Soenke Zehle

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

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

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

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

Open Source Design

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

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

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

→ co.xmlab.org

Paulo Hartmann

As the environmental crisis grows ever more urgent, an awareness of ecological values is spreading. Overtly eco-friendly trends run rampant in corporate communications and marketing, plastering buzzwords like ‘sustainability’ all over every conceivable campaign and industry. Despite the hype, the growing eco-consciousness is a truly interesting movement that deserves attention for its simplicity, as well as the reutilization processes it inspires. DIY is good, but DIWAMS – ‘Do It With Already Made Stuff’ – is infinitely better.

Some Brazilian co-design pioneers have been promoting DIWAMS methodology for quite some time. Augusto Cintrangulo is a good example. ¹ His Volcano project creates toys, musical instruments and games from wear-resistant and long-lasting packaging, delaying its entry into the garbage cycle.  RECYCLING In addition, this post-consumer packaging project includes workshops where children and adults learn how to build the products. Thanks to Augusto’s innovative, well-designed building process, no glue or stamps are used in the assembly of most of the planes, animals, cars and toy figures.

After creating tons of toys and a fully developed methodology with this innovative process, Augusto has now created a new project, Banco Sinuoso (Winding Bench), ² built from the unused pieces of MDF spares from furniture manufacturers that use FSC-certified wood. Banco Sinuoso recently won bronze at the Prêmio Senai-SP Excellence Design Awards, exhibiting at the Senai-SP Design Show 2010 hosted by FIESP, the São Paulo Federation of Industries, and Senai-SP, the São Paulo branch of the National Service for Industrial Training. Banco Sinuoso is a modular system that can be used in public spaces. The modules are made from FSC-certified wood and finished with a water-based varnish. ³

Another Brazilian eco-designer who has successfully applied the DIWAMS concept is Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, a businessman that built the flotation system for his boat from 2040 recycled  RECYCLING PET bottles. ⁴ Both designers view the educational layer of their projects as an intrinsic and crucial aspect, and frequently give workshops and lectures in local communities.

It would seem that DIY  DIY culture and open source are not the only trends that will guide the following Industrial Revolution. The DIWAMS concept, ‘Do It With Already Made Stuff’,  REMIX deserves due consideration here as well. DIWAMS design not only adds new recyclable material – which is a basic principle these days, almost mandatory – but also emphasizes re-using what is already there.

Roel Kaassen Peter Troxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve done it once; it was quite fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You say this as an expert in design?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Troxler

In today’s society, individuals often collaborate in producing cultural content, knowledge, and other information, as well as physical goods. In some cases, these individuals share the results and products, the means, methods and experience gained from this collaboration as a resource for further development; CO-CREATION this phenomenon is referred to as commons-based peer production.

Commons-based peer production is most widely practiced in the area of software development: open source software. The most prominent examples of open source software are the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Open source is not the exclusive domain of software, however; it has spread into other domains, from culture and education to knowledge discovery  KNOWLEDGE and sharing. Examples include the many people who use Creative Commons licences, CREATIVE COMMONS the Blender movies, VEB Film Leipzig, the countless initiatives in open education, the SETI@home project, Wikipedia, Open Street Map, or Slashdot. Commons-based peer production is generally attributed to digital revolutions: the widespread availability of new, digital information technologies. ¹

While its origins can indeed be traced back to digital development, commons-based peer production goes beyond the purely digital domain. A number of open source hardware projects currently aim to produce tangible goods through a peer-production approach, not to mention ‘fabbing’ initiatives (abbreviated from fabrication) that seek to make it possible for anyone to manufacture their own goods.

