Thomas Lommée

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’.

Caroline Hummels

Does training for open design require a different style of education? Current initiatives like Linux, VOICED and Fab Lab show the beauty of open platforms for sharing and learning, without requiring its contributors to follow specialized  AMATEURISSIMO education. Despite this innate advantage, an educational model that is slanted specifically towards open design is needed. This chapter discusses how we can shape that model in such a way that it enables designers to blossom in an open structure. Although I focus on design education, the model can also be applied to other fields of expertise.

The Aim and Focus of Open Design

So why do we need a specific education style to facilitate open design? In fact, we don’t. I do, however, believe that education should reflect upon its own paradigms, and envision what types of designers society will need in the future. Open design is one of the reasons to look critically at current educational models. Society is always changing.  REVOLUTION What that means right now, for example, is that we have to be able to deal creatively and flexibly with large amounts of constantly evolving information. It also means that we currently have to find answers to large societal questions, now that we have reached the limits of our financial and environmental ecologies, among other frameworks. Open design addresses and works with these overall trends.  TRENDS

Open design assumes open access, sharing, change, learning and ever-evolving knowledge and skills. It is an open and flexible platform instead of a closed one. Consequently, open design emerges from the New Science paradigm of quantum physics, relativity and self-organizing structures, developed by such scientists as Einstein, Bohr and Prigogine. ¹ Where Newton’s classical-scientific view is essentially simple and closed – it can be modelled through time-reversible laws and all complexities can be reduced to simplicities – Prigogine’s reality is multiple, temporal and complex. It is open and admissible to change.

Design education based on a New Science paradigm requires a transformative curriculum, according to Doll ². In such a transformative curriculum, teachers discard the God’s-eye view, uniform curricula and tests that are considered objective and predictive. On the contrary, they emphasize and support a variety of positions, procedures and interpretations. Design education for open design could benefit from theories like Constructivism, where learning is the learner’s active construction of meaning in context.

Open design is based on a libertarian relationship between designers and potential users, and not on a rational one in which the designer is seen as superior.

It is possible to postulate what educating for open design could look like, based on a constructivist learning model. The educational model for open design described below addresses attitudes and skills, approaches, and structure and tools. The figures in the text exemplify these topics by showcasing the educational model we use in the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Learning the Attitudes and Skills for Open Design

In his book The Craftsman, ³ Richard Sennett describes the importance of a craftsman’s intrinsic motivation, commitment to doing good work for its own sake, and an ongoing pursuit of mastery in his or her craft. This attitude is the basis for the success of open communities like Linux, where the reward system is based on the quality of the outcome, social appraisal within the group (peer review) and the personal development of the contributors. The success of open communities like Linux depends on a set of attitudes, skills and activities that foster learning from experience, developing skills through doing, curiosity, ambiguity, imagination, opening up, questioning, collaborating, open-ended conversation, experimentation, and intimacy. It is these attitudes, skills and activities that will also determine the success of open design.

I therefore consider it essential that design education focus on forming self-directed and life-long learners, who are intrinsically motivated and who take responsibility for developing their own competencies and delivering high-quality work. Design students should learn to trust their senses and their intuition, and to embrace ambiguity, open-endedness and experimentation, as explained in the next section on approaches to open design. Moreover, design students should develop the attitude geared towards collaboration,  CO-CREATION preferably supported by methods, tools and structures that foster collaboration (as explained in the last section on structure and tools for open design). It is not only designers who are participating in open design; in principle, everyone can participate. The key aspect is that everyone contributes their own expertise, while respecting and building on the expertise of others. This is especially true when addressing larger societal questions and designing systems where expertise is needed from a range of fields, including design, social sciences and engineering.  KNOWLEDGE

Blurring Boundaries

Open design implies that the boundary between designers and users is blurring, at least with respect to motivation, initiative and needs. So what does this mean for the interaction between designers and potential users? On the basis of my organizational classification, ⁴ open design is based on a libertarian relationship between designers and potential users, and not on a rational one in which the designer is seen as superior. Neither is it based on an integrating relationship, in which the designer looks after the interest of the majority of potential users. The libertarian approach emphasizes the freedom and personal responsibility of every individual. This means that the designer is no longer placed above users when determining what is right for them; rather, the designer is part of a larger community. ⁵

To be clear, this does not imply that everyone now becomes a designer, as IKEA and many others are implying.  WYS ≠ WYG The design profession is still something that requires many years of education and practice, like any other profession. It does mean, however, that potential users now add their own experience and specific competencies to the mix.
Based on the aforementioned, I consider it essential for current design education to teach students to cooperate with other experts, respecting their expertise and simultaneously reflecting on their own competencies. This means, for example, that design students need to learn to work as part of multi-disciplinary teams, collaborating with students from other departments and schools, both on the same level and on different levels, e.g. students from a regional training centre, a university of applied sciences and a university of technology working together on projects. Moreover, design students need to learn to collaborate intensively with potential users, not as objective researchers that perform one or several user studies, not merely as facilitators that run co-design sessions, but also as subjective participants in an intensive process in which they themselves are part of the solution.

