Maria Neicu

Openness is no longer only seen in the context of open software; it has become a broadly applicable concept, carried by the digital in the analogue world. Design tools are in user’s hands now, as access to software programs and machines (such as laser cutters or embroidery machines) is opened up in the new context of digital fabrication. Openness has been picking up momentum, but has not yet hit its high point.

Amateurs AMATEURISSIMO seem well-equipped to take on the stage of combining crafts with high-tech: they no longer expect professionals to tell them what is right and wrong. As design is being opened, experts have to re-legitimize their professions in the face of a high demand “for other kinds of taste construction”. ¹

But access alone is not sufficient to achieve this goal. Access is only half-way to openness. If it never progresses beyond access, openness is just a popular bit of OPEN EVERYTHING rhetoric, an over-used “fashionable label”. ² But what does it take to move further? The other part of the journey is collaboration – the only way to give amateurs the opportunity to make a change. This is the only way for openness to bring serious societal relevance to this profession. If both access andcollaboration CO-CREATION wereattained,thenboth amateurs and experts would reach a new mindset – one that thinks beyond design. A first initiative in this sense is the (Un)limited Design Contest. EVENTS Under the auspices of a design competition, the event provides a context for testing Openness in vitro:

Firstly, it provides Access: opportunities, tools and social recognition for the work of non-experts. Everyone that has an idea can bring it to life: participants are encouraged to create prototypes tailored to their subjectivity. Design becomes invitational.

Secondly, it re-connects design with crafts: Crafts are no longer about working only with things, physical objects, but also with entities of intangible value, like symbols, people and networks; these entities are starting to be considered more and more intellectually engaging. KNOWLEDGE As the status of artisanal work done by hand is upgraded by the addition of a symbolic capital, a new awareness is brought to bear on the artefacts around us, and especially on how we can act upon them. Open design causes a shift in our relationship with the stuff we use, bend, break, wear, consume and eventually throw away. It does justice to what these items are really worth. On the one hand, this brings back to us an ancestral sense of curiosity about the artefacts with which we fill our worlds; on the other hand, it demands that we re-think our responsibility in the way we interact with them.

And thirdly, the contest brings people together: experimenting to see whether “shared thinking” can actually happen. The (Un)limited Design Contest SHARING comes as a line of defence: an attempt to prove that openness can move beyond a transitory buzzword, and that collaboration CO-CREATION is possible, transforming design as a profession into a valuable part of future society. As shown by the (Un)limited Design Contest, the value of an object design is expressed in its potential for being taken beyond its original confines. The ‘unfinished’ nature of the script offers the intangible value of an open design. BLUEPRINTS The derivatives are not perceived as ‘corrective’ in this sense. The existence of derivatives does not mean that your original is incomplete or malfunctioning – on the contrary! When others are mixing, mashing and transforming your design script, they are offering their greatest compliment. It is the prize offered by the community: proof that your idea is valuable and considered worthy of further development. By improving your idea, the collaborators are actually approving it.

Adopt and Improve

In open design, adopting and improving is a way of cherishing. The moral is that nothing gets modified unless it is worthy of the time it will take to modify it or add innovations. Humans are limited in their creational power, so togetherness becomes a pre-requisite for socio-technological innovation: different life stories, mindsets and knowledge experiences are added by other participants, enriching each open design project. These initial efforts are only the beginning; this experiment has to be repeated. The first steps towards fruitful collaboration have already made. Design is fully engaged in the re-shaping process, and openness seems to be breeding a new design culture – a culture that is still under construction.

→ UNLIMITEDDESIGNCONTEST.ORG

Bas van Abel

Open design covers an extensive area and its contours are not yet clearly defined, making it difficult for designers to come to grips with the developments. One of the most tangible open design experiments was the (Un)limited Design Contest, which challenged the designers to try something out and experience for themselves what happens next. Alexander Rulkens (Studio Ludens), ¹ Sylvie van de Loo (SEMdesign) ² and Goof van Beek ³ share their experiences.