Perhaps these initiatives are emerging because many “physical activities are becoming so data-centric that the physical aspects are simply executional steps at the end of a chain of digital manipulation”, as Shirky suggests. ² Then again, perhaps the commons-based peer production model “provides opportunities for virtuous behavior” and so “is more conducive to virtuous individuals”. ³

Yochai Benkler argues that “in the networked information economy – an economy of information, knowledge, and culture that flow through society over a ubiquitous, decentralized network – productivity and growth can be sustained in a pattern that differs fundamentally from the industrial information economy of the twentieth century in two crucial characteristics. First, non-market production (…) can play a much more important role than it could in the physical economy. Second, radically decentralized production and distribution, whether market-based or not, can similarly play a much more important role”. ⁴ TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

The business, or rather, the benefits of commons-based peer-production are not uniquely monetary. ⁵ The rewards include indirect mechanisms, such as the positive effects of learning on future earnings or enhanced reputation, which in turn can lead to future (paid) contracts for consultancy, customization, maintenance or other services. The business also includes what economists call hedonic rewards: not consumption, but the act of creation gives pleasure to the prosumers. Peer recognition is another physiological reward, involving ego gratification. This part of the business is an exchange of production for consumption that does not rely on monetary means.

Open Source Hardware

Since 2006, Philip Torrone and Limor ‘Ladyada’ Fried have been curating Make Magazine’s definitive guide to open source hardware projects MANIFESTOS that started out as a holiday season spending guide to ‘gifts that give back’. ⁶ Under the heading Million Dollar Baby – probably alluding to the underdog nature of open source hardware – they presented fifteen examples of companies at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp East in May 2010:

Adafruit Industries, makers of educational electronic kits; Arduino, the open source computing platform; Beagle Board, a manufacturer of open development boards for computers; Bug Labs, known for their modular Lego-type computer hardware; Chumby, standalone Internet content viewers; Dangerous Prototypes, Dutch hackers turned entrepreneurs who sell an open source reverse engineering tool; DIY Drones, for open source unmanned aerial vehicles (autopilot drones); Evil Mad Scientist Labs and their fun educational projects; Liquidware, who make Arduino accessories; Makerbot Industries, the company behind MakerBot 3D printers and the sharing platform Thingiverse.com; Maker Shed, the shop behind Make Magazine and Maker Fair; Parallax, education in microcontroller programming and interfacing; Seed Studios, for Chinese Arduino derivatives; Solarbotics, for solar kits, robot kits and BEAM robotics; Spark Fun Electronics, for education and prototyping electronics products.

All these companies are selling open source hardware and creating some kind of community around them. Together, they generate a turnover of about US$ 50m, or so Torrone and Limor estimate. They reckon that there are currently about 200 open source hardware projects of a similar kind. The open source hardware community will reach a turnover of US$ 1b by 2015, according to the forecasts made by Torrone and Limor. Some of these communities have seen exponential growth recently, such as the RepRap community. ⁷

Kerstin Balka, Christina Raasch and Cornelius Herstatt went to great lengths to collect examples of open source hardware projects through Open-Innovation-Projects.org. In 2009, their database consisted of 106 entries, 76 of which were truly open development of physical products, or open design. Open design as defined on that site is characterized by revealing information on a new design free of charge, with the intention of collaborative development of a single design or a limited number of related designs for market exploitation. Among others, their database includes community projects such as Openmoko, Fab@home, OpenEEG, One Laptop Per Child, SOCIAL DESIGN Mikrokopter, or RepRap.

it is naïve to believe that open source software practices could be copied to and applied in the open design realm without any alteration, ignoring the constraints and opportunities of materiality.

Balka, Raasch and Herstatt used this database of open design projects for statistical studies to identify similarities and differences in open source software projects. ⁸ They found that, “in open design communities, tangible objects can be developed in very similar fashion to software; one could even say that people treat a design as source code to a physical object and change the object via changing the source”. ⁹ However, they also find that “open parts strategies in open design are crafted at the component level, rather than the level of the entire design” ¹⁰ and that “the degree of openness differs significantly between software and hardware components, in the sense that software is more transparent, accessible, and replicable than hardware”. ¹¹ WYS ≠ WYG Indeed, despite the many academic discussions that support such a view, it is naïve to believe that open source software practices could be copied to and applied in the open design realm without any alteration, ignoring the constraints and opportunities that the materiality of design entails.

