openp2pdesign.org » openp2pdesign.org: Blog

Designing together the Open Design Definition

Massimo Menichinelli — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:12:53 +0000

As previously written in a post here on openp2pdesign.org, there are many formal definitions for different kinds of Open Knowledge (Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Hardware), but no working definition of Open Design. This may seems a simple and unimportant issue, but it is actually the starting point for addressing many issues and problems that Open Design still has, like the development of proper IP protection/sharing strategies and business models. Furthermore, many times there is not really a shared agreement about what is Open Design, and that’s another reason why we would like to have a formal Open Design Definition. For a longer overview of the background behind this Open Design Definition, you can check this presentation.

Having such a formal description helps but does not reduce the complexity of the topic, there will still be many issues to be clarified, that’s why it is also important that we develop such a definition in an open source and collaborative way, in order to keep track of all the different shades and hidden meanings and implications. For this reason, as part of the work I’m doing at Aalto Media Factory as Producer for the Aalto FabLab activities, I’ve started a collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation and together we have launched the Open Design Working Group. It works as an open source community, we have a mailing list for discussion and we’ve just launched the online repository where we will develop the Open Design Definition collaboratively. I say “we” because you can join us as well! Just register to our mailing list, introduce yourself and jump on the discussion!

After checking the different technical solutions for handling a distributed discussion about the Open Design definition, and the best option turned out to be using Git as a distributed version control system and Github as the online platform. Github is really popular for developing open source applications, and the platform is really well developed for collective discussion and easiness of use. You can also read this article about Github on Wired, which was then published as a Github repository as well (meta!).

We have created then an organization account in Github for our group:
https://github.com/organizations/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup

And there we’ve just launched the repository for developing collaboratively the Open Design Definition, with all the information that are necessary to start the process:
https://github.com/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup/Open-Design-Definition

What can you do next then?

Create your own basic / free Github user.
Send your username to the mailing list so that we can add you to the group and the repository (only the username, no passwords!!).
Start reading the documentation about the whole process that’s in the repository.
Start reading the existing Open definitions already in the repository, and for any comments open an issue ticket on Github.
If you need help, just send an e-mail to the mailing list.

And, this week we are going to have an Open Design Definition workshop at Fab* in Manchester, the first meeting of the European FabLabs and part of the Future Everything Festival!

One more thing: I’ve built the collaborative process following the Open P2P Design methodology, so this will be another test, both for the methodology and for using Github with it. It is a very simple process now, with only the participation matrix, activity design and storyboard:

The Maker and Fabbing scene in Italy

Massimo Menichinelli — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:33:29 +0000

I’m very busy in this period, so this will be a very short post. I still have to write something about the workshop I did in Helsinki in September 2011 and other events and projects, but now my focus is on the metadesign of the new openp2pdesign.org (and many new projects!). So this post will be about recent events and projects I’ve been involved in Italy, and both were especifically about the Maker and Fabbing scene in Italy.

01. FabCamp Torino

I’ve been working on developing Open Design (and generally, processes with Open Source and Peer-to-Peer dynamics in other fields as well) for many years, since 2005, and also for many years I’ve been interested and working on the issue of digital fabrication technologies (or fabbing) and FabLabs, as they represent a powerful catalyst for Open Design communities and projects to form and become sustainable. For this reason for some years now I’ve been trying to promote the Italian community of people interested in digital fabrication technologies, be them open designers or generative architects or other people. It hasn’t been an easy task, and the community actually has grown only in the past months, but after many months of organization and many difficulties, we managed to have the first FabCamp in Italy in Turin, last October (2011). Thanks to Massimo Banzi from Arduino, Italy had its first (temporary) FabLab in Turin in 2011 within the Stazione Futuro exhibition, and there we hosted FabCamp Torino, in the spaces surrounding FabLab Italia (some pictures of the event can be seen here). It was a small and simple event, but the first of this kind in Italy (yes, with a lot of delay!). Here you can watch my presentation and the morning of the event, we then went on during the afternoon discussing how to improve the situation regarding FabLabs in Italy, but unfortunately it wasn’t been recorded. Luckily, FabLab Italia now has become FabLab Torino.