All designs that were submitted were made with digital manufacturing technology, using machines that turn digital designs into physical products. Digital manufacturing offers the designer many new possibilities. Professional designer Sylvie van de Loo used a computer-controlled laser cutter to create her Fruit bowl 128.  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN The bowl is constructed from 128 pieces cut out of cardboard. Her initial idea was to work out a prototype of the bowl in clay. As she was drawing the bowl in 3D on the computer with a friend, she began checking the possibilities for manufacturing the product digitally. For this, she went to the Fab Lab in Utrecht.

Sylvie: “I’ve been in the Fab Lab before, but I didn’t see the potential for my own work at that time. I thought it was all a bit too technical; I felt that a creative approach was lacking. Now I’m discovering that the technique is an important source of inspiration to me.” Sylvie took the advice to turn her bowl into a technical drawing program, which was capable of breaking the 3D form up into sectional planes with a specific width. This approach allows her to generate forms for different materials, which are then cut out with the laser cutter.
AESTHETICS: 2D It is a fairly technical process, which has had an important influence on the creative process and was one of the deciding factors in the final form and appearance of the end product.

Sylvie: “Working with the laser cutter was really a revelation for me. What a cool machine! Anything is possible. You can form 3D layers out of 2D layers. It’s very precise, and you can engrave the most beautiful forms with it. Because you yourself get to work with the prototyping technology, the process of making it is a valuable addition to the final design. If I hadn’t had the chance to experiment with the machine, the definitive form and choice of material would never have occurred to me.”  HELLO WORLD

But still, designer Alexander Rulkens van Studio Ludens feels there is a great deal of room for improvement in how people gain access to the designing process and machines.  ARCHITECTURE Alexander: “I think the Fab Lab concept can benefit from better interfaces to wield the great power that the technology can give.” He didn’t submit a product for the contest; instead, he submitted a software tool that enables everyone to create their own design easily.

Sharing for Yourself

It’s clear that access to technology offers new possi-bilities, but what possibilities does sharing creative work offer the designer? Goof van Beek won the design contest in 2009; his design received extensive publicity. Goof: “It’s fun when people come up and talk to you because they saw your design somewhere. I’m not sure if it really was the open nature of the design that gave the dress the amount of attention that it got, but it was a good first introduction to the reality outside the environs of my study. Meanwhile, I have been approached to take part in an exposition.”

It could be that the conditions of the contest played a role in this: under the (Un)limited Designs terms, the design could be published and shared without prior approval from the  DESIGNER designer. On the one hand, this made it possible for the designers to establish a name for themselves more quickly, and a company that finds the product interesting knows who to go and talk to. However, it also means that designers have given their permission for others to adapt the design and publish their derivative design. “It is a bit scary, but it also has its advantages,” says Sylvie. “The bowl is finished as far as I’m concerned, and I think it’s really great that someone else could pick it up and give it their own twist.”

She isn’t afraid this openness will stand in her way as a designer or harm her business interests. Sharing the design also associates her with the product as the original designer – and even if a design hasn’t been explicitly shared, the designer still always runs the risk of ideas being stolen.

Alexander emphasizes that it’s not just a business matter. Alexander: “The major benefit of sharing is the opportunity to get feedback on your thought and design process early on. You are opening yourself up to the knowledge of others, to different perspectives, which you need as a designer to come up with ideas that are relevant to society. The fact that your design is open to improvement ultimately means that it will be better suited to the people who are going to use it in their day-to-day lives.”

