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

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

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.

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.

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.”

Bre Pettis

2007: Pizza around the Clock

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

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

2008: Printing Vodka Shot Glasses

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009: MakerBot Industries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010: Thing-O-Matic

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

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

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

2011: 2,500 MakerBots

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

BITE ME APPLE BY PROEF AMSTERDAM

Photo: Michael Pelletier

BOX CREATOR BY DAVID SJUNNESSON

Photo: David Sjunnesson

CAT BUCKLE BY ZELDA BEAUCHAMPET

Photo: Joost van Brug

CUSHION LAMP BY MANI ZAMANI

Photo: Mani Zamani

FISH BURNED INTO CHICKEN BY PROEF AMSTERDAM

Photo: Marije Vogelzang, www.proefamsterdam.nl

EXPERIMENT BY FAB LAB BARCELONA

Photo: Fab Lab Barcelona, fablabbcn.org

MODULAR NECKLACE, PONOKO JEWELRY DESIGN CHALLENGE  ➝  PONOKO/ PETER TROXLER

Mujoyas, www.etsy.com/shop/mujoyas

LANDSCAPE BY FAB LAB BARCELONA

Photo: Fab Lab Barcelona, fablabbcn.org

ONE-PIECE BATHING SUIT BY ELISABETH DROOG

Photo: Elisabeth Droog

LASER-CUT OUTFIT BY KIRSTEN ENKELMANN

Photo: Kirsten Enkelmann

RASTER EXPERIMENT BY KOEN MOSTERT

Photo: Xander Gregorowitsch