Fabbing

Besides these single-aim or single-product projects, there are other initiatives promoting commons-based peer production primarily by sharing designs and encouraging people to ‘make things’. Some are about making things for the fun of it;  GRASSROOTS INVENTION the Maker Faire in the USA, Make Magazine and Craft Magazine are all good examples. Some initiatives are about easy sharing, distribution and promotion, such as Ponoko, Shapeways and Thingiverse. Others involve more serious or more ambitious social experiments, such as the Open Source Ecology with their experimental facility, Factor E Farm. ¹²

And there are initiatives of commons-based peer production that could be summarized under the heading of ‘shared machine shops’. ¹³  These initiatives are typically centred around workshops equipped with hand tools and relatively inexpensive fabrication machines (e.g. laser cutters, routers, 3D mills). Users produce two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects that once could have only been made using equipment costing hundreds of thousands of euros. They use digital drawings and open source software to control the machines, and they build electronic circuits and gadgets.

100k-Garages is “a community of workshops with digital fabrication tools for precisely cutting, machining, drilling, or sculpting the parts for your project or product, in all kinds of materials, in a shop or garage near you”. ¹⁴ Most of these workshops are located in the USA and Canada (about 180), with five shops in Europe and two in Australia. 100k-Garages are essentially establishing a network of distributed manufacturing shops that produce their users’ designs for a fee. They are providing a professional manufacturing service, rather than offering shop access for makers to make their own things themselves. Through quality of workmanship and standardization of equipment – the network is sponsored by ShopBot Industries, a maker of CNC routers – they are establishing a platform which guarantees the making end of it and frees users to focus on design. Ponoko, one of the preferred sharing platforms, enables further exchange.

TechShop is a group of workshops that are equipped with typical machine shop tools (welding stations, laser cutters, milling machines) and corresponding design software. TechShops are mainly based on the ‘gym model’: a monthly subscription buys users access to tools, machines, design software, and other professional equipment. Courses on how to use the tools are offered, too, for a fee. Located in Menlo Park, San Francisco and San Jose, CA, Raleigh, NC, Portland, OR, and Detroit, MI, they cater to a US-based clientele. ¹⁵ Chris Anderson describes them as an “incubator for the atom age”; ¹⁶ according to his account, the facilities are mainly used by entrepreneurs who come to a TechShop for prototyping and small batch production. The online member project gallery, however, shows such diverse projects as a 3D scan of an alligator skeleton, custom-made sports equipment, movie props, a laser-cut gauge for bamboo needles, a laser-etched laptop and an infrared heater for an arthritic dog.

Hackerspaces are another venue where peer production takes place, self-defined “as community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects”. ¹⁷ Emerging from the counterculture movement, ¹⁸ they are “place[s] where people can learn about technology and science outside the confines of work or school”. ¹⁹ Equipment and funding are collective endeavours.

A hackerspace might use a combination of membership contributions, course fees, donations and subsidies to sustain itself. Activities in hackerspaces evolve around computers and technology, and digital or electronic art. Hackerspaces are founded as local initiatives following a common pattern. The Hackerspaces ecosystem comprises several hundred member locations world-wide, of which roughly half are either dormant or under construction. ²⁰ Becoming a hackerspace is essentially a matter of self-declaration – an entry on the hackerspaces.org wiki is sufficient – which lowers the barrier to entry enormously, at least for advanced computer users. However, this low barrier to entry is probably also the reason for the relatively large number of ‘registered’ but dormant hackerspaces. Collaboration  CO-CREATION between Hackerspaces has recently begun in the form of ‘hackathons’; these marathon sessions currently do not seem to extend beyond displaying the activities happening at the spaces taking part. ²¹

the open source label confers a certain coolness in some circles of a gadget-crazy world.

