Erik de Bruijn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Fabrication

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

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

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

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

→ reprap.org

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

Tommi Laitio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smarter Crowds

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

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

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

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

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

Time Is Money

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

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

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

Design for Better Living

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Andrew Katz

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology is Expensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Monopoly is a Bad Thing

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

The Tragedy of the Commons

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

The Creative Commons Licenses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complications of Analogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Rights

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

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

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

Patents

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

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

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

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

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

cp old.one new.one

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

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

Benefiting from Connected Creativity

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

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

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

GNU/GPL AND BSD LICENSES

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

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

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

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

The Commons Analogy

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

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

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

Free Riders

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

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

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

RIGHTS AND LICENSING SCHEMES

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

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

www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

CREATIVE COMMONS AND DESIGN RIGHTS

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

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

www.creativecommons.org

STRUCTURE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

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

Michel Avital

‘Openness’ is a recurring and increasingly frequent theme in recent buzzwords that populate the discourse on the forefront of technology, from open source via open innovation to open design. A review of related articles in the popular press and trade magazines indicates that the modifier open often denotes better, cheaper and faster. Apparently, the qualities inherent in openness or being open have materialized as the underlying enablers that pave the way for creativity, innovation and prosperity. In keeping with the thrust of this volume, this article contextualizes open design, focusing in particular on the characteristics of the infrastructure that are most conducive to its generative capability in relationship to innovation.

The Context of Open Design

Openness pertains to accessibility. Openness is a relative characteristic that refers to the degree to which something is accessible to view, modify and use. The ability to view refers to sharing  SHARING content and the availability of detailed information about the subject matter. The ability to modify refers to sharing labour and empowering changes, improvements and extensions of subject matter. The ability to use refers to sharing ownership and enabling semi or unrestricted reuse of the subject matter or parts thereof. These are the three fundamental operations that are implied by accessibility. Subsequently, from a systems theory perspective, openness relates to the transparency and permeability of any natural or constructed boundaries. Yet openness is not merely a technical attribute that conveys flow or lack thereof; it is an embedded trait that pervades the structure of a thriving civil society. From a social perspective, openness is a core characteristic of an infrastructure that conveys and reinforces sharing, reciprocity, collaboration, tolerance, equity, justice and freedom. The application of openness,  OPEN EVERYTHING as implied by various accessibility features, to a growing number of central ubiquitous practices that drive the human enterprise, has turned into a megatrend that can be labelled the Rise of Open-X. Megatrends are widespread trends which have a major impact and are likely to affect all levels – individuals, organizations, markets, countries and civil society – for a long duration. Understanding megatrends  TRENDS and their rolling effects can provide valuable information for developing futuristic scenarios and can subsequently help to shape current actions in anticipation of that future. So far, as described below, Open-X has materialized in various configurations that can be classified according to three archetypes: open innovation, open source and open design. The three archetypes are juxtaposed in the table on the previous page as a preliminary overview to point out their different respective value propositions and thrust (as a distributed collective action), core openness orientation, and prime actors involved.

Open Innovation

The value proposition and thrust of open innovation is ‘distributed knowledge’ processes that emphasize the view-related capabilities of openness. The prime actors of open innovation are organizations. According to the traditional doctrine, industry leaders self-create the most and the best ideas; innovation should therefore be fostered by internal development teams behind high organizational walls and protected as a trade secret. In contrast, according to open innovation, industry leaders make the best use of internal and external ideas to develop better business models. In other words, superior outcome should be expected with permeable boundaries between a firm and its environment, which allow idea flow, knowledge
KNOWLEDGE exchange, and intellectual property trade. Reaching out and tapping into external knowledge resources extends the generative and innovative capabilities of a firm, as demonstrated by industry leaders like Procter & Gamble, Boeing, Philips and many others. The tenets of open innovation have promoted the proliferation of communities of practice and laid the foundations of crowdsourcing.  CROWDSOURCING

Open Source

The value proposition and thrust of open source is ‘distributed development’ processes that emphasize the modification-related capabilities of openness. The prime actors of open source are developers. The open source concept originated in the software industry; according to the traditional doctrine, software is developed in commercial software firms by professional personnel, guarded through legal and technical measures, and then licensed for a fee. In contrast, according to the open source business model, software is developed through coordinated peer production by independent volunteers.