Signature

But looking at the entries in the design contest, only three products were submitted in the ‘fusion’ category. It’s a category that provides incentives for the re-use and re-interpretation of designs that had already been submitted.  REMIX Sylvie and Goof both expect that this has to do with the importance of the designer’s signature style, especially in a contest. Sylvie: “There is a difference between what you use from other designs as an inspiration for your own design, and basing your design entirely on somebody else’s. Originality is important to a designer, and designers aren’t used to explicitly recognizing others for contributing to their design. This makes us choose the safe way by inventing something new.’ Goof: “It’s strange that we don’t consider improving somebody else’s product a challenge, because I would really like to take a few designs in hand in my surroundings. I do know several designs that I think could be done better.” Sylvie thinks that education has an important role in forming this attitude. Sylvie: “At the academy, we were encouraged to be original by creating work that is unique and distinguished.  DESIGNERS I never saw any–one literally taking an existing design as a starting point for a personal interpretation or addition. Maybe we still consider ourselves too good to do that.”

Alexander has a somewhat more radical view. He believes that open design will essentially change the role of the designer. Alexander: “Designers will have to start listening better in a world where the designer doesn’t make the design decisions, but rather facilitates the process of designing decisions.” The meaning of a signature style is changing, as is the way in which we handle that signature style. Alexander: “We have to move towards a system where a person’s contribution to a design can be measured and that person can be given proper credit for their efforts. This means that the designer has to let go of the feeling that “it was my idea”.

It is not yet possible to draw hard and fast conclusions from the results of the (Un)limited Design Contest, EVENTS but it is clear that the designers will engage in the challenge. The most valuable aspect of this kind of experiment is that it enables us to explore certain aspects of open design. In the first edition of the contest, the question was still whether designers were willing to throw open their own design. The emphasis in the second edition was on compound products; the challenge for the third edition will probably be achieving a design dialogue between the contestants.

→ unlimiteddesigncontest.org

Zach Smith

Thingiverse.com was started on a lazy Saturday afternoon in late October 2008. I was at the local hackerspace, NYC Resistor, with my friend Bre Pettis. As usual, we were tinkering with our RepRap machine and dreaming of the day when 3D printing would be ubiquitous. As we worked, we chatted about what it would be like if you had a 3D printer that could make you anything you wanted. We decided that one of the coolest things would be the ability to download designs from the internet that your 3D printer would then turn into real things.

We then asked ourselves what that would look like. HELLO WORLD We did some quick Googling and found that almost all the 3D model repositories on the internet were behind paywalls. We were shocked and appalled; the future of digital fabrication was supposed to free us from the tyranny of distribution costs as we applied the techniques of free software to hardware. Being people who prefer action to words, we set out to build a site that reflected what we wanted the future to be.

Thingiverse  COMMUNITY was built from the ground up as a place for people to freely share their digital designs for physical objects. We built it to be as inclusive as possible. It will accept almost any digital file, so long as it a design for a real, physical object. In fact, most of the early designs on the site are vector drawings for laser cutters. Later, we branched out with support for 3D models, electronics, and designs intended for CNC machines.

Once the rough framework was in place, we started adding features to encourage open design and collaboration. The first step was a licensing system that allowed users to very explicitly state the licence which the listed files were available under. Designers can choose from a number of licences, including Creative Commons,  CREATIVE COMMONS GPL, LGPL, BSD, and Public Domain. The licensing is even available in a machine-readable format on the page itself. We also wanted to encourage collaboration  CO-CREATION by including a derivatives system that allowed people to upload modifications to a design. This feature was a hit because it allowed modified designs to easily give attribution, as well as creating a nice tree structure of all the derivative works available. This was a victory for both the designers and people who wanted to improve on designs that were already available. The designers got credit for the initial work, and the users were easily able to find the latest designs.

The result of this is that Thingiverse is now home to nearly 4,000 open source   OPEN EVERYTHING objects. It has over 5,000 active users and nearly 1 million downloads across all of the design files. It is home to a huge variety of open source hardware projects. On Thingiverse, you can download open source bottle openers, statues, robots, toys, tools, and even 3D printers.  REPRODUCTION It is the largest repository of open source hardware on the Internet and a wonderful place to share your things with the world.