Fab Lab, short for fabrication laboratory, is another global initiative with a growing number of locations around the world. Fab Labs have a more conceptual foundation, as they emerged from an MIT course entitled ‘How To Make (almost) Anything’. ²² While there is no formal procedure on how to become a Fab Lab, the process is monitored by MIT, and MIT maintains a list of all Fab Labs worldwide. At the moment of writing, the Fab Lab community COMMUNITY comprises about sixty labs, with another fifty to open in the not-too-distant future. There are a few collaborative projects within the community, and a number of initiatives to exchange designs and experience between the labs. Similar to the hackathons, but occurring more regularly and systematically, all the labs around the world can get in contact with each other through a common video conferencing system hosted at the MIT which is used for ad-hoc meetings, scheduled conferences and the delivery of the Fab Academy training programme.

Academic publications note a number of examples of Fab Lab projects. Mikhak and colleagues report on projects in India, at Vigyan Ashram Fab Lab just outside the village of Pabal in Maharashtra, and at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology in San Jose, Costa Rica. The projects in India are about developing controller boards to facilitate more accurate timing of the diesel engines they use to generate electrical power, and developing devices to monitor milk quality not at the collection centres and the processing plants, but at the producer level. The Costa Rican projects revolve around wireless diagnostic modules for agricultural, educational and medical applications, for example monitoring a certain skin condition in a rural village. ²³ SOCIAL DESIGN

In FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop, Neil Gershenfeld lists examples of what students at MIT made in his course on ‘How to Make (almost) Anything’. The list includes a bag that collects and replays screams, a computer interface for parrots that can be controlled by a bird using its beak, a personalized bike frame, a cow-powered generator, an alarm clock that needs to be wrestled with to turn it off, and a defensive dress that protects its wearer’s personal space. ²⁴

Arne Gjengedal reports on the early projects at the Norwegian MIT Fab Lab at Solvik farm in Lyngen. His list includes the ‘electronic shepard’ (sic) project that used telecom equipment  RECYCLING to track sheep in the mountains, the ‘helmet wiper’ for clearing the face shield in the rain, the ‘wideband antenna’ for the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio band, the ‘Internet 0’ project for a low-bandwidth internet protocol, the ‘perfect antenna’, and the ‘local position system’ for positioning of robots in the lab. ²⁵

Diane Pfeiffer describes her own experiments and projects in the context of distributed digital design. Her experiments were Lasercut News, Digital Color Studies & Pixelated Images, Lasercut Screen, and Lasercut Bracelets (which she sold at a local shop); the projects she worked on were Distorted Chair and Asperatus Tile. ²⁶

The Business Promise

All those initiatives represent various aspects of a commons-based peer production ecosystem (non-market or radically decentralized production) or are at least contributing to the emergence of such an ecosystem.

Torrone and Fried have shown how a regular and sizeable market has grown around open source hardware. Those open source hardware businesses clearly operate under market conditions and their production is not radically decentralized. Indeed, Torrone and Fried’s agenda might even be said to ‘prove’ that open source hardware results in marketable products. Evidently, the open source label confers a certain coolness in some circles of a gadget-crazy world.  OPEN EVERYTHING

Yet many of these open source hardware components – Arduino and MakerBot being the most prominent examples – are providing open source ingredients to a peer production ecosystem at a price that outweighs the pain of sourcing all the parts, having to deal with manual assembly, or facing issues of incompatibility. As components, they can become building blocks of higher-order machines. In that sense, they function as a platform for open source development. As far as the components themselves are concerned, they are open source in the sense that their internal structure and functioning are made transparent and potentially modifiable.  BLUEPRINTS

As flat-packed, self-assembly, open source machines, they are the choice of many peer-producers and form an important basis for highly decentralized – and highly customized – production. It becomes possible to own machines at the price of building them rather than the price of buying them pre-assembled. DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN And their open source nature makes it easier to adapt them to specific requirements or even repurpose them in novel ways.

