open Design movement, Ronen designed a chair: the Hack Chair.

“If you’re in a design movement, in a style, or if you’re an individual designer, you would probably want to do a chair that would embody the basic attitudes and points of view or technologies. The chair is a central object in our culture and a central object in design. So the Hack Chair is my first Open Design chair.  DESIGNERS  I wanted it to be an object or a chair that makes you say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’ At the same time, the Hack Chair is very sculptural, very dangerous, but also very funny; it’s pure expression. I had no buyer for it. I was not working for some producer who told me how to design it so it could be sold. I suppose it won’t be a bestseller, but that’s not the point. I did it because it helps me make a statement about being an independent designer. It says loud and clear that I’m able to design something like this, and share it, and make it open; if you want to make the chair more cushy and comfortable, it’s an open design. Go ahead, make it comfortable, add your nice round radiuses. I see the Hack Chair as very concise: my story, in a very basic product. Hack.” HACKING DESIGN

Of course Ronen’s Hack Chair employs certain procedures that are considered ‘clever’ in design, such as producing a three-dimensional object out of a single, two-dimensional sheet of metal. Ronen has been doing this for years, and has even given the technique a name: ‘thinology’. He wanted to invest this chair with a sense of his own aesthetic preferences:

“I was designing the chair so everything would look wrong and be as unconventional as possible; an un-chair, a chair that has a look that makes you stop and consider your own self, reassess your relation to an object that is not the expected. You may not enjoy its beauty, but you’ll enjoy the conflict between its appearance and your experience of sitting and of chairs in general. I could have designed it to be straight and rounded and nice, but I chose not to.

“The chair has conflict in it. There is some anger in it, there is some humour in it; there are many things in it that I want my viewer to experience. I don’t want them to just go out and buy it in the first place. It will be available to purchase shortly, but it is also open. There is an important connection between it being open and the way it looks. This is my choice; you have other choices, and you can have different points of view. If you’re a designer, or if you want to be a designer, or if you think you are a designer, you could make your own version. You are actually welcome to make your version.

“It looks edgy and sharp, but it’s quite sittable. It’s not the first chair to have a user-object conflict, but it’s the first one I’ve made.”

Ronen just sent me some photos from his Hack Chair exhibition, Recent Uploads, at Berlin’s Appel Design gallery. He extended the Hack Chair and produced several permutations. The exhibition was truly process-oriented. The walls were decorated with the remains of the 2D cut-outs.  AESTHETICS: 2D Throughout the evening, Ronen would take new sheets of metal and fold them, within a matter of a minute, into yet another Hack Chair derivative, a clear nod to the active process of creation rather than the finished product. People could sit in the chairs and interact with them; there were also miniature versions that the audience could buy and fold themselves. It was an intriguing concept – and indeed, the exhibition chairs were all sold out.

When sharing his own designs, Ronen offers friendly production instructions:

“In order to produce this object, you need to be somewhat proficient with handling DXF files, have knowledge of laser-cut part  AESTHETICS: 2D production, have two good hands and a creative personality that thrives on experimentation. If you have all these, there’s a good chance you are an industrial designer or design student; if not, welcome aboard.

I AM SAYING: PLEASE COPY. BUT IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A BUSINESS OUT OF IT, THEN CALL ME AND WE’LL DISCUSS ROYALTIES. IT IS MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, AFTER ALL; THAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE.

“Please note that you can use this design as many times you like, change it, send it to others, and express through it any personal point of view and creativity, as long as you follow the Creative Commons licence.”

The Creative Commons license that he applies allows anybody to reproduce and modify his designs. There are only two limitations: these modifications and derivatives must be shared under the same license, and the licence prohibits commercial uses.
“I am saying: please copy. But if you want to make a business out of it, then please call me and we’ll discuss royalties. It is my intellectual property, after all; that’s the bottom line. If you want to use it, I would love you to use it; we can talk about it. But if you’re making money out of it, then I would like a share SHARING of it also. That’s the principle behind my design.

“Open Design is not an intellectual property trap. It is not something I do to get money out of suing companies. I consider my audience to be designers and makers and anyone who is interested in creating.

The intellectual property rights, the Creative Commons license I publish it under, these are just a legal framework that supports my work, but they are not at the centre. The centre is creativity through designing objects.”

Ronen is well aware that his ability to prosecute somebody is fairly limited, particularly if a big manufacturer copied his designs illegally, without his consent.