The Approach to Open Design

Due to the flexibility, open-endedness and often innovative character of open design, students should have first-hand experience with the fact that design decisions are always conditional; such decisions are always based on insufficient information, are but taken to the best of their and the community’s experience and knowledge at that point. They can use two strategies to generate information to support these decisions, which reciprocally provide focus: design making (synthesizing and concretizing) and design thinking (analysing and abstracting).

Since open design depends highly on different people and expertise, including the element provided by potential users, tangible solutions that can be experienced are essential throughout the design process to validate ideas and to guide further developments.  STANDARDS Moreover, design-making opens up new solution spaces that go beyond imagination, especially in group settings and when focusing on innovative, disruptive products which lack a well-established frame of reference for users or the market. It recalls the adage ‘quality through quantity’.

I consequently advocate that design students learn to use a highly iterative process of generating dozens of solutions and testing them in situ, in their proper context.  The Reflective Transformative Design Process ⁶ offers such a flexible and open process that it regards the act of designing not only as thought, but as a generator of knowledge. The process supports developing a vision of social and societal transformation, exploring solutions in situ with others, as well as offering moments of reflection.

Structures and Tools for Open Design

Open design requires a place to co-operate. That said, a hybrid design environment would both take advantage of a digital space that is always available all over the world, while making use of the intensity of collaborating in a physical workspace, making things, exchanging ideas and knowledge, and testing designs in context with potential users. A beautiful example of such a hybrid community is Beppe Grillo’s blog, ⁷ which enables people to share digitally  COMMUNITY and to meet each other all over the world. What does this mean for design education? Faculties, departments and schools have to think both physically and virtually about workspaces that enhance collaboration.  CO-CREATION At the Department of Industrial Design here at Eindhoven University of Technology, we have structured our workspaces thematically to provide areas in which students can work together, share expertise and learn from each other. In addition to a supportive structure, open design would benefit from tools that support designing and sharing, for a variety of contributors. Design education can support students in exploring these tools through methods such as participatory design, co-design or rapid prototyping equipment at Fab Labs. Universities and schools can also develop open design tools and methods, such as Skin 2.0, ⁸ the Fab@home printers or design tools developed by former ID students at Studio Ludens.

Conclusions

Open design not only forces designers to think about their profession, role, attitude and competencies, but also challenges design educators to scrutinize their educational system. In this article I have discussed what open design means for the designer’s attitude, skills and approach as well as for the educational structure and tools offered. Since we have stressed the flexibility, open-endedness and often innovative character of open design, the educational model for open design will also be flexible and open, and will need continuous development and testing with all parties involved to become a truly open design system.

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

Pieter Jan Stappers Froukje Sleeswijk Visser Sandra Kistemaker

Open design has numerous aims; some of the most important ambitions include breaking down the barriers between designers and end-users, making it possible for non-designers become designers, AMATEURISSIMO and cutting out the middle-man by having end users fabricate the products they need. Inspiring examples have been presented in the domain of craftsmanship. New, craft-based industries are visibly taking off, either locally oriented or operating globally over the internet. However, the feasibility of open design for more complex products, such as washing machines, cars and jet planes.

The Creative Guy

As yet, it is unclear where the limitations of a user-centred approach to user involvement lie. Despite these complicating factors, the roles of designer, client, user and end user are being shaken up in these more complex areas of design and product development. ¹ Traditional caricatures of the designer as ‘the creative guy’ and the user as a recipient, a ‘passive, un-critical consumer’ have been questioned and surpassed in a growing variety of ways.

One example mentioned frequently is the ‘lead user approach’, ² in which select subgroups of dedicated, tech-savvy users contribute to the process of generating solutions, and develop new features for products. This presents a clear challenge to the traditional division of roles in the design process, but it only serves the needs of specific subgroups in the user populations. Other approaches, such as generative techniques and contextmapping ³, try to involve end users as experts in their own experience by taking them through a carefully orchestrated and supported process of fostering awareness, reflection and expression, in order to help them become competent partners within the design team. In commercial practice, the use of focus groups critiquing proposed new product designs, usability tests, or marketing consultations can also involve users in more active ways than have been practised so far. It is important to define the distinction between co-creation  CO-CREATION and co-design; co-creation indicates a collaborative creative effort, either large or small, and often localized, while co-design refers to co-creation used in the course of the design process, preferably from beginning to end. In this article, we focus on contextmapping, a specific aspect of co-design, in which end users are assigned the role of expert informant, and are supported in that role through access to dedicated tools for observation, reflection and expression. The production of these tools and facilitation of the process have become design research activities which are carried out by professionals with a background in design and/or research.

