Maria Neicu

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adopt and Improve

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

→ UNLIMITEDDESIGNCONTEST.ORG

Neal Gorenflo

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

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

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

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

Learning from Car-sharing

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

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

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

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

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

→ shareable.net/

Jürgen Neumann

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

Why can’t we just use any copyleft license?

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

How does it work?

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

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

Four Freedoms

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

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

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

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

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

Who owns it?

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

→ www.ohanda.org

Daniel Saakes

At the beginning of the 20th century, when standardization successfully separated design from manufacturing, a new profession emerged: the industrial designer. Industrial designers cater to mass production by making trade-offs between engineering, human factors, design constraints and marketing. Today, new ways of manufacturing and distribution are emerging that can effectively scale mass manufacturing down to small series of products marketed over the internet, or even unique products manufactured at home.

With these modern methods of fabrication and distribution, end users will participate as designers, and producers will be able to make their own trade-offs. It would not be overstating the matter to say that the traditional skills of the industrial designer will change fundamentally.

As an experiment, I designed a lamp, in the form of an ‘IKEA hack’.  HACKING DESIGN IKEA hackers are people that repurpose IKEA products to create personalized objects. In contrast to ‘everyday creativity’, ¹ they share their results online. Due to the standardization STANDARDS and global availability of IKEA products, hacks can be reproduced by other people anywhere in the world. I shared  SHARE my lamp design online on the Instructables website, a popular place to share everyday knowledge and skills.

For me, sharing the design turned out to be more challenging than making the design. I was designing not only for users, but also for makers. I wanted to take into account the availability of materials and the level of expertise that my makers would have, with the aim of designing for optimal reproducibility. What, for instance, are globally available, safe ways of connecting electrical wires?  WYS ≠ WYG Reading the online discussions and comments posted by people making the lamp made me realize my responsibility.

I was amazed by the amount of people willing to void warranty, who felt confident that they would successfully be able to reproduce a lamp design that they found on the internet. After all, DIY disasters cannot be returned to the store. Also, I was surprised to find that makers made my lamp exactly as I had designed. I had secretly hoped to see new solutions and adaptations to the posted design.  REMIX Then again, it is possible that makers had no incentive to adapt the design, or no incentive to share designs online. ²

Similar to the way that IKEA hacks adapt existing products, desktop manufacturing will give end users the tools to make professionally produced products tailored to their preferences, without the need for compromises aimed at satisfying a large market.  DOWNLOADABLE Currently, the design software to cater these technologies remains in the realm of professionals. The challenge is in adapting the software to the end user’s needs, ensuring design freedom and including validation of engineering and human factors; SketchChair.cc is an example of how these parameters can be incorporated. Desktop manufacturing facilitate user confidence, allowing designers to benefit from many iterations and affordable prototyping.

The challenge for the industrial designer will thus be in metadesign: designing for the ‘new’ designer: the empowered end user. Traditional designers will design the tools and techniques to support end users, as the designers and makers of the products they need, want and desire.

→ www.ikeahackers.net

→ www.sketchchair.com

→ www.instructables.com/id/Big-lamps-from-Ikea-lampan-lamps

André Knörig, Jonathan Cohen, Reto Wettach

Fritzing is an open source project with the aim of supporting designers, artists and hobbyists (i.e. ‘non-engineers’) to work creatively with interactive electronics. As computer processing power moves away from the desktop and ‘into the cloud’, it becomes useful and important to ensure that this resource is made accessible to tinkerers all over the world.

Originally a research project, Fritzing is now actively used by more than 10,000 people to document their electronic prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in the classroom, and create PCB layouts for professional manufacturing.

Fritzing’s most important contribution to design is that it gives its practitioners a common, familiar ‘language’ in which to document and exchange their ideas. COMMUNITY At Fritzing, we call this the ‘breadboard view’; it is simply an abstract, but clearly recognizable software version of the way many of our practitioners work in the real world: with a breadboard, chips, and wires. Because these images are easier to interpret than photographs, Fritzing sketches are now used on sites like Arduino.cc or Instructables.com – and in the project gallery at Fritzing.org.  SHARE

Beyond facilitating the sharing of knowledge, a major goal of Fritzing is to enable production. In the case of electronics, this means designing and manufacturing printed circuit boards, a skill that has so far been reserved for professionals. Fritzing lets a beginner AMATEURISSIMO seamlessly translate a breadboard sketch into a PCB design (and schematic design, if needed), ready to be sent to a production house or made at home. Additionally, we are setting up our own fabrication service that will eventually make it possible for users to order designs created by other users.