→ www.thingiverse.com

Neal Gorenflo

Like any innovation, open design by itself is neither good nor bad. Its social value depends entirely on how it’s used. It can be used for the common good, or it can be used to destroy the human and biological communities we depend on for survival.

The latter would not only be tragic, but boring. We deserve a better story than this! Our species has already accrued 2.5 years of ecological debt. ¹ And the debt is mounting rapidly – this year we’ll use an estimated 150% of the resources the earth can generate. ² TREND: SCARCITY OF RECOURSES Despite this profligate level of resource use, a billion of our fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth live in extreme poverty. This is an EPIC FAIL!

So the question is: how can you help reverse ecological debt and raise a billion people out of poverty? This is a challenge worthy of your remarkable ingenuity. Sure, there’s time to create that sculpture of Obi-Wan Kenobi with your 3D printer, but set aside some time for this EPIC WIN too! Don’t you think our species has more exciting places to go than oblivion? Let’s look at the problem at the level of products for a possible road map.

What’s obvious is that we don’t need more stuff. 99% of the stuff humans make becomes trash after just six months. ³ And most of our stuff is idle most of the time. For instance: Cars are idle an average of 22 hours a day; Power drills are used an average of 20 minutes total; Most lawn mowers are used 4 hours a year. ⁴

Learning from Car-sharing

So what can we do about this? Car-sharing offers a clue. Duh, we should share! Car-sharing statistics show the positive change that could come from an access economy, one where products are services accessed on demand  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN by users. A 2010 study ⁵ of over 6,000 North American car-sharing members found that 51% joined who didn’t have a car but wanted access to one. Almost a quarter of members shed a car, 1,400 cars total. A 2004 UC Berkeley study of City Carshare ⁶ found that members drove 47% less after joining and saved 700,000 pounds of CO2 emissions. If you’re wondering if car-sharing makes things worse by increasing access to cars, consider that the average ratio of users to cars in North American car-sharing systems is 1:24. ⁷ Compare this ownership in the US where cars outnumber drivers by 1.2 to one. ⁸ And more benefit is coming – car-sharing companies ⁹ are partnering with ride-sharing companies to increase the number of passengers per car rental.

I don’t know of another innovation that increases access to a resource and decreases the environmental footprint. Our environmental and energy crises have some people thinking we must scrimp to survive. Sharing offers a better story – it suggests that we can live well and still reduce our footprint.

But the impact goes beyond material concerns. Research shows ¹⁰ that sharing makes us happy and can prolong life.  SHARE In addition, the New Sharing Economy study ¹¹ done by Shareable Magazine ¹² and Latitude Research ¹³ showed that car-sharers share across dramatically more categories than non-car-sharers – 11 versus 8. Not only does sharing offer many benefits, it also begets more sharing. Now that’s an elegant hack.

The news gets better – entrepreneurs are applying the car-sharing template  TEMPLATE CULTURE to a wide range of assets that include parking spaces, ¹⁴ planes and boats, ¹⁵ camera lenses, ¹⁶ textbooks, ¹⁷ children’s clothing, ¹⁸ handbags, ¹⁹ spare rooms ²⁰ and houses, ²¹ office space, ²² household items, ²³ and a lot more. ²⁴ What’s more, the New Sharing Economy study suggests there’s a big future in sharing – 75% of participants felt that their sharing of material goods will increase in the next five years. Rachel Botsman, ²⁵ author of Collaborative Consumption, ²⁶ believes that the access economy could be as big as the Industrial Revolution. REVOLUTION

So I invite you to help build the access economy. Aside from that sculpture of Obi-Wan Kenobi, there may be no better use of your talent.

→ shareable.net/

Erik de Bruijn

The RepRap digital fabrication system can 3D print a large share of its own parts. In fact, it reproduces almost 90% of the really important mechanical parts that convey most knowledge. The other 10% is the hot end and the main electronic boards for motor control.