Rather than commoditizing ingredients, 100k-Garages commoditize one part of the making process: the cutting. If there is a dense enough network of such facilities in any particular region, this makes a certain practical sense in terms of efficiency and safety, given the somewhat demanding fabrication process of a ShopBot CNC router as compared to a laser cutter. However, it establishes a division of labour, and it deprives user-clients from accessing potential learning experiences and therefore potentially contributing to a more general commons. The result is that the ShopBot remains a commons apart, and somewhat closed at that.

TechShops, Hackerspaces and Fab Labs are all providing facilities and knowledge as part or rather as a basis of a commons. The environment in which TechShops operate is strictly commercial. Peer production might happen by accident, but there seem to be no incentives to support it. As an ‘incubator for the atomic age’, they remain safely in the market arena, yet they are effectively creating opportunities for decentralized prototyping and production.

In contrast, Hackerspaces live up to their name, definition and history by building on non-market, sometimes even anti-market  MANIFESTOS commons-based principles. Their core focus is doing personal and collective projects. And Hackerspaces are far from exclusive; they frequently include casual users who might spend a lot of time in hackerspaces. Nick Farr even speculates that those casual users are “perhaps making more significant contributions than regular members, but decline to officially join for many different reasons.” ²⁷

The Fab Labs’ commitment to a commons is clear from how they are structured. Fab Labs subscribe to a charter which, among other things, stipulates open access, establishes peer learning as a core feature and requires that “designs and processes developed in fab labs must remain available for individual use”. In the same clause, however, the charter also allows for intellectual property to be protected “however you choose”. Underlining this point, it explicitly continues that “commercial activities can be incubated in fab labs”, while cautioning against potential conflict with open access, and encouraging business activity to grow beyond the lab and to give back to the inventors, labs, and networks that contributed to their success. ²⁸ Fab Labs incorporate an interesting mix of characteristics that might seem contradictory at first, but might well be considered the best practical approximation of Benkler’s networked information economy.  TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

‘Libraries’ of the Peer Production Era

The fabbing universe could be described on two dimensions, characterizing initiatives as more reproductive or more generative in their nature, and as more infrastructure-oriented or more-project oriented in their approach.

Books, Libraries, and the Choices of Self-Directed Productivity

Open source hardware – as components or production equipment – not only embodies the technical knowledge of products and production the way that traditional components and machines once did. In sharp contrast to the opaque and impenetrable black boxes of advanced 20th-century engineering,  WYS ≠ WYG they give users access to that knowledge as a result of their open source design. Akin to books, which seem meaningless to people who cannot read, but open their content to those who have achieved literacy, open source hardware reveals its technicalities to those who grasp that language.

If open source hardware can be compared to the ‘books’ of commons-based peer production, then TechShops, Hackerspaces and Fab Labs are its libraries. Traditional libraries act as common points of access to knowledge coded in books, and in fact offer locations where knowledge can be produced. Similarly, copy shops allow anybody to produce their own range of print products, from cards to books, T-shirts and mugs. Cyber-cafés also provide access to knowledge, as locations where everybody can link into a common information and communication infrastructure. Those new labs are the places that provide general access to the tools, methods and experience of peer production. Indeed, the National Fab Lab Bill presented to the US Congress in 2010 EVENT argues along these lines, aiming “to foster a new generation with scientific and engineering skills and to provide a workforce capable of producing world class individualized and traditional manufactured goods”. ²⁹

The business proposals of open source hardware and the various fabbing initiatives are not equally straightforward in every case. As discussed, commons-based peer production has found ways to generate monetary returns by selling open source products, charging memberships fees in open source communities, or providing paid education and manufacturing services. To some extent, the strong appeal of commons-based peer production can probably be attributed in part to its hedonic rewards: the pleasure of being creative, the pride of recognition by peers, the feeling of achievement and status. However, there are no clear examples of indirect mechanisms deriving tangible benefits from these hedonic rewards, such as makers getting corporate development assignments or contracts as product managers thanks to their reputation in open hardware design. If such examples exist, they are not being discussed openly. And commons-based peer production has yet to realize its potential as a platform for many more developers and producers to generate a substantial income under market or non-market conditions.