THE APPLICATION OF OPENNESS TO A GROWING NUMBER OF PRACTICES THAT DRIVE THE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, HAS TURNED INTO A MEGATREND THAT CAN BE LABELED THE RISE OF OPEN-X.

Subsequently, everyone can freely access the source code, and can modify and redistribute it under the same terms, thus nourishing continuous cycles of improvement, adaptation, and extension in a distributed fashion. Reaching out and tapping into external development resources extends the generative and innovative capabilities of a core project. Inspired by the impact of high-profile projects like Linux and Mozilla Firefox, the tenets of the open source development, licensing and distribution model have promoted the proliferation of open source projects of all sorts – from digital content development (e.g. Wikipedia), via vehicles (e.g. c,mm,n) and beverages (e.g. Free Beer – Vores øl), to 3D printers (e.g. RepRap), just to name a few.  OPEN EVERYTHING

Open Design

The value proposition and thrust of open design is ‘distributed manufacturing’ processes that emphasize the use-related capabilities of openness. The prime actors of open design are consumers. Although designers undoubtedly play a pivotal role in fostering open design by producing and sharing suitable design blueprints,  BLUEPRINTS ultimately the consumers who engage in distributed manufacturing are the core players and raison d’être of open design. According to the traditional doctrine, design is mostly a preliminary stage prior to commercial manufacturing and distribution. In contrast, open design is directed toward consumers who engage in fabrication, passing over the conventional manufacturing and distribution channels. Open design implies that the design blueprints are publicly available, sharable, licensed under open-access terms, and distributed digitally in a general design specification file format (e.g. dxf, dwg). Moreover, open design is not black-boxed or exclusive; it implies reconfigurable and extensible design that can be fabricated in distributed and scalable fashions through commercially available, off-the-shelf, multi-purpose means of production.

A structured description of the unique features and boundaries of open design is provided in the table on the next page. The inherent reconfiguration and extension potential of a user-driven open design reinforces the generative and innovative capabilities of consumers. The tenets of open design have inspired the development of public manufacturing facilities networks like Fab Lab, and laid the foundations of open design clearinghouses like Ponoko, Shareable and Instructables. In summary, the distinctions between the three archetypes of Open-X are more a matter of thrust and areas of application. They are not mutually exclusive. All three inherit the core features of openness and naturally overlap to some degree. Open design, for example, is not merely a matter of re-use and distributed manufacturing – it also entails sharing design blueprints and sharing extensions thereof, thus distributing knowledge and development. Building on the working definition of open design and an understanding of its unique features, the remainder of this article will discuss its potential, in particular addressing the infrastructure characteristics that are most conducive to its generative capability in the context of innovation.

Unpacking Open Design

Open design signifies open-access digital blueprints that can be adapted at will to meet situated requirements, and can subsequently be used by consumers to fabricate products on demand by commercial, off-the-shelf production methods. The open design model diminishes the traditional vertical value chain that is formed by designer-manufacturer-distributor-consumer relationships and offers an alternative, open web of direct links between designers and consumers. The resulting short-spanned, transient and non-hierarchical relationships forge dynamic and flexible arrays of blueprints that are not only user-centred but also user-driven.

The discourse on open design encompasses a multitude of considerations: for example, design specification, fabrication, collaborative action, supply and value chain management, business models, legal aspects, technological infrastructure and normative values. The complexity of this ecology can be untangled to some extent by classifying the underlying issues of open design into four interdependent conceptual layers, as follows:

Object layer refers to the design blueprints that enable and constrain the specification of the design artefacts. This layer encompasses the design and distribution of open design objects, that is, configurable and extensible blueprints that are available under open access license in online public repositories.