“Copyright protection gives you the big guns, but can you afford the ammunition? You can register your intellectual property, but you don’t usually have the money to defend it. This is life; the big fish eat the little fish.”

“Suppose you have a good bicycle. You like it and you want to keep it, so you buy a really nice lock for it. If a thief truly wants your bicycle, no matter how good your lock is, he will find a way to steal your bicycle. Intellectual property protection is exactly the same. I’m not saying that I’m leaving my bicycles completely unlocked; they have a lock. But the lock says, ‘hey, why don’t you take a ride and give it back when you’re finished.’ So you can take it out for a test drive, but if you want to keep it, I’m asking you to buy it from me, and I am willing to sell it to you. If you want to produce it, I will let you do it. There are many other options available too. People should just be honest about it.”

And many people are honest. While Ronen gets many emails asking if he’s really serious about sharing his designs, he does not get to see most of the private copies or modifications. An exception was São Paulo-based designer Oswaldo Mellone, who produced a Hanukkah design based on Ronen’s Candle Holder¹ and sold it at a gallery; proceeds went to a local educational project.

Suppose you have a good bicycle. You like it and you want to keep it, so you buy a really nice lock for it. If a thief truly wants your bicycle, no matter how good your lock is, he will find a way to steal your bicycle. Intellectual property protection is exactly the same.

Ronen is not out to squeeze every eurocent he could possibly get from every user of his designs; he does not even see recovering production expenses as a truly commercial enterprise.

“My answer to this is always, you’re welcome to sell them to cover your expenses; it would be my pleasure to have you make some money out of it.”

He occasionally makes some money himself, too. In September 2009, his original prototype of the Italic Shelf was included in the Phillips de Pury & Co. auction ‘Now: Art of the 21st Century’. The estimate was around four to five thousand pounds; the shelf sold for six and a half thousand pounds, plus the 25% commission for the auction house, bringing the final sales price to GBP 8,125.

“The interesting thing about selling in an auction is that buyers usually research the background of what they might be going to buy, because each piece has a name, a designer’s name, a history, and so on. They probably knew beforehand that the shelf was Open Design and that anybody else could copy it and build it, so there is an interesting conflict between the rarity of an object and the fact that anybody can copy it. Even so, they got the prototype. There is no real difference between the prototype and a copy. So putting yourself in that situation is an interesting concept. I wanted to do it that way, displaying things in a gallery. It takes Open Design and the concomitant legal copying of an object and brings about a confrontation with the collector’s situation, collecting rare things or limited editions. The limited edition is exactly the same as any other copy to be produced anywhere by anybody, legally. This is an interesting intellectual puzzle.”

The only thing that differentiates the original from any other original copies is a little brass plaque on the edge of the shelf, incised with the words ‘RONEN KADUSHIN 2008/ITALIC SHELF PROTOTYPE’, naming the Open Designer as the author.

In the meantime, Ronen is garnering increasing attention with his Open Design products. His Square Dance coffee table already made it into Wired in 2009. The iPhone Killer which he launched in a style worthy of Steve Jobs, presenting it at Premsela’s Unlimited Design Forum in 2010, landed him a prominent spot on some of the most widely read web publications: Wired, BoingBoing, The Huffington Post. Ronen knows how the Net ticks; with no real marketing budget to speak of, his self-created media ripples are not to be underestimated. And he is certainly enjoying his ‘15 megabytes of fame’ on the internet.

Yet Ronen’s real Open Design business is clearly geared towards the producers of lighting and furniture accessories. It’s a business-to-business thing. If we’re talking about royalties and serious marketing, and production and branding, and so on, this is what I’m looking at.

THERE’S NO REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROTOTYPE AND A COPY.

“If an accessory producer or lighting manufacturer would want to include it in their collection, then we would have to sit down and work out the details: not just royalties, but the whole concept. There is no big company today – no big producer, no mid-sized producer, not even a small producer – that is doing something that is in any way connected to Open Design. There is mass customization,  MASS CUSTOMIZATION yes, but not Open Design as such. I would like to convince the producer that it could be to his advantage to try it out, and it would not cost him more to try it out. Actually, it could be a marketing pitch for the company to position itself as the first business to embrace Open Design. This claim would be very likely to benefit the company that does it.”