As Yochai Benkler notes, it is “important to see that these efforts mark the emergence of a new mode of production, one that was mostly unavailable to people in either the physical economy (…) or in the industrial information economy.” ³⁰ The initiatives of commons-based peer production give more people more control over their productivity in self-directed and community-oriented ways. The variety of the initiatives give people a range of fundamentally different options to choose from, and indeed requires them to make those choices instead of accepting a mode of consumption that has been predetermined by a lobby of the current “winners in the economic system of the previous century.” ³¹

Even if the emergence of open source hardware and fabbing initiatives only dates back a few decades, commons-based peer production is still in its early days. Nobody knows yet whether the one and only correct, long-lasting and sustainable approach to this new mode of production has been found yet – or even if such a uniform approach will ever emerge.
REVOLUTION It seems much more likely that the current trend will develop into a plethora of different models that embrace various aspects of commons-based peer production, with users switching between different models as appropriate. It will be interesting to see whether and how traditional businesses will be able to adapt to a new reality of real prosumer choice.

John Thackara

In 1909, Peter Kropotkin was asked whether it was possible to learn a trade as difficult as gardening from books. “Yes, it is possible,” he replied, “but a necessary condition of success, in work on the land, is communicativeness – continual friendly intercourse with your neighbours.”

Although a book can offer good general advice, Kropotkin explained, every acre of land is unique. Each plot is shaped by the soil, its topography and biodiversity, the wind and water systems of the locality, and so on. “Growing in these unique circumstances can only be learned by local residents over many seasons,” the aristocratic anarchist concluded. “The knowledge which has developed in a given locality, that is necessary for survival, is the result of collective experience.” ¹

The biosphere, our only home, is itself a kind of garden – and we have not looked after it well. On the contrary, we have damaged many of the food and water systems that keep us alive, and wasted vast amounts of non-renewable resources.  TREND: SCARCITY OF RESOURCES One of the main reasons we’ve damaged our own life-support system is that we under-value the kinds of socially created knowledge Kropotkin wrote about. Ongoing attempts to privatize nature, and the over-specialization of knowledge in our universities, continue to render us blind to the consequences of our own actions.

Openness, in short, is more than a commercial and cultural issue. It’s a matter of survival. Systemic challenges such as climate change, or resource depletion – these ‘problems of moral bankruptcy’ – cannot be solved using the same techniques that caused them in the first place. Open research, open governance and open design are preconditions for the continuous, collaborative, social mode of enquiry and action that are needed.

For centuries, the pursuit of knowledge  KNOWLEDGE was undertaken in open and collaborative processes. Science, for example, developed as a result of peer review in an open and connected global community. Software, too, has flourished as a result of social creativity in what Yochai Benckler has named ‘commons-based peer production’. ² These approaches stand in stark contrast to the legacy left by the industrial economy – from cars to power stations – which depends on a command-and-control business model and militant copyright protection. The internet may have made it easier, technically, to share ideas and knowledge – but an immense global army of rights owners and attendant lawyers works tirelessly to protect this closed system of production.

Openness, in short, is more than a commercial and cultural issue. It’s a matter of survival.