Process layer refers to the means of production that enables and constrains the fabrication of the design objects. This layer encompasses open design fabrication, that is, the application and operation of commercial, off-the-shelf machinery like printers,  PRINTING  laser cutters or CNC machine tools to produce customized products with no custom-built moulds or machines.

Practice layer refers to the work practices that enable and constrain the conception of the design processes. This layer encompasses open design culture, that is, the related nomenclature, professional standards, craftsmanship, rules of the trade, code of conduct, rituals and normative values.

Infrastructure layer refers to the underlying institutional and technical foundations that enable and constrain the vitality of the design practices. This layer encompasses open design substructure, that is, the related legal system, market structure and technical archi—tecture that govern open design activities and future growth.

The discourse so far is focused on the object and process layers, with some touches upon the practice layer. However, quite surprisingly, despite its fundamental role, the infrastructure layer is virtually ignored.

Designing Generative Infrastructure

The infrastructure that governs open design activities, business models and development is based on the related code of law, market structure and technical architecture, which together enable and constrain most human activity systems in an attempt to balance inherent conflicts and pursue the common good. In a general sense, infrastructures are designed to promote fairness, wealth and operational efficiency. TEMPLATE CULTURE Much has been written about the general nature of infrastructures elsewhere, leaving no need to reiterate it here. Instead, let us elaborate on the generative capability of infrastructure as an additional area of concern that should be considered particularly in the context of developing infrastructure requirements for open design. In view of the generative character of design in general, and open design in particular, developing an appropriate infrastructure should aim to incorporate the structural features that are most conducive to creative processes and products. Building on the concept of generative design, I suggest a set of generalizable considerations for designing such infrastructures. More specifically, I propose that the infrastructure of open design should be evocative, engaging, adaptive, and open.

Generative design refers to the design considerations in developing an array of artefacts and interactions that support and enhance generative capacity – that is, the considerations in designing systems that are conducive to the ability of a person or group to produce new configurations and possibilities, to reframe the way we see and understand the world, and to challenge the normative status quo. ¹ People’s generative capacity is a key source of innovation; by definition, generative design aims to encapsulate the design directives that enhance and complement that human capability.

In general, generative capacity refers to having an evocative power or aptitude that can result in producing or creating something, or tapping into a source of innovation. In the context of open design infrastructure, the modifier ‘generative’ denotes that the noun it modifies is conducive to the production of something innovative or the discovery of new and hitherto unknown design alternatives. In other words, generative design refers here to the design requirements and considerations in developing open design infrastructures – that is, the related code of law, market structure and technical architecture – that augment people’s natural ability to innovate. Subsequently, four top-level design directives are suggested for infrastructures, as follows:

Generative infrastructure is evocative
Generative infrastructure inspires people to create something unique. It evokes new thinking and enables them to translate their ideas into a new context. The infrastructure can help to create the environment or conditions that are prone to those insights by generating and juxtaposing diverse frames that are not commonly associated with one another within an underlying context. Systemic features that drive evocative design enable, for example, seeing an object or situation from multiple perspectives, testing it in multiple situations, examining it at multiple degrees of granularity, and exploring multiple overlay configurations.

Generative infrastructure is engaging
Generative infrastructure is enchanting and holds the attention of people by inducing their natural playfulness and ‘flow experience’. The infrastructure TEMPLATE CULTURE can help in the creation of engaging environments or platforms that stimulate the users’ cognitive spontaneity and playfulness as well as overall positive affect state, thus encouraging further exploration, tinkering and experimentation. Systemic features that drive engaging design enable, for example, fostering positive affect and high spirit that stimulate a state of ‘joie de vivre’, activating cognitive spontaneity induced by playfulness, and stirring up curiosity through intriguing challenges.