The Traditional View in Transformation

The traditional view of design identifies three roles: the user, who buys and will live with the product, the designer, who conceives the product, and the client, who manufactures and distributes the product. Popular visual representations of these roles, as well as training materials used in several types of design education, show the connection as a chain of single, narrow links. In this view, the client takes the initiative. For instance, the client conducts market research, spots an opportunity in the market, gives a brief to the designer which specifies design requirements, and expects to receive a concept design in return. A number of trends are chipping away at this linear, unintegrated model from all sides. In co-creation, roles and responsibilities which had previously been thought of as separate are interacting, merging, or even being swapped back and forth between the parties; some roles are disappearing in the form in which we knew them, and new roles are appearing.

There are several reasons for this shift. First, as our lives get more complex, people are more informed, and they need to be more informed.

Users are getting savvier
The internet has made it possible for users to be more informed, giving them opportunities to be involved and have a say in what is made for them. TREND: NETWORK SOCIETY

Designers are getting savvier too
As the design process incorporates more and more areas of expertise from different parties, managing this process increasingly calls for research skills and a talent for facilitation. In some places, including our own school, design education is starting to include those vital skills in the curriculum; elsewhere, people with backgrounds in organizational management or social sciences are specializing in addressing those roles.

The designer-client relationship is no longer as simple as a brief stating a clearly defined problem.

Design clients are diversifying
Some areas of human endeavour are adopting design perspectives. As a result, principles and practices of design are being used to address increasingly complex problems. Projects such as the design of hospitals, services, or policies generally involve multiple stakeholders and areas of expertise. As the structure of design processes shifts, design techniques are being recognized as supporting these very different people by facilitating shared, solution-oriented thinking. Referred to collectively as ‘service design’ or ‘design thinking’, such larger-scope problems are being claimed for the design profession (or at least the design procedures).

Partly as a result of these developments, the relationships between the parties are changing.

→ The designer–client relationship is no longer as simple as a brief stating a clearly defined problem and the concept design proposing a single solution. In the Dashboard User Guide, Stevens & Watson distinguish five degrees of how the client is served by the designer, ranging from prescribing (one concept to deliver on the brief), through menu (several concepts to choose from), co-creation DIY (collaboration as equals), and assistance (the client receiving design coaching and help), to DIY (the client does the design while the designer observes and interjects comments as needed). ⁴

→ The client–user relationship is opening up in open design and meta-design. In open design, manufacturing options are becoming widespread and widely accessible, and resources for sharing design ideas are available (open movement). In meta-design, ⁵ products are made with sufficient adaptability to leave a number of final design choices to the user.

→ The designer–user relationship is opening up strongly throughout the entire design process. In several industries, competition on technology and price has saturated the market, and clients are taking a closer look at the user experiences and contexts of use in order to improve their products. Elsewhere ⁶ we called this the “contextual push”, a force in product development that complements the classic forces of ‘technology push’ and ‘market pull’. Users are being involved increasingly early in the design process, not just in the post-conceptualization phases (e.g. usability testing and concept testing), but also in the fuzzy front end of strategic planning, information gathering, and conceptualizing. The challenge here is not only the timing of when different players are involved, but also the responsibilities and powers granted to them. Frequently, users can participate in informing design, providing ideas for solutions, or evaluating proposed concepts; however, at this stage, they are rarely involved in deciding what will be made (as would be the case in fully fledged participatory design).

In small and medium enterprises, the separation has always been less clearly defined: individuals often take on several roles in the process, with the benefit that several viewpoints are more smoothly integrated than in larger corporations.

The list above shows how some of these developments are unfolding. The traditional view, with its clear separation of roles, seems too restricted to address the current complexities, but its influence has not yet been lifted from design-speak, from thinking, or from practice. In our experience, the separations between these roles are more entrenched in the larger industries, where roles are often separated over many specialized individuals or departments. In small and medium enterprises, the separation has always been less clearly defined: single individuals often take on several roles in the design process, with the benefit that several viewpoints are more smoothly integrated than in larger corporations.

Co-creation with Users in Industrial Practice

User involvement is progressively moving toward the front end of designing. The people controlling the design process are seeing that the user can be a source of valuable input, not just a channel for directing output.