FabCamp Torino – 29/10/2011

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

02. World Wide Rome

At the beginning of March 2012, the World Wide Rome event was organized in Rome showcasing the Italian Maker community, with the presence of international guests like Chris Anderson (director of Wired US) and Dale Dougherty (director of Make magazine). The event started a huge discussion on print and social media, raising also the interest of the Italian Government and the possibility of one or more Maker Faires in Italy soon.
I participated in the event, presenting an introduction to digital fabrication through the perspective of interactions between bits and atoms. I think that the best way to explain what a FabLab is can be found not in saying “it is a place where you can do (almost) anything”, but by explaining that in a FabLab you can experiment on the interactions between bits (information) and atoms (matter). It is not by accident that the FabLabs started at the Center for Bits and Atoms, and not at some center for rapid prototyping! So the whole perspective of the story I told at World Wide Rome was: only if you start thinking about how bits + atoms can interact, you can develop really innovative projects.
Before the event I was interviewed and you can read the discussion (in Italian) here.

World Wide Rome 9.3.12: Bit, Atomi, Città e Soldi

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

03. An op-ed for Domus Magazine

Just after World Wide Rome, I wrote an article for Domus regarding the Maker scene in Italy, it was an op-ed and not just a report of the event. With Italy’s long history of arts, crafts and embedded industrial systems of industry clusters, it is only natural to see a very interesting maker scene now emerging. You can read the article (in English and Italian) here on the Domus website: Networking craftsmen and designers into a maker community. I also mapped the social networks of the community Fabber in Italia on Facebook, the most active place for discussion in Italy for these topics; the map wasn’t published so here you can find the picture (expect more analysis of these kind soon, and they will be more detailed).

The turning point for the Maker movement came in the year 2005: the first Web 2.0 Summit was organized by O’Reilly Media in 2004 and in 2005 we saw the starting point of Arduino (the open hardware prototyping platform), RepRap (the open hardware self-replicating 3D printer), Instructables (the web platform for sharing the processes of DIY projects) and Make magazine (the most significant paper publication for makers). We could even argue that we use the term maker now as a consequence of the sense making ability of Make magazine and its series of events called Maker Faire.

Thanks to World Wide Rome, the existence of the maker movement is finally acknowledged, but it is too early to make a hypothesis of how much support the movement will receive or if it will gather a critical mass. The Italian context could be the perfect experiment where to test the dynamics of makers, open design and distributed manufacturing experiences, to see if they are a real sustainable opportunity and to see how they can integrate with the existing social and industrial fabric of the country. It is a common stereotype, sometimes, that the family is at the center of the Italian life, both on a social level or as the country’s actual welfare state: one could not be happier to see examples as Kent’s Strapper, a whole family that works together on building self-replicating 3D printers in Florence.

Finally, the emergence of the Maker community in Italy also gives us further insights on the power of social networks for launching projects. Many projects started independently and then only recently networked through Web 2.0 services and thanks to this networking the community has grown rapidly. It is also true, however, that print media and already established initiatives still play a key role in supporting such bottom-up initiatives: Wired and Make have been crucial not only in the past years but also in the World Wide Rome event.

A meetup about Open Knowledge and Open Design

Massimo Menichinelli — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:38:42 +0000

During November 2011, a first Open Knowledge Foundation meetup was held in Helsinki (read the report by Kat here). There I proposed to focus on Open Design among the future activities to be developed in Helsinki, since it’s an emerging field that is finally booming and it still needs a lot of reflection. I proposed to have another meetup in order to build the local presence of the Open Knowledge Foundation (the ultimate goal is to build the local chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Finland) and to focus it this time only on Open Design. This second meetup took place in at Aalto Media Factory in Helsinki on January 28th 2012 in the morning, while in the afternoon we hosted a meetup of Alternative World Design Capital 2012 (for a report of that meetup, you can read this review). I now work at Aalto Media Factory as a Producer for the Aalto FabLab, and for this reason I organized this event in order to have a broader discussion around Open Design.
You can have a look at all the pictures of the event here and here on Flickr. I also wrote a blog post about it on the Finnish Institute in London blog here and on the Aalto Media Factory blog here.

For the meetup, I prepared a presentation that gave an overview of the history of Open Design, its current status and the situation regarding a formal definition of Open Design yet. Briefly speaking, there is no real Open Design definition, the Open Hardware definition is quite new and design itself is quite a tricky concept to define (since it can refer to a process, a representation of a project, the realization of a project). You can see more about this in the presentation.
At the end I proposed the audience to start discussing what an Open Design definition could imply and what are their ideas and needs about the process.