This allows for a decentralized community to independently produce physical parts based on digital designs that are shared via the internet. Apart from improving the device, dedicated collaboration infrastructure  ARCHITECTURE was developed by user innovators. Examples of such infrastructure include Thingiverse, a web-based design sharing platform, and CloudSCAD, a web-based Solid 3D CAD Modeller.

While open source software development has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about the viability of the same development model for a physical object’s design. To remedy this knowledge deficit, a case study and survey of the RepRap community was conducted (n=386). ¹

There is substantial adoption and development of open 3D printer technology,  PRINTING even when compared to unit sales of the largest vendors in the 25-year-old industry. RepRap community members are spending between 145 and 182 full-time equivalents and have spent between 382,000 and 478,000 US dollars on innovation alone. At the RepRap project’s six-month doubling interval, it is entirely feasible that its adoption and disruptive levels of innovation will exceed that of the incumbent industry.

Open design and open source software also share many similarities. Design information can be digitally encoded and transmitted much like software code. The motivation to develop or improve software or a physical object may be induced partly by the ability to benefit from its use. In the context of this study, another important similarity is that, both in open source software and open design, the tools to practice open source development are often user-developed as well.

Within the community, there is a higher incidence in modifications of hardware than in software, and, surprisingly, hardware modifications are expected to be relatively easier for others to replicate. The level of collaboration  CO-CREATION is also higher for software than for hardware.

Open source physical design, also known as open design, differs from open source software in that it has an embodied manifestation. This has implications for dissemination of the related knowledge and the logistics of this manifestation that has led observers to think that open design is fundamentally different. Moreover, OSS differs from open design in terms of the maturity of its licenses.

Personal Fabrication

In the research, special attention is given to the role of the capability provided by digital fabrication, and their effect on the ability to collaborate. It affects the cost of development, production, reproduction  REPRODUCTION and distribution of physically embodied innovations. While artefact-embodied tacit knowledge influences the locus of innovation, the implications of this ‘embodiment’ can be mitigated. Results from the survey indicate higher levels of sharing, collaboration and even a perceived higher replicability for hardware, when compared to software. This supports the notion that personal fabrication tools can play an important role to enable distributed activity in open design.

Through Thingiverse, 1,486 designs of physical objects have been shared in the last six months. Also, more than 10,000 objects were independently manufactured by its members’ machines. While already substantial, this level activity exhibits similar exponential growth characteristics.

In offering its tools, infrastructure and incentives, the RepRap community uses the open source development methodology to design physical objects, achieving great success and promoting democratization of the process. The extensibility of this phenomenon has many implications. Obtaining the digital design for a product becomes increasingly attractive compared to having to acquire the physical object.  BLUEPRINTS This is partly due to logistics of physical objects, involving lead-times and transport costs.

Many RepRap community members possess a fabrication capability that the average person does not have access to. While this does limit the present-day generality of the study’s findings, there are many reasons to expect a high likelihood of personal access to digital fabrication in the near future. The rapid development and adoption of increasingly affordable, yet more powerful and valuable fabrication technologies and the anti-rival logic of open design allow user-dominant collaborative development to have significant implications for the provisioning of goods in society.

→ reprap.org

Maxim Schram

Open design by online communities is becoming more common among companies that had previously been secretive about the products they create. Dutch tea manufacturer Pickwick, for example, used the online design and idea community RedesignMe.com to interact with an audience of external designers, marketers and consumers.

The goal was to collect input from stakeholders and lead users on the subject of innovative tea products. A challenge was presented to a community of about 3,500 people; the assignment was to ‘create innovative tea concepts that match Pickwick’s brand values’.

The exercise proved successful in terms of the number of ideas generated. 90 people participated actively over a period of six weeks, creating 198 tea-related concepts. The concepts ranged from new flavours to new packaging, as well as items to be sold or given away as a marketing gimmick.