To generalize somewhat, it would seem that the complaints department in many companies was the place that received most input from the users, in the form of returned products. In many cases, the product was returned not because of a product defect, but because the user could not figure out how to operate it, or discovered after purchase that the product completely failed to fulfil his expectations. In the 80s and 90s, consultations with users moved up earlier and earlier, first advancing through sales and marketing, then usability testing, and finally concept evaluation. What happened in these three phases is that users were called in after the concept had been developed to test the products in practice, hopefully revealing any mistakes. This helped companies launch better products by eliminating problems earlier in the design process.

In the 90s and 00s, user involvement was solicited from the other end of the process, bringing in users in increasingly active ways for contextual informing, idea generation, and concept development.  KNOWLEDGE Although the participatory design movement had shown that intensive collaboration with users can be effective throughout the process, progress in the industry in this half of the cycle has been slower and often limited to incidental involvement (short, local contributions).

Contextmapping: Informing Design

Contextmapping methods help users to observe and reflect on parts of their lives, and to use these reflections in making a ‘map’ that reflects the various facets of their experiences. This map provides the design team with information, inspiration and empathy, feeding further development of the concept design into a product. ⁷ The approach is built on four main principles:

→ Users are involved as the experts on their own experience.

→ The user’s expertise can be coaxed into expression by applying appropriate techniques, which typically involve self-observation and reflection.

→ The information gathered on the context of use should be like a map: it should provide multifaceted, rich and supportive leads for the design team to explore the experiential context. This requires both empathy with the users (a concrete, holistic, feel for the context) and an understanding of the context (an abstract overview of what could be generalized to other users, other situations and future developments).

→ Facilitating this process requires a mixture of design competencies and research skills.

In a series of some 100 design research projects, ranging from individual student graduation projects to larger collaborations  CO-CREATION in consortiums of academic researchers and industrial partners, these methods were developed to fit both user needs and industrial practice. In some cases, user participation has gone beyond informing the process, moving into the realm of idea and concept generation and development.

The client involved in this project offers a large range of hearing protectors for private users, for use in a range of situations: swimming, working, flying, making and listening to music, sleeping or riding a motorcycle. The focus of this project was to gain insight into the life, experience and context of amateur musicians.

Despite our hopes and ambitious rhetoric, design is often not at the forefront of companies’ attention.

The company did not have its own design department; most of the innovations were developed internally with people from the existing team, who came from different backgrounds. The CEO and other people responsible for innovations were highly involved and were part of the research and design team during the entire project. The initial study and the idea generation brainstorming sessions were conducted and facilitated by design agency Muzus, resulting in a concept that was further developed by a second, technical, design agency, and handed back to the company (so we already see several separate design agencies at work).

Process and Techniques

The techniques support designers, helping them to develop empathy for this user group, learn about their lives, understand their context and be able to step into their shoes. COMMUNITY The client already had longer-standing relations with users, but felt that the existing relationship had not led to new ideas for a while. In the contextmapping study, seven musicians who played in amateur bands formed a fresh band and played their instruments in a three-hour session. The participants prepared themselves with a sensitizing package during the week before the test session. By taking part in creative assignments, explaining the artefacts and discussing the different topics, the user group of musicians painted a rich and detailed picture for the research team. Employees from the client company observed the session, took notes from their perspective and subsequently engaged in a discussion with the musicians. An immediate result of the session was the reassessment of several stereotypes; the design team went home with plenty of ideas to for further innovation.

Insights, Ideas and Concepts

Three substantial new insights emerged from the session and subsequent analysis. First, hearing protection is currently geared toward individual usage, but it has an adverse effect in a band: if one band member is using hearing protection, volume will be increased and all other members will suffer. Second, many musicians are ignorant of the risk of hearing damage, and are completely unaware of the decibel threshold for damage. This lack of awareness was new to the client. Third, this group is different from all user groups that this company serves. In contrast to, for instance, construction workers operating heavy machinery, these musicians actually want to hear the sound, even while they are protected from the full impact of it: they love their music and want to be able to experience it to the fullest.

Based upon these user insights, the client conferred with users and the research and design team to generate new ideas for innovative hearing protection that is appropriate to the context, experience and needs of amateur musicians. The resulting concepts covered several different levels: helping musicians become aware of the danger of high volumes;developing new ways of communicating with musicians in their familiar context and fitting their tone of voice; redesigning marketing for this specific user group; developing concepts for new innovative products.

Although this company had already had contact with their users over a longer period, they found that that they had often asked the same people for feedback over and over, only requesting confirmation of their own ideas and asking users to reflect on existing ideas. The experience of opening up, adding a fresh perspective and stepping into the shoes of a specific user group led to new directions for innovation at different levels.