The real benefit for a producer that adopted the principles of Open Design would of course be that a second and third Open Design product would not incur any extra costs for tooling. They would only have to care about marketing, packaging, production. However, the companies Ronen has spoken to so far have not considered this concept to be relevant. “They are investing in tooling to make a specific product. If a company produces something made of plastic, or that involves tooling by definition, Open Design becomes irrelevant. Making it open would also not make it relevant for any other user to make modifications. They don’t have the equipment, they don’t have the know-how,  KNOWLEDGE they don’t have the money; it’s too complicated.”

I’m not pleading, “oh please, please, do my design for a 3% royalty”, with the manufacturer equivocating, “no, well, maybe later”, and then changing it and so on.

Ronen still believes that commercial adoption of open design could be possible. Yet he’s not a fundamentalist about his own ideas; he is not pushing open design to companies. Rather, he is introducing it gradually, helping companies develop a basic understanding that they have ‘this type of designer’ in their network of contexts, a designer who sees things a little differently. This approach seems to be paying off; Ronen secured a rather large project about two years ago. “The company approached me because they liked the Open Design concept, and they liked the product that resulted from this concept. I was never put at a disadvantage, I was never mistreated; quite the opposite.”

So one day, Ronen dreams, another producer might approach him, asking him to become their chief designer. “What I would like to see is not about getting money from other people. I just want to be … let’s call it an ‘art director’ on this kind of projects. I want to be in a position where I can influence how people understand what quality is, how to make the connection between the producer, Open Design and consumers, to search for the next stage, things like that. That would put me in a very comfortable position; I would enjoy that. But it will take time. I’m waiting patiently, no hurry. I’m doing other things at the moment. But my plan is to introduce this concept to companies.”

Ronen’s Hack Chair has all the characteristics of an open design product. It is native to the internet, and was clearly designed to use the internet as a marketing and distribution channel.

Ronen believes that “if you do something this way, it will be watched, viewed, produced, copied, talked about, blogged about in more places than if it was a closed design, if it was a normal design”.

“So, in this situation, the designer is at the centre of an enterprise. If I meet a manufacturer, we’re talking eye-to-eye. I’m not pleading, ‘oh please, please, do my design for a 3% royalty’, with the manufacturer equivocating, ‘no, well, maybe later’, and then changing it and so on. It’s really about having control of your creative output.

“At a fairly low cost, a designer can select suitable producers and sell products at a price he or she thinks it appropriate. It is a flexible venture that adapts easily to the customers’ needs and locations, and it is scalable in terms of quantities. The presence of the designs on the web gives a large number of designers, producers and entrepreneurs access to creative content to experiment with. It can be considered as a business opportunity, on a ‘try before you buy’ basis. It also creates space for new business practices that are unknown in ‘normal’ circumstances”, Ronen writes in his 2009 Open Design primer. ⁴

At a fairly low cost, a designer can select suitable producers and sell products at a price he or she thinks it appropriate.

Ronen talks about his experiences with design schools and how they see open design. “Students are kind of suspicious, but once I tell them how I make money out of it, why people don’t copy from me, they get it; they understand that I’m on to something here. And the design professors complain that it’s not working for them anymore; they say that design is not what it used to be. So maybe we are discovering a new opportunity, a new approach here.”

This new approach as proposed in Ronen Kadushin’s concept of Open Design has another interesting aspect as well. “You’re designing for a consumer, but you’re also designing for a user. Somebody has to use it as a design, to change the design. And this distinction causes a lot of confusion in students. They don’t know how to handle it until they are pretty far into the projects.”

However, once they finally understand the concept, some students produce very interesting transformations. In a course on open design at the Institute of Advanced Architecture in Barcelona, students converted the Square Dance table into what they imagined could become a shelter for use in South America. For another design, they took the idea behind the construction of the Italic Shelf to build a church hall. Ronen is fascinated by what these students are doing: “They are turning Open Design into architecture.”

In the future, maybe ten years from now, Ronen imagines a couple walking down the street, peeking into the shop windows of designer outlets and saying to each other, “God, I simply can’t stand this Open Design junk anymore, it’s everywhere. Can’t they come up with something else?” So there still will be designers, their products will still be sold in design shops, and there will still be couples going shopping to furnish their new home.

But maybe the situation will have changed fundamentally. Maybe the producer will have disappeared altogether, or perhaps just have taken on a completely different role. Ronen is searching how to make his vision of Open Design a reality: “I have to find a way to ensure that my creativity will not stop at the producer’s front door. I will be independent in pursuing that goal.”