Initially, 70 people created 125 concepts without further encouragement. Our research showed that the presence of community  COMMUNITY managers from Pickwick positively influenced participation. Because many people received feedback directly from Pickwick, participation went up, inspiring participating users to send in one or two additional concepts.

In addition to creators, there were also commenters. Over 500 people commented on the challenge and the resulting concepts. Discussions between people led to numerous improvements in the concepts. Some ideas that only consisted of a short story from one user were converted into a 3D model by another user. Other concepts were perfected based on discussions between participants and Pickwick marketers.

By the end, the challenge had been viewed by over 20,000 people, most of which were passive readers (‘lurkers’). Although only about 2% of the total number of readers actively participated in the challenge, it is possible to state confidently that Pickwick generated significant publicity as the first Dutch producer of fast-moving consumer goods to participate in this level of online co-creation.  CO-CREATION

The Pickwick Challenge paved the way for other food companies to take advantage of co-design through online communities. While co-creation does not guarantee that original concepts will be found, companies say it helps them step back and see the bigger picture in relation to their business.

→ www.redesignme.com

Peter Troxler

Ponoko first saw the limelight of success on 17 September 2007 at TechCrunch40, a conference held in San Francisco to showcase ‘forty of the hottest new start-ups from around the world’ to a 600+ strong audience. The event unfolded under the auspices of an expert panel which included Chris Anderson, Ron Conway, Esther Dyson and Caterina Fake. Ponoko was one of those forty, together with the likes of App2You, Docstoc, Kaltura, Tripit, Trutap, and Viewdle.

Ponoko was the odd one out. Instead of keeping safely to the digital information realm, its promise was to link the digital to the physical world. Users upload designs to the Ponoko website and select the materials; Ponoko then makes and delivers the product or product parts – and users can post designs in the Ponoko showroom for people to view and buy. Lauded as ‘the world’s easiest making system’, Ponoko combines digital designing with internet technology for distribution, relying on local manufacturing for production of the designs.

Ponoko’s first designer community in Wellington, New Zealand  COMMUNITY consisted of 19 hand-selected designers. At a family gathering on 19 July 2007, the 27 designs available ranged from bike lights, lampshades and jewellery, to tables, room dividers, a chess set, CD rack, artwork and an architectural model of well-known Wellington neighbourhood Brooklyn.

In the 24 hours after the TechCrunch40 talk, Ponoko’s website got over one million hits; their name was all over the media outlets and tech blogs. ‘I believe that everyone wants to be a designer. Ponoko is going to make that possible,’ someone commented on Ponoko’s company profile at Crunchbase.com. ‘Currently, Ponoko has no decentralized manufacturing competitors,’ the directory entry said. Indeed, the 3D-printing service Shapeways  PRINTING registered their domain on Monday, 18 February 2008.

After TechCrunch40, Ponoko quickly moved into the US market. Their user base continues to be mainly in the United States; its hotspots are the usual suspects: the Bay Area, New York, Austin, Philadelphia. ‘We have a good strong user base here in New Zealand, but the vast majority are in the United States,’ Ponoko founder Dave ten Have admitted in a recent interview. ¹

In its early days, Ponoko’s manufacturing capabilities were limited to laser cutting. In 2009, they partnered with CNC-router manufacturer ShopBot to create the 100k-Garages initiative, a network of 180 machine shops ready to professionally cut  AESTHETICS: 2D any 2D design. In September 2010, they teamed up with SparkFun to be able to add electronics to designs, and as of November they offer 3D printing in collaboration with CloudFab.

Ponoko employs five full-time staff in Wellington and three in Oakland. They have arrangements with local design studios Formulor in Berlin, RazorLAB in London, and Vectorealism in Milan. Ponoko’s user community counts a few thousand designers; some products have even made it to reasonable success. Still, Dan ten Have declines to comment on the profitability of Ponoko, saying only, ‘the lights are still on’. For Ponoko, the challenge remains to ‘kick the scale side of things’, and Dan is hinting at some ‘very deliberate rinse and repeat’.