Where Is This Going?

The traditional view is splitting at the seams. In many industries, the traditional separation of roles is recognized as no longer inevitable, effective or desired. However, the evolution to new forms of designing has by no means produced a stable and unified view of how the roles are distributed now. Moreover, these processes are not easy to implement. Despite our hopes and ambitious rhetoric, design is often not at the forefront of companies’ attention due to such factors as budget constraints, insufficient awareness of what a design approach can contribute and should cost, and a lack of innovative user-driven attitudes. The same holds true for the newer trends of doing research within design, especially user research; the concept of opening up design processes to end-user participation  HACKING DESIGN is often not even considered.

In our experiences with large and small industries, we see a variety of formats being used, combining ingredients in different constellations and using different degrees of separation or specialization, depending on the object of design. Moreover, we see a greater need to orchestrate these processes in the large design projects currently gaining attention under the label of ‘service design’; some design professionals are shifting into this new role.

In many industries, the separation of roles is no longer recognized as inevitable, effective or desired.

Clients (or providers, from a user’s perspective) need to become aware of what is possible, and consider how they can become more flexible to accommodate the new design paradigms. The paradox here is that this may be more difficult for the larger industries, which already include user participation in their research budgets, than it is for smaller companies, who have much smaller budgets, but often build a stronger relationship with their users. In large companies, different phases of the design process are often split up, connected only through formal documents that are too limited to convey the full richness of user contexts. These overly structured transitions cause valuable insights to be lost because they are not handed over effectively to the new team. On the other hand, smaller companies, who have a longer-standing relationship with users, are often not aware that their users’ expertise can be brought to bear more effectively with the aid of appropriate methods.  STANDARDS

The role of designers is becoming more varied: part creator, part researcher, part facilitator, part process manager.

The role of designers is becoming more varied: part creator, part researcher, part facilitator, part process manager. We see graduates of design schools specializing in these roles to varying extents. Users’ roles are also changing. A side effect of co-creation
CO-CREATION which we have often observed is that the participating users do not lose their awareness of their own expertise once it has been identified; indeed, they are eager to develop it further. In our own experience, we find that participants are eager to return months after their initial participation, having continued to develop the expertise that was awakened in the study. ⁸ Gawande recounts a series of similar participatory studies in the area of hospital hygiene, where various participating users discussed and suggested solutions. ⁹ One effect was that after the sessions, these users would take initiatives to change their work environment in ways that they had never done before in their traditional roles as nurses, cleaners, or doctors. Awakened expertise can lead to confidence, inspiring users to take increased responsibility and initiative. It is likely that this effect can be found in all areas of co-design and co-creation OPEN EVERYTHING in particular, and open design in general: the act of taking part in the creative process, and becoming aware of the expert within, gives people the confidence to take initiative.

Gabrielle Kennedy

There’s always something special about the top crop of Dutch design graduates, but every once in a while one comes along that makes everyone sit up and take notice. In 2003, that was Joris Laarman. His Reinventing Functionality project at the Design Academy of Eindhoven fused function with ornament and was snatched up by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Design must accept some of the responsibility for creating many of the world’s current problems.

Since then, he has earned a reputation for himself as a designer with visionary ideas and a concern for societal issues. His first project out of school, the Bone Furniture range, was exhibited in the Friedman Benda gallery in New York, a limited edition series made from marble, porcelain and resin. While he calls it an “annoying coincidence” that much of his work has spawned major contemporary trends, it also testifies to its relevance to the issues that matter.

Furniture That Can Be Grown

Both those early projects clearly expressed Laarman’s highly specific views on modernism. The Bone range DESIGNERS resulted from a cooperative partnership with car manufacturer Opel, using software to design a series of artworks based on the organic way that bones form. Car parts are designed with the help of topology optimization software to increase strength and maximize the efficient use of materials. Furniture, as it turns out, can also be ‘grown’ by adding and removing material to maximize its strength and functionality.

Laarman’s stance is that functionality and extravagance are not mutually exclusive. Where modernism went wrong, and how its core advantages need to be readdressed, are what drive his research. What he is looking for are design solutions that possess a revolutionary quality. Much of his current research repudiates how things are currently done and patiently pursues a better way not just to manufacture, but also to distribute design.

Seen in this light, design must accept some of the responsibility for creating many of the world’s current problems. More importantly, it can play a key role in fixing them. In 2009, Laarman opened his Amsterdam studio to the public for the first time. His purpose was to share his thinking and his process. He wanted to reveal how design experimentation and research can create answers, not just pretty objects.

