Tommi Laitio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smarter Crowds

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

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

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

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

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

Time Is Money

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

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

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

Design for Better Living

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Peter Troxler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Avital

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

The Context of Open Design

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

Open Innovation

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

Open Source

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

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

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

Open Design

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

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

Unpacking Open Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing Generative Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Brave New World

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

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

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

From Push to Pull

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

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

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

The Road Ahead

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

Conclusion

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