Open Knowledge Finland meetup: Open Design (28/01/12, Aalto Media Factory)

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

The audience (around 30 people) liked the idea of developing the definition, and here are some ideas, needs, issues to address and questions that were made during the discussion:

why are current definitions not enough?
how to balance altruism, mutuality, dependency?
open information of daily material use of citizens?
what about materials, products, services, processes, language, communication, data/content?
open as reciprocal sharing
political side of openness
the definition has to focus on enabling the benefits of open design
general benefits:

sharing
innovation diffusion
inclusivity
collaboration
efficiency
innovation
transparency
risk management

how to protect individual creativity?
what about commercial interests?
how to boost constructive group creativity without mutual destructive/prohibitive competition?
is open public?
does open also imply availability?
open means infinitive, never finished! Release vs. dev. version
what about a license? software has a definition and license…
what is the purpose of the definition? maybe it helps to create a license or it helps people to know what we talk about
open design can refers to a process, not a physical object
what about the 4 freedoms?

The second discussion we had was about ideas for projects to improve Open Design as a discipline and its presence in Finland. This is another thing that we had proposed during the first meetup, with the idea that having more events and projects could reinforce the local Open Design community and the attention towards Open Knowledge. Participants were so much interested in the Open Design definition that was very difficult to wrap up that discussion and shift to the project discussion! We did not have much time for both discussion as the ADC part of the day was about to start.
Here are some proposals for projects (I have grouped them into groups):

Tourist attractions:

Open Guggenheim: Openheim
Openness for dummies

Media:

short video clips presenting the Open Design agenda
video about Open Design from Kahn academy
Open Design and local media
Open Design awareness campaign

(as you can see, these proposals follow the development of an Open Design definition)

Local events:

a regular Open Design meetup
pop-up Open Design “restaurant day”
Open Knowledge Festival
Camp Pixelache

Apps / tools:

hackathon to produce apps, open data, services
open design / hardware documentation tools development
workshop to share and explain open design tools

Open Design for public projects:

define Open Design requirements for public projects
define a certificate for Open Design

Open Design in Finland:

a twitter hashtag for Open Design in Finland?
a shared mindmap for Open Design in Finland?
design the new services of the Helsinki library together (Open Source Service Design)
Open Design startups (also in collaboration with Slush

As a conclusion, there was a really good feedback and interest in Open Design, especially in the Open Design definition. For this reason, we thought about further improving the process and making it really open, that’s why we set up an Open Design working group, as a joint project between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Aalto Media Factory! I hope you will join the discussion about the Open Design definition by joining our mailing list and by introducing yourself there! As a first project of the working group, we will develop an open definition of Open Design through local workshops and online discussion, stay tuned for hearing about its development!

An interview with Bas van Abel about Open Design

Massimo Menichinelli — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:52:41 +0000

Genomineerde Rotterdam designprijs 2011: Waag Society – Open Design from Premsela, The Netherlands Inst. on Vimeo.

Continuing the serie of interviews about Open Design, DIY, Fabbing and related issues, I have now the pleasure to interview Bas van Abel. Bas works as a Creative Director at Waag Society, where he co-founded of Waag Society’s FabLab, directs the Open Design Lab and edited the Open Design Now book. By the way, don’t forget to vote for Bas’ and Waag’s work about Open Design here on the Rotterdam Design Prize website.

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society works in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where Fab Labs and Open Design have encountered a great interest. Has the city influenced this in some way? And which is the impact Waag Society and its Fab Lab has on the city?

Bas van Abel: Amsterdam probably has the largest creative industry in The Netherlands with a big focus on innovation, which is a great context for open design and Fablabs. Waag Society has always been an influential organization in this Dutch – and Amsterdam creative industry on the policy and institutional level. With the Fablab we’ve created a making and meeting place for everyone to get involved from both a top level (municipality, education) and grass roots level (designers, artist, individuals, SME’s).

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society promotes the idea of open source and related issues like Open Data, Open Design, Open Content and O pen Hardware. How can they interact and mix in common projects?

Bas van Abel: All of these issues share common principles, though the infrastructure needed (licensing, tools, methods) are very specific. There are also big differences in the maturity of the domains. For open source software there is a clear definition, it has it’s own cultural background, the tools are ready available and there are successful business models. Open design and open wetware for example are far from clearly defined. Therefore I think it is important to specifically experiment on different domains and get a clear image of the needs and implications before creating cross-over projects. That doesn’t mean off-course that you shouldn’t use open source software for creating open design platforms. It is just about where you put the focus of your research.