“In galleries and in Milan, people only ever see perfect pieces,” he says. “In this exhibition, I wanted people to see the research part of design, what is behind all the pretty shapes, and how they could eventually be of use in the world. I wanted people to understand what the future of design could look like using technological progress.”

Laarman hit a wall when he was researching open source design and digital fabrication. He realized that design had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and was now failing society. “I am not necessarily against how design is now,” he says, “but I do think the internet can provide a more honest way to design, make, distribute and sell things.” Not modernism, then; what’s needed is a new -ism. It takes some audacity for such a young designer to criticize the industry. Laarman has gone beyond theoretical criticism, underlining his opinion with some tangible ideas that he wants to try out – hopefully with the support of his contemporaries.

I do think the internet can provide a more honest way to design, make, distribute and sell things.

“I started to think of my work and of design in general as a sort of laboratory,” Laarman says. He explains it as a place where solutions might be found to the predicament created by over-production in the post-industrial age. “I’m not condemning the whole design industry,” he says, “or even questioning it. There is a lot of very good industrial production, and that will never go away, but I think it will soon be joined by another revolution made possible by the internet.” REVOLUTION

Despite its failures and the role it played in creating over-production, Laarman’s research kept bringing him back to modernism – not as an aesthetic per se, but as a philosophy. In 2010 Laarman was selected by Ingeborg de Roode, curator of industrial design at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to participate in the Modernism Today series. “I guess she sees me as a sort of contemporary version of Rietveld,”  DESIGNERS says Laarman. “That is an interesting comparison, and I see some connection.” 100 years ago, Gerrit Rietveld experimented with technology and materials; Laarman does the same today. His aesthetic is not in the tradition of De Stijl, but his values most certainly are.

The Modernist Roots (of Open Design)

In line with those values, it made good sense to fuse Rietveld’s world of ideas and experiments with open source design and digital fabrication; both could be argued to have modernist roots. Open source has been revolutionizing the cultural content universes of music and software for almost a decade, so why shouldn’t it also be able to change the way design is both made and distributed?

“I think true modernists wanted open source design one hundred years ago,” says Laarman, “but back then it wasn’t possible. Rietveld published manuals about how to make his chairs, but nobody could really use that information, because there were no networks of skilled artisans. His designs look simple, but are difficult to construct. These days, we can distribute knowledge in a way that can potentially bring craftspeople back to the centre stage of design – not in an idealistic, naïvely romantic way, but in an economically sound way. All we need are the networks, and cheaper and more accessible digital manufacturing technology.” One of modernism’s core flaws was the huge amount of power that ended up in the hands of a few big factories and design firms. The movement was supposed to be about the democratization of design – that was their big idea – but somewhere along the line it became nothing more than an aesthetic. Of course there are some obvious differences between modernism and open source design. Modernism produced an international and generic style. Industrialization led to mass production, which meant production had to be centralized and its products transported across the globe from countries with the lowest wages at great environmental and economic expense. Information and knowledge were kept closed and protected by copyrights; even if they had been accessible, it would have been impossible for an individual to use the design data without access to exorbitantly expensive production tools. The quality of design produced was and continues to be guaranteed by the producer; in turn, the producer and the retailer divide the majority of sales revenues.

I think true modernists wanted open source design one hundred years ago.

Open source design, on the other hand, has the capacity to conserve culture and decoration as well as traditional skills by utilizing new technology.
Digital production makes mass customization possible. Open source makes information and knowledge public; in addition, it has low entry costs, quality control takes place in the form of peer review by the public, and revenues are divided between craft and creativity. Also, because the products of open source design can be produced locally, transportation costs are drastically reduced.

What open source design does is redistribute knowledge  KNOWLEDGE and the means of production. It has the potential to change everything that we know about design, from manufacturing to education. Open source design is anti-elitist insofar as it can create fairer and more honest prices. It is democratic and helps to create self-determination in an individual’s immediate environment. Ultimately, it takes power away from the huge multinationals and from production hubs like China and India and hands it back to craftspeople – those individuals rendered irrelevant by industrialization. In short, open source design could feasibly become this century’s new -ism.

Ultimately, it takes power away from the multinationals and production hubs like China and hands it back to craftspeople – those individuals rendered irrelevant by industrialization.

“This does not mean that anyone can make good design or that more rubbish can be produced,” Laarman says. “Just because everyone has a digital camera doesn’t mean that everyone is a photographer. I am not in favour of amateurism, but the way I envision the system working, the good will eventually be filtered from the bad.”  AMATEURISSIMO

Less Production Is Needed, Not More.