The open design experiments you will read about in this book – such as the 60 Fab Labs in operation as we go to press – are nodes within an alternative industrial system that is now emerging. These are the “small, open, local and connected” experiments that environmental designer Ezio Manzini views as defining features of a sustainable economy. ³

Open design is more than just a new way to create products. As a process, and as a culture, open design also changes relationships among the people who make, use and look after things. Unlike proprietary or branded products, open solutions tend to be easy to maintain and  TREND: GLOBALIZATION repair locally. They are the opposite of the short-lived, use-and-discard, two-wash-two-wear model of mainstream consumer products. As you will read in the pages that follow, “nobody with a MakerBot will ever have to buy shower curtain rings again”. ⁴

Another open source manifesto states, “Don’t judge an object for what it is, but imagine what it could become.” This clarion call is welcome – but it does not promise an easy ride for open design. Our world is littered with the unintended outcomes of design actions, and open design is unlikely to be an exception. For example, 90% of the resources taken out of the ground today become waste within three months – and it’s not axiomatic that open design will improve that situation.  RECYCLING On the contrary, it’s logically possible that a network of Fab Labs could produce the open source equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV. The long-term value of open design will depend on the questions it is asked to address.

An important priority for open source design, therefore, is to develop decision-making processes to identify and prioritize those questions. What, in other words, should open designers design? All our design decisions, from here on, need to take into account our natural, industrial and cultural systems – and the interactions between them – as the context for our creative efforts. We need to consider the sustainability of material and energy flows in all the systems and artefacts we design. In reading the articles and case studies that follow in this book, I am confident that these caveats will be embraced by the smart and fascinating pioneers of open design who are doing such fascinating work. Crowds may be wise – but they still need designers.

GUIYU IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST E-WASTE CENTRES OF THE WORLD ➝ FROM BEST DESIGN TO JUST DESIGN / TOMMI LAITIO

PHOTO: BERT VAN DIJK. MORE IMAGES OF GUIYU ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ZILPHO/2994217039/

A LOT OF INTERNATIONAL BRANDED GADGETS END UP ILLEGALLY IN GUIYU

PHOTO: BERT VAN DIJK. MORE IMAGES OF GUIYU ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ZILPHO/2994217039/

E-WASTE

PHOTO: BERT VAN DIJK. MORE IMAGES OF GUIYU ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ZILPHO/2994217039/

THIS MAN DISASSEMBLES PLASTIC WASTE TO TRY TO RESELL IT

PHOTO: BERT VAN DIJK. MORE IMAGES OF GUIYU ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ZILPHO/2994217039/

GEEK RECYCLING: LASER-ETCHED CIRCUIT BOARD CLOCK, BY JOE

COURTESY OF WWW.GEEKGEARSTORE.COM

EXPORTING BEER MINUS WASTE: HEINEKEN WOBO BOTTLE, 1963

COURTESY OF HEINEKEN INTERNATIONAL

WHY WASN’T WOBO SUCCESSFUL?

COURTESY OF HEINEKEN INTERNATIONAL

MIELE SPACE STATION, 2012 ARCHITECTEN

2012ARCHITECTEN, ROTTERDAM ➝ WWW.2012ARCHITECTEN.NL

MIELE SPACE STATION (DETAIL) ➝ FROM BEST DESIGN TO JUST DESIGN / TOMMI LAITIO

2012ARCHITECTEN, ROTTERDAM ➝ WWW.2012ARCHITECTEN.NL

FREITAG BAG FROM RECYCLED TRUCK TARPAULIN ➝ DIWAMS / PAULO HARTMANN

PHOTO: ROBAN KRAMER ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/ROBANHK

MAARTEN BAAS: A CRUEL WAY TO RECYCLE A RIETVELD ZIG ZAG CHAIR

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…ZIG ZAG CHAIR (RIETVELD) WWW.MAARTENBAAS.COM , PHOTOGRAPHY: DANE JENSEN

The 20th century was the unfortunate era of hyper- consumerism. You know the stats: basically, the world is ending, and we, the insatiable consumers of the world, are at fault. Traditionally, there are two solutions for what to do with all the junk we buy and collect. You can dispose of it, or you can store it. Yet both options bring their own set of troubles, be it overflowing landfills or premium rent on storage.

Michelle Thorne

As Bruce Sterling says, every moment devoted to stumbling over and tending to your piled debris are precious hours in our mortal lives, and time not spent with family, friends, your community, yourself. The things you own end up owning you.¹ So, with all this doom and gloom, is there any reasonable way to take action?Can we even make ACTIVISM a difference? There is one clear advantage we have in our generation: the power of the network.