Massimo Menichinelli: While hackerspaces usually start independently, it seems that Fab Labs always start within an existing institution: a foundation, a school, a museum.. Why do you think this happens? How could we use this strategy to start a new Fab Lab?

Bas van Abel: The idea of the Fablab is easy to comprehend and to adopt. The potential is clear and it functions as a huge global innovation hub, based on collaboration and sharing with a clear distributed organization model. It creates economic benefits and it prepares us for a future industrial model. This makes it very attractive for institutions to host such a lab. It connects easily to existing programs and structures, opposed to a more “chaotic” hackerspace.
Furthermore, the whole context makes it fairly easy for institutions to get funding to start a lab.

Meet My Maker from Waag Society on Vimeo.

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society is collaborating with Droog Design for the open design project “Design for Download”. What are the possible business models for Open Design, and could the collaboration with Droog Design make it less controversial and more popular?

Bas van Abel: I’d like to make something clear first. For me, being able to download design based on a new industrial model doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s Open Design. Shapeways and Ponoko are doing this as well and I wouldn’t call them Open Design platforms. They are however part of the context of open design. Droog approached it from this industrial perspective, while our perspective was from a more social disruptive one. I think they are very much related (a new industrial model will change social, economic and political modes), but the approach is different. That was also the exciting part about this collaboration.

The technical framework we have been developing within the collaboration is very similar to what Ponoko is doing with it’s maker system. Though the “design for download” business models are much more consumer oriented. We’ve been looking at the added value for consumers if you have on demand production and DIY production. With on demand production the business models are based on distributed production (could be a Fablab) and the consumer experience is in using the tools to design part their own product. With DIY production the focus of the business models are much more on services from DIY facilities. Making becomes part of the consumer product experience.

And about making Open Design less controversial with the collaboration with Droog Design, I think this definitely contributed to the acceptance within “design culture”, but we have been working on several projects, which have helped making open design more popular. We are very excited by our Open Design Lab nomination for the Rotterdam Design Prize, which is a great acknowledgment on the importance of Open Design.

Massimo Menichinelli: What do you think Open Design will be: users fabbing professional designers’ projects or designers and users collaborating in the design process? Or will there be a division between bottom-up user-driven design and elite professional designers’ and companies’ projects?

Bas van Abel: Yes, yes and yes. To me open design is about ownership and responsibility. Openness is a way of creating transparency. We need more transparency in general to be more emphatic with the things created around us. Open design is just part of this change towards more transparency. What this does to the role of the designer is just a small aspect of this change. More transparency will have an impact on society as a whole.

Massimo Menichinelli: The digital fabrication ecosystem at the moment consists of onlice services (like Shapeways), Fab Labs, hackerspaces, commercial high-end tools and cheap open hardware tools. Chris Anderson even suggested to manufacture DIY and Open products in China. How will these interact among each other?

Bas van Abel: You only have to look at the current shanzhai developments in Shenzhen to see where this is going in China. There hackerspaces are popping up working on all kinds of open design/hardware projects based on micro-manufacturing. It’s where the economic benefits of open and community based small-scale manufacturing are taking shape. Shanzhai has for a while been seen as piracy, but it is far past that and turning into a true open grassroots manufacturing model.

A very interesting conversation on the future impact of Shanzhai can be found here: http://www.iftf.org/ShanzhaiFutures

Will Open Design have a place within traditional manufacturing companies or will it work only with individual or community-based fabbing?

Digital production, online platforms for knowledge sharing, information access, exchange systems and social networks radically change the structure of society.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we have been building in mass production, a non-transparent, centralized and closed system. There is still a big gap between the principles and drivers in our “digital world” and our “physical world”. Open design, hackerspaces, shanzhai, Fablabs, DIY… they are all moving towards closing this gap.

Looking at the future, I believe we are heading for a world where our societal, industrial and economical models will be based on the same principles we use in our current communication systems. It’s distributed, social and transparent.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design and Fab Labs need tools (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) but also supply chains, partnerships, services, … How can we design a system that enables people to develop Open Design projects?