Statistics show that up until the Industrial Revolution, a similar amount of products were being produced every year. With industrialization came increased wealth and prosperity, which lead to massive increases in production. The result was more waste, more environmental damage  TREND: SCARCITY OF RESOURCES and a surge in unemployed artisans. The average Western person today has access to more things than Queen Victoria owned during her reign. “The tragedy is that the vast majority of what is being today made lacks creativity and quality and isn’t really needed,” Laarman says. “The over-production of mediocrity for the middle classes has created a difficult economic situation, and there is nothing that can be done about it within the current system.”

If digital design went local, imagine what this would mean for small producers. “Right now, most people are just talking about digital fabrication,” says Laarman, “but it is happening, and I think can eventually take over. I am not going to say it will change the world, but it will change the way things are made. 3D printing is still very limited,  AESTHETICS: 3D
especially in terms of materials, but as digital manufacturing technology evolves, anything is possible.”

One possible scenario would be for local communities to invest in technology. “There are already all kinds of initiatives popping up that give individuals the opportunity to start their own small production facilities,” Laarman says. “We are looking into setting up a sort of professional Fab Lab, for instance, where any design based on a digital blueprint could be mass-customized and made.”

It could work. The RepRap machine, for example, is an open-branded DIY 3D printing machine.  HELLO WORLD The RepRap is a machine that you can make yourself (and that can reproduce itself!)  REPRODUCTION that can in turn make other gadgets. “Right now, this sort of thing is the domain of geeks for geeks, but once it becomes more professional, it will be ready for more general usage,” Laarman says.

The average Western person today has access to more things than Queen Victoria owned during her reign.

Open source design and local digital fabrication could also revolutionize education, which has mostly become outdated and irrelevant. “We could tie the platform into trade schools,” Laarman says. “Education has fallen behind and kids are not being taught what is needed. Digital manufacturing should be taught in schools, especially at the vocational school level.”
These developments are slow, however, because open source design remains the great unknown, with many unanswered quandaries. The new, innovative nature of the ideas works both for and against them; instead of inspiring images of a world less controlled by branding and regulations, open source design ends up sounding chaotic, with too much choice and an over-abundance of experimentation and waste. Issues of copyright and profit-sharing scare off many, leaving a lot of the earliest experimental platforms looking unprofessional and insecure.  MANIFESTOS

But the problem for most of the current websites selling open source design is they lack professional participation. What’s needed is more of the best and most visionary design minds debating and devising ways to make it all work. “What is happening so far isn’t really making a difference, but it does show that there is huge potential,” Laarman says.

Creative Commons  CREATIVE COMMONS has made some interesting inroads. It is a new type of copyright that protects a designer (or anyone else) so that they can make licensing agreements with suitable producers or limit use of their ideas to personal use only. “It works in an idealistic sense if everybody plays nice,” says Laarman. It is still limited, though, and resembles a small-scale iTunes dominated by amateur musicians playing a limited number of instruments. What is needed next is a professional digital platform, or a network where people can meet, access and share information about how and where to have design digitally manufactured.

Digital manu­facturing should be taught in schools, especially at the vocational school level.

Make-Me .com

One exciting project already under way, albeit in its nascent stages, is Make-Me.com, a cooperative venture involving Laarman, the Waag Society, Droog Design and some early internet pioneers. For designers, it means uploading their design for general distribution. For consumers, it means being able to access and customize design. For local producers, it means using licensing agreements to make the things that people want. “It reduces our carbon footprints and allows for more customization,” says Laarman.

That is what we do. We take something from the past and shape it into something new.

Make-Me.com plans to operate like an app store. You go there to get what you want. Some of it is free and some of it is paid for; some are designed by amateurs and some by professionals. “The amateurs and the professionals have to compete against one another,” Laarman says. “You find the chair you want online via us and you go to the local Fab Lab to have it produced on the spot. The platform is linking consumers to craftspeople and digital fabrication tools.”

Make-Me.com as an open source platform is not limited to design. “It is for journalists, architects, businesspeople, scientists – even a place you could go to for a new haircut,” says Laarman. Big pharmaceutical companies, for example, don’t want to invest in research on diseases that only affect small numbers of people, because there is no money to be made. An open source platform could open up possibilities for DIY bio-labs where scientists and doctors could access research and make their own medicines. “Anyone can use Make-Me.com to distribute information in a new way.”

Designers, however, fear what all this means for them in terms of copyright. They think production companies protect their intellectual property, the quality of their designs, and guarantee them an income. What that fails to recognize is that copyright is a complicated question. Who really owns an original idea? Is anything truly and completely original? Every creative person pilfers and borrows ideas from everywhere; referencing what came before is a natural part of the creative process. “That is what we do,” says Laarman. “We take something from the past and shape it into something new.”  REMIX Via Creative Commons licensing, it might become possible to profit from someone stealing your idea.