Generative infrastructure is adaptive
Generative infrastructure is flexible and conducive to effective use by a heterogeneous set of people in their own respective environments and for various tasks within an intended scope. It can be adapted with respect to the type of users or groups that it serves in diverse problem spaces. It is also simple to understand and easy for anyone to master. The infrastructure can help in the creation of adaptive systems or platforms that are flexible yet powerful enough to enable the generation of a continuous stream of new ideas and configurations. Systemic features that drive adaptive design enable, for example, user-induced tailoring and customization to meet situated needs, self-production of complementary extensions and features that meet new or initially unforeseen needs, automatic system-induced adaptation, and overall scalable functionality with no regard to size-related attributes.

Generative infrastructure is open
Generative infrastructure accentuates permeable boundaries and transparency that promote co-production, cross-fertilization and exchange of any kind. The infrastructure  ARCHITECTURE can help in the creation of open systems or platforms that provide connectivity, enable transparency, allow information sharing, and encourage dialogue with no regard to institutionally or culturally imposed boundaries. Systemic features that drive open design enable, for example, free and unrestricted access to information, communication among all stakeholders, and the easy integration of third-party extensions by independent boundary-spanners. In summary, from the generative requirement perspective, infrastructures of open design should be evocative, engaging, adaptive and open. However, while the last two directives are clearly implied in the discourse of open design, the first two have not yet been addressed. Subsequently, the inclusion of evocative and engaging features in the infrastructure of open design, let alone in the discourse concerning its requirements, is strongly recommended. Although this conclusion might not be obvious for legislators, policymakers, managers, and engineers, it should be quite intuitive for designers.The expected proliferation of open design has far-reaching implications that are likely to extend well beyond design practices as such and have significant socio-economic effects on a global scale.

Another Brave New World

Open design presents entrepreneurs and agile companies with a grand opportunity to expand existing markets, to develop new ones, and to capture large shares from current market leaders. Mobilizing open design to generate organizational value and to boost its market position requires radical strategic and operational changes. However, the tight coupling between design and production, which has so far been instrumental in fostering economies of scope and competitive advantages for the current industry leaders, is now likely to hinder their agile capability and their ability to take advantage of the new vistas that are beginning to be afforded by open design.

PEOPLE’S GENERATIVE CAPACITY IS A KEY SOURCE OF INNOVATION; BY DEFINITION, GENERATIVE DESIGN AIMS TO ENCAPSULATE THE DESIGN DIRECTIVES THAT ENHANCE AND COMPLEMENT THAT HUMAN CAPABILITY.

The adoption of open design practices by esta-blished industry leaders, let alone run-of-the-mill manufacturers, where the dominant culture and mode of product design has been shaped and reshaped over long periods, is likely to pose multiple challenges to these organizations at all levels, from the boardroom to the production floor. Subsequently, the resistance to change in these organizations is expected to reinforce the current tight coupling between product design and industrial manufacturing. Just as Amazon could conquer the market share of established retailers that were unable to adapt quickly enough to the new marketplace of e-commerce, emerging market players based on open design business models are likely to cannibalize the turf of established manufacturers that are entrenched in the old model of industrial production.

From Push to Pull

Open design paves the way to the next iteration in the massive shift from push to pull business models. In general, push business models are based on top-down value chains where a line of a few mass-produced products is distributed broadly through value-driven downstream marketing techniques. In contrast, pull business models are based on bottom-up value chains where a line of customer-configured products are distributed individually through features-driven upstream marketing techniques. Whereas push models are based on economies of scale and emphasize cost efficiency, pull models are based on flexible manufacturing and emphasize mass ustomization. In previous centuries, most artefacts – from shoes to carriages – were custom-designed and built on demand by a craftsperson.
Building on push business models, the industrial revolution almost wiped out cottage manufacturing and shifted its lion’s share to production lines and mass-scale manufacturing in factories that offer economies of scope and scale. Consequently, the resulting abundant supply of affordable products was instrumental to massive market expansion, higher living standards, and growing wealth across the board. This prosperity has come at the expense of product variety and personalization, as most notoriously conveyed by Ford’s remark “any color as long as it’s black”.  MASS CUSTOMIZATION

OPEN DESIGN INFUSES ‘DO IT YOURSELF’ WITH A WHOLE NEW MEANING THAT GOES FAR BEYOND COST SAVINGS OR THE JOY OF CRAFTING.