We can leverage our networks. Unlike any generation that came before, we can provide and share infrastructure better thanks to network technology. We can buy, build, and collaborate locally and efficiently. We can shop smarter, share better, and use our networks, both online and off, to reduce waste, improve the economy and environment, and spare our bank accounts, and even have a good time and make new friends doing it. COMMUNITY

That’s Collaborative Consumption

Think about co-working spaces, for example. You can rent a desk and share office infrastructure together with fellow digital nomads. No one, besides the people who actually run the space, have to own any of the equipment, and even they can lease or rent it from other companies. A huge advantage of a co-working space is that it makes it easy and attractive to share these resources, and by doing so, they make it more efficient (and let’s be honest, more fun and social) for all of the people working here.

Let’s think about other types of resources. Who needs to actually own a moving van? Not many folks. That’s why services like Robben & Wientjes, a moving truck rental company in Berlin, are successful. The same holds true for platforms like the US-based car sharing service Zipcar, or airbnb and Couchsurfing – or even the Bahn bikes, Mitfahrgelegenheit, and stuff-sharing sites like NeighborGoods.² All of the many, many sites out there now make it easy to offer, find, and share goods and services: flexibly, agilely, and socially. SHARE

Here’s another example: the common household drill. Do you own a drill? If so, can you even remember the last time you used it? Did you know that on average, a household drill is used a total of just 5-10 min its entire lifetime? That gives you what, like 20 holes max? Is that really an efficient object to purchase, maintain, and care for? What if instead of all that time it spent idling on the shelf, it could be generating value, either by renting it out for cash or just helping out a neighbour?

Products like household drills, or moving vans, or a bike in a city you’re visiting aren’t necessarily desirable to own. Instead, isn’t it just better to access them? Aren’t the rights to use and access more important than owning it? This is a mantra for our times, for the century of collaborative consumption: Wealth as a whole consists in using things rather than in owning them. ³

Design Challenges

Here are a few design challenges for collaborative consumption:

Create open layers. Think about interoperability across key components. How can you use open standards to enable remixing, modification, and improvements across products? REMIX How can open layers be applied to motors, power cords, outlets, connectors, joints, nibs for maximal customization and range of use?

Build modularity. Similarly, shared objects should be easytorepair REPAIR andmodify.Youshouldn’thaveto throw away your entire phone because it’s scratched. Building modularity means fostering generativity.

Value added through usage. I think this is one of the most powerful design challenges. Think about an object that doesn’t depreciate with use, but is instead improved by it. One example is a baseball mitt. When you first buy it, it’s very stiff and hard to catch a ball with. Over time, with use, it becomes more flexible and a better product. That’s just on the physical layer. What about value added on a data layer? Think about how objects can learn from behaviours the more they’re used. Like by collecting more data points. Or where the user contributes metadata, like marginalia, reviews, and fact-checking for books.

Personalize shared objects. Are you familiar with these phones that hold multiple SIM cards? Those are really common in places like Africa where one device is used by multiple people. Each person inserts their own SIM card and all their address books and personal settings are ready for them. The personalization follows the user, not the device. Can we apply this to other devices and services? Cars, printers, refrigerator, coffee machines, or even drills?

Diversify libraries. Libraries are not just for books. Think about other ways to pool resources, be it for commercial or community aims. You could have libraries of tools, or libraries of electronics, cooking appliances, moving boxes, jewellery and accessories, holiday decorations, toys, you name it. BLUEPRINTS It has huge potential. There are many business opportunities here, as well as many challenges to be solved by creative and adventurous people.

Let’s break the mould. Don’t design for the dump. RECYCLING Don’t design for 20th-century hyperconsumption. Design for things to last, to be shared, and to be part of the future: a future of collaborative consumption.

Link: coworking.com