What limits the scope of open source at this point goes beyond legal concerns. For it to work, a whole new economic model would need to be devised and accepted. Under the current system, a designer takes his or her design to a manufacturer, who makes it and then takes it to a shop that sells it. “If he is lucky, the designer gets 3% ex factory,” Laarman says. “The brand adds 300% and the shop doubles that again. It’s ridiculous how little of the cut a designer gets. If we used digital tools and changed the way stores work, the ratio would be able to favour creativity and the craftsman.”

However, test-driving a new model will require a platform like Make-Me.com. It has to be large scale, and it will need to attract big-name designers and brands so that people can see it working. It’s a tough chicken-and-egg situation: unless designers feel that their financial income and copyright dues are guaranteed, they are not going to take the risk – and without enough designers taking the risk, it will be virtually impossible to erect the solid infrastructure to ensure smooth, safe and legal operations. It will take a coordinated leap of faith from educational facilities, designers and craftspeople for anything like this to work.
None of these obstacles are insurmountable. What Laarman wants is to be a part of the experiment and to be a contributing member of that generation who will be defining the parameters and creating the way forward. It is that vision which distinguishes him from a lot of his contemporaries – he has the commitment and the patience. He knows that this is something big and wants to do whatever it takes to make it work. “Right now, I am making very expensive, limited-edition designs,” he says. “That is a good way to fund the experiments and start a business, but eventually what I’d like to be able to do is provide open source versions of my work for everyone. That is my goal.”

He knows he doesn’t have all the answers, but Laarman is working through all these problems one by one. “I don’t want to say that this idea could take over the entire production world,” he says, “but it can certainly help craftspeople to make things that are not standardized or mass produced. If a world-wide network of craftspeople grows, then this could potentially really change things.”

Closed Societies Fail

Whichever way you look at this, design cannot continue as is. Design reveals a lot about society, and closed societies fail; like organisms that shut themselves off from their environment, a society that shuns reality will eventually die. Likewise, closed design is outdated. Open source, whether it can be what designers want or even understand at this point, is one way for design to play a real role in building a new, more honest economy. A world with less mass production, less waste, less transportation and less standardized design  STANDARDS can only be interpreted as a win-win situation for all concerned.

Another decade of discussion is needed before open source design will ever be able to make a tangible difference. Interestingly, the same arguments being used against the phenomenon now are the very same arguments that were once used against the introduction of democracy. The ruling elite will always feel threatened by the idea of giving power to the people.

What I’d like to be able to do is provide open source versions of my work for everyone.

NAPOLEON TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED THE 1795 METRIC SYSTEM

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID ‘NAPOLEON CROSSES THE ST. BERNARD’

PAPER SIZE STANDARDS

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ELECTION CAMPAIGN

CAMPAIGN FOR EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

STANDARDIZING INTERACTION: A GESTURE LIBRARY FOR TOUCH SCREENS

SOURCE: OPEN SOURCE GESTURE LIBRARY, CHAD PERSON

QWERTY: AN OLD STANDARD THAT SURVIVED NEW MEDIA

SOURCE: COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG

LEGO SINCE 1949 ➝ LIBRARIES OF THE PEER PRODUCTION ERA / PETER TROXLER

ALAN CHIA ➝ WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SEVEN13AVENUE

ESPERANTO, AN EASY-TO-LEARN AND POLITICALLY NEUTRAL LANGUAGE

L.L. ZAMENHOF ➝ EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/ESPERANTO

DETAIL FROM OPEN DESIGN MANUAL BY INTRASTRUCTURES

MANUAL FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE OPEN DESIGN PROCESS BY INTRASTRUCTURES

OPEN STRUCTURES GRID BY THOMAS LOMMÉE ➝ OPEN STANDARDS / THOMAS LOMMÉE

DESIGN AND PHOTO: PHILIP LUSCHEN

A 20 TO 5 MM PLUG BEING ADDED TO OPEN STRUCTURES ➝ OPEN STANDARDS / THOMAS LOMMÉE

DESIGN: INTRASTRUCTURES

OPEN STRUCTURES KITCHEN ➝ OPEN STANDARDS / THOMAS LOMMÉE

DESIGN: CHRISTIANE HOEGNER, LUCAS MAASSEN, THOMAS LOMMÉE, JO VAN BOSTRAETEN, BIOGAS-E VZW & MICHOU NANON DEBRUIJN, PHOTO: KRISTOF VRANCKEN FOR Z33.