Fritzing is almost as open as it gets, in every respect. The software itself is open source, uses open standards and file formats (SVG, XML), can be used within an ecology of other open tools (such as Arduino, Wiring and Inkscape), and offers open access through online learning materials (under CC licences).  OPEN EVERYTHING

Building on this foundation, Fritzing encourages open sharing of knowledge, from basic electronics to complete documentation for completed projects. Openness is hardwired into the structure of Fritzing: there is a ‘sharing’ button in the software, and Fritzing include rich export options and an online project gallery. We are committing to bringing about a culture in which sharing is self-evident, simply because it is easy and useful for everybody.

In another context, we think of Fritzing as a tool for democratizing production. By putting the tools of the industry into the hands of the people, we hope to open up the discussion of our technological future. People should not take the outcomes of the industrial process for granted. Rather, they should participate critically in shaping our culture, by creating their own objects as alternatives.

→ fritzing.org

Mushon Zer-Aviv

I have been teaching open source design since 2008, in an attempt to figure out whether it can even exist. This article is an opportunity for me to reflect on and share my latest failures and successes in teaching what has yet to be learned.

I was first exposed to the open source world as a user of some free software; it was only later that I was introduced to the idealistic arguments about Freedoms, ACTIVISM as a more abstract principle. This combination of collaborative work and individual autonomy intrigued me. Coders were developing appealing political structures that were fostering creativity, collaboratively. I envied that degree of creative freedom; as a designer, I live in fear of ‘design by committee’.

Don’t designers know how great free collaboration can be? Are they too afraid of trying? Do they just need a helping hand? Or is the problem that what works for code just doesn’t really translate into the design process?

Inspired by these initiatives, I started my own open source project, co-founding ShiftSpace.org; I took part as a designer, collaborating with Dan Phiffer, a coder. It was my enthusiasm about open development that inspired me, but I was surprised to find that this excitement was not shared by my fellow designers. Don’t designers know how great free collaboration OPEN EVERYTHING can be? Are they too afraid of trying? Do they just need a helping hand? Or is the problem that what works for code just doesn’t really translate into the design process?

I set out to answer these questions, but trawling through online resources did not yield enough satisfactory writing on the subject. Many discussions confused sharing with collaboration,  CO-CREATION or were trying to advocate the use of open graphics software for purely ideological reasons. These arguments did not convince me; I was fairly sure that the ideological stance of coders could not be the only element that makes ‘Free Software’ such a desirable practice. Similarly, there is no intrinsic sociable instinct that leads coders to one another. The networked collaborative model of Free Software for coding is pragmatically the best way to go; any other way just makes much less sense. In this context, ideological reasons are secondary to simple pragmatism.

An Open Design Lab, with My Students as Lab Rats

It might be that we just haven’t found the right way to transcend the design process; it’s not as if we’ve tried all that hard yet. Art and design schools still nurture the image of the genius  DESIGNERS as an individual artist. Originality is rewarded as a higher standard than com-munication, and copying is considered a sin. I figured the classroom would be the first place to start, so I proposed a class for the Parsons School for Design entitled Open Source Design. I assumed that our exploration of design based on Free Software methods should probably start with interface design, since interface is an integral part of most of the software we use. My hope was that I would be able to convince my students to contribute their design skills to some projects – have them get hands-on experience working on real projects while actually making some actual (and much-needed) contributions to Free Software.

To drive home the point about collaboration (and to scare off any students who might not be ready for the bumpy ride), I decided to kick off the first class with some bold statements:

“In this class, we’re going to explore the possibilities of Open Source Design while learning HTML, CSS & WordPress theming. However, I should warn you that I don’t have much experience in HTML & CSS, and I will practically be learning WordPress for the first time along with you guys.”