Bas van Abel: When you’re talking about the open source part of open design, we need to know what is the source of design. This is a far more complicated question than with software, though I think it is possible to start creating systems for this. I always see the analogy with cooking. You have a very culturally embedded local production with local ingredients, but you also have an international exchange system in the form of recipes. On top of that the production facilities (the kitchen) and the tools are pretty standardized. If you take this to open design, a common design language for exchange could be layered the same way. Our kitchen is for example the Fablab and the local materials, the recipes are the instructions and finely the secret ingredient is your designer signature.

Off-course we also need to create collaboration systems etc., but I think a common language is where we have to start. Only this way we can truly work in an open and distributed way.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design now seems to be based on small individual projects instead of large, collaborative and community-based projects. What I’m trying to do with Open P2P Design is to start the design process from communities (or at least include them in it) helping them to self-organize a collaborative design process. What do you think about this issue?

Bas van Abel: Good luck ;-) !
It sounds a bit corny, but I think the biggest open design project we are working on is society itself. Design is more and more being used as a mechanism to solve societal issues. Within this context, design processes need to be open, transparent and reciprocal. We need systems that are able to organize this ongoing and ever changing design process. Open P2P Design is a great initiative, which I think reflects one of our current societal challenges.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree with this idea? How could we further explore it?

Bas van Abel: Like I said, I believe Open design creates transparency, which creates more ownership, which creates more responsibility. Open design is therefore a driver for a more responsible, emphatic society, where efficiency is not based on purely on costs, but also on conditions, energy and relevance.

Also, if we want to drive towards a next industrial revolution we also have to develop new energy sources. A great vision on industrial revolutions has been defined by Jeremy Rifkin, who stresses the critical combination of new energy and communication systems to drive industrial revolutions. We have a distributed communication system, but we still work with central energy systems. Fablabs and open design can be great platforms for developing distributed renewable energy systems.

Redesigning openp2pdesign.org

Massimo Menichinelli — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:08:49 +0000

Almost two years ago, in May 2010 I blogged that openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community.

A brief recap: the openp2pdesign.org project started in March 2005 with my Master Degree Thesis in the Faculty of Design of the Milan Polytechnic. Therefore, for the first year (March 2005 – April 2006) openp2pdesign.org was just a work in progress while I was producing the first source code. As since back then the concepts of Open Design and Open P2P Design were in their early days and there were very few opportunities to develop them further, I started openp2pdesign.org in order to provide a space for collective discussion and further research. It took then form of a website towards the end of 2006, opening the 2007 as a multilanguage blog, “Open Peer-to-Peer Design. Design for Complexity” in English, Italian and Spanish. During the following years, the project has become quite successful, with workshops, lectures or panels in many countries, including Italy, Spain, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico. Meanwhile, I also moved to Helsinki to further investigate Open Design and Open P2P Design in the Media Lab of the Aalto University – School of Art and Design.

But now, the most important thing I want to share with you in this post is this: if you remember, in the old post I mentioned, I wrote this:

During the next months, we will design the collaborative activity of the open source community of openp2pdesign.org; and yes, we are going to use the Open P2P Design methodology for this task. You can track this process in the meta.openp2pdesign.org page. Once this collaborative activity is stable, we will open it to the participation and everybody will be able to join us and be part of it.
We hope it will be ready by the end of 2010, meanwhile the blog will work, and you can follow our projects in it or subscribing to our newsletter on the Contact page or here below:

What has happened since then? Well, everybody has been very busy, and the participation of the new members has been really low (4 posts in 1 year and half). Meanwhile, other people joined the project but unfortunately still 99,9% of the work was done by me. Information has been scattered among this website, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and other external websites. This project needs then to rearrange all the resources that it has been mapping during these years, and to do it in a really collaborative way (so far, there were some technical limitations that prevented many people from entering).
Even if busy with many projects (some of them still have to appear on this web!), I’ve been researching and testing how to improve this website and make it really an open source project. After many tests, finally the moment has arrived! If you go to meta.openp2pdesign.org, you will find that the redesign process has already started, and if you want, you can join it. We will use Trac and Subversion software (as in the development of many open source projects) and the Open P2P Design methodology for designing how openp2pdesign.org project will work as a community dedicated to a set of collaborative activities. There is also a mailing list for discussion about the redesign of the project here:

http://lists.meta.openp2pdesign.org/listinfo.cgi/discussion-meta.openp2pdesign.org

If you want to understand better the tools and process that will be used, have a look at this recent presentation:

Open P2P Design: Workshop @ Pixelversity, Helsinki (16/09/2011)

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

Here are few things to keep in mind about the openp2pdesign.org project and its redesign:

as in many open source projects, with this project I need to “scratch an itch” i.e. map and studying resources about designing collaborative, open and complex projects; we can further discuss about this, but this is the starting point;
ideally, the redesign process will never be completed: it will always be possible to modify and improve the project;
content published on the website will be released as open content or open data; however, this does not mean that absolutely everything will be open: we will discuss together what shall be more or less open and which licenses to use (for example, the work I’m doing in the Aalto University can be open only to some extent because I have to follow existing rules and dynamics);
it doesn’t need to become a big project or to develop very quickly: it needs to be a good and useful project for understanding better open, complex and collaborative design (quality is preferred over quantity);
you can join the redesign process, or wait until the new website will be up and running to join it; in any case, the best thing is to follow openp2pdesign.org and learn a bit about Open P2P Design;
the redesign process is also a way for further testing and refining the Open P2P Design methodology itself, I hope you can help me in finding bugs or in proposing suggestions.

One more thing: but what it is supposed to be openp2pdesign.org? It is not a start-up (at least not yet): the idea is to have a common space for studying how to design open, collaborative and complex projects, and to do this in an open source way. It is a place for anybody interested in find resources, tools, knowledge about design for open, collaborative and complex projects. But of course, if you join the project and help with the redesign process, you can help us in redefining also the project.
You should be interested in openp2pdesign.org if you usually ask yourself these questions:

What does it mean to develop an Open Design project, or to develop a collaborative design project for a community or complex system?
Where can I find the closest place for developing Open Design projects
Where can I find tools and resources for developing projects for complex social systems?
Where can I find a place for discussion about designing for communities and about co-design?
Where can I find the closest place for fabbing an Open Design project?
(and many other questions… you can leave a comment suggesting related needs!)

As a conclusion, blogging now will be less important until a new platform will be developed. If you want to participate in the process, go to meta.openp2pdesign.org or send an e-mail to meta [at] openp2pdesign.org asking for a Subversion (SVN) and Trac account. If you don’t want to participate in the process but want to see / use the new website / community when it will be available, just subscribe to the newsletter and we will keep you updated. In this project, open doesn’t just mean something that you can download for free, but that we welcome any participant in further improving this collaborative effort, so we will be happy if you join and help us!

At Futur En Seine 2011

Emmanuel Gilloz — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:01:54 +0000

From 17th to 26th June, there was “Futur En Seine” in Paris, a popular festival about life and digital creation. I had the chance to be here during a whole week, hosted and working in the temporary FabLab² as a finalist of the (Un)limited Design Contest.
More details of the work in progress on my blog, flickr, and on thingiverse for the files of my project of a folding shelve (Ronen Kadushin and other liked it ^^).

It was a very good occasion to taste what could be a Fab Lab, from the designer point of view (its addictive to have access to all these tools), but also for the public (I think we evangelized a wide audience) and the interaction with them (we made plenty of things for/with many people). And now everyone want a permanent Fab Lab at the “Citée des Sciences et de l’Industrie”.

Besides that, there were a lots of conferences (I missed “what tools for amateurs in a Fab Lab context?”, but we can read about here, in French) and many events/workshop (for diy enthusiasts, kids, to learn 3D softwares, or Arduino,etc.) see also this pearltree.

I was very occupied by the Fab Lab, but I could attend at least some conferences, including the one I was waiting for : The Future of Creation (with Neil!).
I took many notes but what’s following is the most important things I keep from this presentation and for each speaker.

There was two major keyword : open, and collaborative.
From the enlightenment of creativity, that spread with the democratization of digital tools and the rise of the sharing culture, to the basic freedom of the commons that are needed to really enable that sort of renaissance of a new free creative culture.

Marleen Stikker

She bets that in the future it will be “open design by default”, open as the new norm in design, including all the design process. With the digital and distributed manufacturing revolution, products are personal again and we can put them online or share them like music. That disrupts all the known business models, and design people are afraid but more and more understand the shift: cut the middle man, share blueprint not product.

She also insists on open knowledge, because knowledge empower peoples, we must understand how things are made (like they said “if you can’t open it…you don’t own it”). And with the Open Data movement, all is new again, allowing anyone to make meaning from data. And when having a bunch of personal data, we can and tend to quantify ourselves. Imagine now that everyone not only use the data but can also add their own, by sharing them, like for the citizen research (not counting butterflies, but your CO² footprint by example).