→ WWW.PONOKO.COM

Thomas Lommée

Over the last 20 years, we have been witnessing the early developments of a networked economy that is operated by its interconnected participants. Decentralized information streams and sources have altered people’s attention scopes, ambitions and goals and stimulated a more critical and pro-active attitude. Rather than swallowing manicured advertising made up by professional PR departments, consumers are now informing, inspiring and instructing each other with home-grown content – using Twitter feeds, blogs and YouTube movies to communicate their skills, knowledge and ideas.

But the global mouth-to-mouth mechanism of the World Wide Web  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY not only initiated a dialogue among consumers, it also started a conversation between consumers and producers. This emerging dialogue is generating exciting new business models and rearranging current artistic practices.

On the one hand, it enables consumers to participate in the design process at various levels. Blogs facilitate product reviews and ratings, while easy access to online instructions stimulate consumers to personalize, adapt, repair  REPAIRING or hack  HACKING products. On the other hand, producers can now obtain a huge amount of feedback on their products by observing all these millions of small movements online and subsequently respond to them in their next product releases. Some producers are even actively involving the end user in the creative process by asking them to design new applications (e.g. Apple’s app store) or to propose new uses for their products (e.g. the Roomba vacuum cleaner ¹).

Out of this creative dialogue, the need for a common design language, a kind of shared design vocabulary with its own specific rules, characteristics and outcomes, is slowly  STANDARDS emerging. This vocabulary is manifesting itself through common agreements within the dimensioning, assembly and material cycles of the object. The concept of introducing a set of open standards is nothing new. Whenever a need for sharing has become apparent, open standards have always emerged as a means to generate more flexible and resilient models of exchange. The internet, for example, is entirely based on HTML coding, a common, free-of-charge text and image formatting language that allows everybody to create and share web pages; Wikipedia is nothing more than a common standard template that can be filled in, duplicated, shared and edited over and over again.

Despite the obvious advantages that these common standards and design protocols bring, there is considerable scepticism among designers to adopt and embrace them – probably because, until recently, a seemingly infinite amount of resources indicated little need for more flexible and open systems, and the hierarchical, top-down monologue of mass communication offered few opportunities for exchange.

In addition, these open models also raise questions of accountability, profitability and formal expression. How do we credit the contributors? How do we generate money? Last but not least, how do we balance openness and protection, freedom and restriction? Since every standard by definition imposes a restriction, it limits our choices and obstructs our freedom to design and shape, and it disrupts our independent position as designers.

Nevertheless, the more we continue to share and exchange, the more the need for common platforms will surface within all aspects of our culture. This doesn’t mean that one system will replace the other. Sometimes the commons will do a better job; other times the classical systems will prevail. Both open and closed systems will continue to exist, but it is the evolution of both in relation to the emergence of a networked society as well as the growing range of hybrids (closed systems with open components) that need to be closely observed and tried out.

Designing within certain common standards will require a different mindset from all stakeholders of the design process. In order to think ‘within the box’, in order to accept and embrace the new opportunities that emerge out of common restrictions, we need to acknowledge that we are part of a bigger whole, rather than being the whole itself. It requires us to give up the myth to create ‘something new’, something that ‘hasn’t been done before’ and to replace it by a willingness to dissolve into bigger projects that just make common sense. This new mindset will severely damage the romantic ideal of the ‘designer-creator’  DESIGNERS and shift it towards the ‘designer-collaborator’.

And, let’s face it, that’s quite a different perspective to work from. No designer of our generation wants to be a pixel; we all want to be the full-colour image.

Soenke Zehle

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

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

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

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

Open Source Design

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

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

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

→ co.xmlab.org

Jürgen Neumann

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

Why can’t we just use any copyleft license?

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

How does it work?

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

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

Four Freedoms

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

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

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

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

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

Who owns it?

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

→ www.ohanda.org