You can imagine the looks on their faces. Luckily for me, only some of them left as soon as the class was over. My approach to this class was different than what I had done in previous classes I had taught. Rather than teach the students to use the technology, we learned how to figure things out on our own. Rather than memorizing every HTML element and what it might be good for, we learned to use Firefox and the Firebug extension to inspect the source code of every site. Open source made sense immediately when the students could read the HTML code   KNOWLEDGE of any page like an open book. Unlike in other classes, the students were encouraged to copy, to analyse, to understand and to implement code and design patterns they found on the web.  HACKING

To look at grid-based design, we used the Blueprint BLUEPRINTS CSS framework; for WordPress, we used the Sandbox and Thematic framework themes. In both cases, the students based their work on previous design decisions coded into these frameworks and explored ways of modifying the code or design to fit their needs. We were using design foundations that were strong, but at the same time easy to modify. It made sense to the students; they understood why the concept of openness might actually be relevant for them.

Teaching vs Learning

Like many other design educators, teaching is one of the ways that I can stay up to date. I am required to constantly keep myself informed, constantly learning and make sure I actually understand new subjects enough to teach them. That is also a benefit of being involved in open source initiatives. The professional exchange between coders facilitates a sustainable peer-to-peer learning environment – and one that extends beyond the structures of institutional education. To extrapolate, if I learn by teaching students and geeks learn by teaching each other, maybe my students can learn that way too.

The first assignment in my class was ‘The Tutorial’. Students were required to create a (non-digital) tutorial on something they already knew how to do, preferably a topic that others might not be familiar with. They exchanged tutorials in class; over the following week, all the students had to follow the guidelines provided by their peers and report to the class on their experiences. The students wrote tutorials on such topics as ‘How to curve a football’, ‘A recipe for banana bread’, ‘DIY 3D glasses’, ‘Finding an Apartment in NY (Without Paying a Broker)’ and ‘How to Sell Multiple Pairs of Shoes’. A tutorial is an involved interactive design task, even when the tutorial is not digital. It also provided a framework for the semester that was constructed around knowledge sharing, documentation and peer learning.

Art and design schools still nurture the image of the genius. Originality is rewarded as a higher standard than communication, and copying is considered a sin.

Tutorial hunting has become a substantial part of the semester, as tutorials become a major source of pooled knowledge. We used a class mailing list where students could submit technical questions and ask for creative feedback. I encouraged them to post their code and questions on the blog and refer their peers to the relevant blog post from the mailing list. However, in many cases, a code snippet was not enough to get the full picture, reproduce the problem and help solve it; we needed to share the full code repository. I was concerned that getting the students on a version control system would be pushing them just a bit beyond the geekdom level that design students could handle in one semester, but it became unavoidable. I set them up on a centralized Subversion code repository, so every student would get every code update downloaded directly to their computers. They shared all the code by definition and could modify each other’s work when needed. SHARING

This worked well, but it had an unacceptable side effect: at the end of each semester, the class code repositories created in that semester would be left abandoned. Symbolically, each class became an abandoned open source project. Obviously, that was not the message I wanted to leave the students with. I recently gave up on the Subversion system, which used centralized version control, and got my students on Git and the Github.com ‘social coding’ site. On Github, the students publish their code in public and other users (not just the other students in the class, but also other users) can easily fork, merge and comment on the code. When the semester ended, the students maintained control of their own repositories, beyond the context of the class.

Pragmatic, Not Altruistic

By that point in the semester, I have managed to convince the students why free and open source content available online is relevant to them and will advance their creative work. But that was the easy part; I have not yet managed to convince them why they should contribute too, why they should give back to the commons.  MANIFESTOS

I initially set up the final assignment of the semester as an arbitrary task: “Find an open source project, and contribute to it as a designer.” I was naïve, to say the least, and this ill-conceived task failed miserably. My students didn’t really understand the projects they chose, and the geek-talk on the mailing lists was incomprehensible jargon to them. The communities they approached did not have a frame of reference to appreciate the students’ contributions and were suspicious of the students’ motives. The first semester of the Open Source Design class ended in disappointment; it was clear we were on the wrong track.