The advent of the internet has bestowed a new communication infrastructure that made it possible not only to exceed the economic accomplishments of industrialization, but also to offer an unprecedented variety of products and personalization thereof. The latter has been accomplished through pull business models and upstream marketing that take advantage of automated fulfilment and logistics centres supported by fast, wideband, many-to-many communication networks. The extent of product variety and personalization has been attained and fortified in three main phases enabled by the accessibility (i.e. ability to view, modify and change) afforded by the internet. In the first phase, retailers have introduced consumers to the ability to view up-to-date, rich and targeted information about off-the-shelf products, thus enabling them to make informed decisions. Then, in the second phase, manufacturers have introduced consumers to the ability to modify base products and specify a customized configuration thereof, thus enabling them to fine-tune a product according to their preferences. Finally, in the still-nascent third phase, designers have introduced to consumers the ability to use blueprints for self-managed fabrication, thus enabling them to gain full control over the features of the resulted product as well as its production process. In summary, as in a stage model, every phase builds upon the previous one to bring the consumers closer to the designers and to provide them with more control over what they get, how it is produced, and how it is delivered.

The Road Ahead

Open design is still nascent, yet it provides a springboard for radical changes in the way we acquire almost anything that is currently mass-produced. Open design presents a new way of design that complements new methods of fabrication, commonly branded as 3D printers  PRINTING of all sorts. Open design infuses ‘Do It Yourself’ with a whole new meaning that goes far beyond cost savings or the joy of crafting. It allows consumers to be in charge and offers them an opportunity for full customization of an artefact, including a choice of features, materials and delivery options. It allows for continuous innovation and localization, which in turn has major implications for consumers in shoestring economies as well as in developed countries. It also provides a fertile ground for the development of new forms of organization, new business models, new supply chain structures, new varieties of products and services, and the like, as demonstrated in the many cases in this volume. Nonetheless, traditional design and mass manufacturing practices have been extremely valuable since the Industrial Revolution  REVOLUTION and are unlikely to disappear in the future. Although the threat to the dominant technologies and practices may seem implausible, open design presents a clear alternative that may grow strong once it reaches a critical mass in the right socio-economic conditions. Open design is not a threat to designers’ livelihood. Quite the contrary; it opens new vistas and new opportunities and is likely to generate increased consumer appreciation of the role of designers. Moreover, it is likely to bring designers closer to the intended and unintended applications of their designs. Grand opportunities also imply undeveloped land. There is much development to do in all four layers of open design – the object, process, practice and infrastructure layers. To a large extent, the discourse mirrors the field; the most immediate attention is required in shaping practices and laying the foundations of the support infrastructures.

Conclusion

It has been suggested that open design stands for accessible design in the form of blueprints that are publicly open to view, modify and use under open-access terms. Moreover, open design often implies that the design blueprints are available via open-access digital repositories, that they can be adapted at will to meet situational requirements, and that they can be used by consumers to fabricate products on demand by commercial, off-the-shelf means of production.  DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN Open design is generative. It is conducive to continuous re-design, adaption, refinement and extension. Open design is a potent elixir that mitigates stagnation and awakens generative action.

Jos de Mul

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

Design as Open Design

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

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

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

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

Making Almost Anything

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

Design as Metadesign

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

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

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

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

Designing Models

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

The Tower of Babel

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

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

Designability

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

Paul Atkinson

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

Back to the Future

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

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

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

DO IT YOURSELF CAN BE SEEN AS: PRODUCTIVE LEISURE.

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

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

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

Orchestral Manoeuvres

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

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

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

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

Future Factories

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

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

Generative Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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