But to be truly open the data must follow some rules: to be complete, raw, actual, accessible, machine readable, non exclusive, in an open format, and under a free license. To encourage this movement there are also new “open data contest”, for programmers/developers/citizens… but at the end we need a policy for the access of information, toward an Open Government (see what they are doing in Iceland with they crowdsourced constitution), it’s only a trust issue.

She also reminds us some principles:

Users as designers design for/with them, not for the stakeholders
Questioning the question “Do we really need it?”, from a sustainability point of view consider also the “do-it-with-what-you-have”
Reciprocity (the most important) the exchanges must be in the two-way (example with Facebook that can profit from personal data while we can’t use our own data collected), as for the right to access to information, it’s a matter of openness and trust.
privacy by design (it’s a design requirement, not a security issue)

(you can see her talk here)

Shawn Micheal O’Keefe

Like the “open” for Marleen, for him Participation is the new norm (in the creative process), this real feedback loop allowing to go beyond the mere customization. Collaboration (and sharing in case that interest others) becomes the framework for success and the future of the creative process.

Beside the example of Threadless (an online infrastructure+logistic permitting to crowd-source t-shirt design), and a well-done remark (exploit-sourcing: one-way “spec works” with no reciprocity or any feedback versus crowd-sourcing), he shared with us his experience of the organization of the event South by Southwest (SXSW) in which the panelists are chosen in part by the crowd.
At this interesting question from the public “did collaboration change the business model of SXSW ?”
He answered “Not very much (logistic is the same), but participation and involvement in the selection process is good for the quality of the event (as if it were tailored by/for the community).
As for this other noticeable example of collaboration: Iceland outsourcing its constitution, the more people are involved in an open process the merrier the result is.

Concluding that the future of design is community and passion.

(you can his talk here)

Odette Valentine

We know that fashion relies on shared knowledge (as science and soon design), it’s already an example of a functioning free culture. But what happen when we mix clothing and digital communication technologies ?

As for many disciplines, digital tools are pushing the boundaries (possibilities for printing patterns, experiments, or even 3D Printing in fashion). What’s interesting in open-source fashion and mass-custom, is not about economy, but making individual and allowing expression of talent.
Thus tomorrow will be more about personal, autonomous, and symbiotic creation. She had a nice example of social creation with the “sweat shop cafe couture” where people can come to craft their clothes. The “I made it” is socially inclusive but permit also exclusive creations.

(you can see her talk here)

Jean-Louis Frechin

He remind us not to forget that the language is a system of though that influences us (and shapes how we think I will add).
Thus, we can’t hope to copy/paste an anglo-saxon thing here (referring to the design thinking trends), and Design has to change. From the comfortable bourgeois crafts, to the Bauhaus and the aesthetic of serial democratic product, or Ulm and the industrial rationalization individualization… what’s the next step ?

What will be the aesthetic of our times ? How are we going to do things ?
Arguing that digital personal fabrication change the “how”, but doesn’t change the things in themselves.

(you can now see his talk here)

Neil Gershenfeld

Having seen the video of his conference in this previous post, I already knew most of the presentation but it was nice to see him in person.

He explained us that additive manufacturing is great but limited, because it’s still just consist of “smooching stuff” (not a great difference between the principle of a glue gun and 3D printing). And he’s sorry that people are focused on it while he think that the next step is “object=code”, where object-code could assemble themselves like the ribosome in our DNA (and they already have made some interesting proof of concept at the MIT). By the way, this idea of a “codeable” matters to make objects that we can easily transform, reminded me this video of a “living kitchen“.

On the Fab Lab side, he compared them as a new Internet, changing how we work/learn/play and contributing to an empowerment of the people (empowerment ->education->problem solving->jobs creation->innovation/invention). Of course this bottom-up approach is disruptive, producing innovative peoples, distributed learning, and creating, new networks.
But we have faced similar moment of old-new method… look at what we finally have today in the music industry: a whole ecology of various actors. He said that we need this ecology in fabrication.
And Fab Labs, with their educative mission, can be like libraries: sustainable by community.

Finally I noticed a greater emphasis on organization than on fabrication (example of child in Africa educating themselves through the Fab Lab because they don’t fit in the school, but after that can’t integrate the classic system): we need to invent a new system.