In the following semester, I understood that assigning an arbitrary contribution was the wrong way to go. I had a smaller class that time around, and we chose to work together twice during the semester. First, we took part in the WordPress 2.7 icon design challenge. Later, the students chose to help some of their friends get their portfolios up online using the Indexhibit system. They wrote tutorials, they recorded screen-capture videos, they wrote code examples and style comments. Finally, they posted their contributions on the class blog and on the Indexhibit forums. Back then, the documentation available for Indexhibit was lacking and the students’ work was well received.

The second attempt had worked much better than the first one, but I knew its success had a lot to do with the qualities and personalities of the students in class. They enjoyed working together but at its core, the Indexhibit documentation was still a relatively altruistic contribution to a project that they were not actually planning to use after the class ended. If they were not going to benefit from their own contributions, why should they contribute again once they were no longer required to for a group assignment?

In the following semesters, I guided students to write the kind of tutorials they would have liked to find for themselves. Their tutorials focused on CSS, WordPress, Github… environments they used for their own benefit, in their own work. They not only covered the technical side of the technologies they documented; they also looked at the design aspects. At the end of the semester, the blog featured valuable, peer-reviewed and tested tutorials that benefited the students who had already completed the class. Months and years after each of these semesters ended, these publicly available contributions constantly receive thank-you comments from random users on the web. And still, it was not enough yet.

Toward a Collaborative Design Process

As far as knowledge sharing is involved, the tutorial approach has indeed proved itself. However, sharing technology and design tips is not collaboration. In this context, sharing has been happening post mortem to the creative act. To really challenge the design process and discover whether design can enjoy the benefits of the networked production  REVOLUTION revolution, I needed to focus my efforts on design collaboration.
Writing a wiki and coding software both benefit from a highly collaboration-friendly technology: text. Both types of content generation use a vocabulary predefined by language, which levels the playing field for the various contributors. It poses implicit prerequisites (literacy) and it funnels the contributions through a finite list of the syntax options standardized by language. For better or worse, both visual and behavioural languages are not confined within such rigid structures.  STANDARDS Ironically, it is the openness of these languages that makes networked collaboration harder.

In the last few decades, interface design emerged as an important cultural practice. There have been many attempts recently to coordinate and standardize this new language. The critical discussion of interface linguistics does not happen in the academic arena, it happens in the blogosphere. These interface linguists document design patterns and evaluate best practices for following them. Many of them are advocating semantic content and structured data, claiming such approaches would support efforts to index and process this content. The aim here is to serve artificial systems that are not intelligent enough to derive the meaning without external assistance. At the same time, these index-based and component-based approaches help structure the creative process as well. We see it in Wikipedia, where the way that articles are structured helps to focus and process the collaborative act. We see it in the structure of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), where design decisions propagate through the document’s structure. And we see it in interaction modules, where code libraries encapsulate a single action which can still be modified externally through APIs.

The critical discussion of interface linguistics does not happen in the academic arena, it happens in the blogosphere.

The next frontier for the academic collaborative design lab that my students and I have been leading would have to involve the linguistics of interaction design. We will start drafting characters, then words and then sentences; some might call it building a structured visual language. We will try to define a syntax, then rearrange it and try again; some might call it designing modular systems. We will try to set standards, then extend them, then break them; some might call it developing a design guide. We will try to evaluate the legibility and readability of our messages; some might call it usability testing. We will try to discover a new collaborative paradigm for the design process; some might call it ‘Open Source Design’.

Dick Rijken

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

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

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

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

Fundamental Paradoxes

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

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

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

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

Atoms and Bits

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

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

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

Why Keep It Simple?

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

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

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

Design Literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Literate

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

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

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

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

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

Design into the Future

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

THE STEIM STORY

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

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

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

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

www.steim.org

Peter Troxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bre Pettis

2007: Pizza around the Clock

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

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

2008: Printing Vodka Shot Glasses

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009: MakerBot Industries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010: Thing-O-Matic

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

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

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

2011: 2,500 MakerBots

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

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.