(you can now see his talk here)

Bror Salmelin

As a Policy Advisor to the Director of the European Commission, it was very interesting to see that (representing the institutions for me) they seems to be quite aware (more than I thought) of the coming changes:

Policy is crucial, and open-design is a major issue of change, creating solutions for the industry/organization/society.
For 2020 the Europe have some goals for a smart-growth and many action areas, among them: making legislatives propositions, investing in a faster infrastructure (fiber Internet), increasing the amount invested in Research & Innovation (from a small amount that I don’t know to 3% of the global GNB).
While presenting this digital agenda of the Europe, everything seems cool but I noticed it include also a “stronger Intellectual Propriety” (curious, after talking about openness).

Linear innovation is dead, long live experimental mentality, and we must adapt our education and everything to that. About this coming Knowledge Economy he mentioned the “National Intellectual Capital” report, comparing 40 country (nic40.org)
Fab Lab and all are essential for this evolution from a closed to an open and then a networked innovation system, we have the infrastructure but we need to connect all that together.
And for how to design the EU innovation system he pointed us to the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission: europa.eu/fp7/ict.

(you can now see his talk here)

//Question time//

A question from the public mixed the idea of reciprocity, and the users-designers relation.
Bror first compared it as “want/need” versus “something-from-someone-who-knows”, the top-down approach will seem unbearable if the diy/sharing culture continue to arise, let people try by themselves.
For Marleen it’s a question of transparency : we must open the black box of the design process, show how to make sustainable product without IP, opening knowledge for more understanding, and maybe that will lead us to an open-society.

The afternoon it was the launching of the book OpenDesignNow, with a little workshop/discussion.

During the talk they reminded us an interesting fact about copyright: we tend to forget that its quite recent in our history… while before the relation between copy and inspiration was not as criticized as today.

And I noted an interesting example about the changes that implied: it seems that Giuseppe Verdi has been less productive after the introduction of copyrights. The goal was to protect the authors to allow them to pursue their creation, but doesn’t it looks counter-productive?

I thought it’s as if you have the choice between “living from what you have done” (selling the same thing again and again) versus “living by doing what you like”… both are understandable but the later seem less boring and more prone to improve things and life, because unlike our resources, creativity (or how we use them) is infinite.

It was a great week and I think if things keep going like that, we’re on a nice track of changes !

An interview with Open Design City

Massimo Menichinelli — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:37:11 +0000

Just after my participation in the Maker Lab at the DMY Berlin 2011, I finally had the chance to meet and interview Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant from Open Design City, a co-working and community-based space for making hosted in the Betahaus (Berlin, Germany). The following interview is the result of a reconstruction of a great half a day of sharing of ideas and talking in Berlin.
(By the way: I’m going to be again in Berlin next week for the Open Knowledge Conference: I’ll be part of a panel and workshop on creating a standard for Open Hardware and Design, more details on the website of the event.)

Massimo Menichinelli: Could you please tell us the story of Open Design City, how it started and what is planned for the near future?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Open Design City happened by accident, starting from an existing community, with an event in Betahaus in February 2010.
Various makers from Berlin and other places met for an Open Design Event, which resulted in a dinner party, numerous products, experiments and the documentary “delivered in beta”. The design festival DMY Berlin then was interested in having a Maker space, 200 square meters of space, with a budget of 3000 € for materials and transportation provided by Etsy (Editor’s note: Etsy has an office in Berlin, here). Then Betahaus wanted to start a Fab Lab, and before the MakerLab, we opened the space in Betahaus, catalysed by the community formed in creating the MakerLab. We confronted business models, asked the community about how to organize (and then create) the space. People brought tools, resources and ideas in the space, that was not defined in the beginning. We left it up to the community to share tools, skills, machines and organize events and workshops to launch the space.
Everything in the place has been built or donated by the members, except for a series of tools donated by the marketing department at Bosch. Then CNC machines and a Makerbot arrived later.

We are now in a transition process, recruiting more members in order to cope with the rental costs, and trying to establish a long-term business plan (because everything happened by accident). Since we don’t have a legal status yet, we are not receiving any subsidies from government or companies, the space is offered by Betahuas but all the money comes from members, so there’s need to find more money.
We are trying to establish connections with companies that may benefit from the space, but in any case the community comes first for us. It is a space by the community for the community, and we are trying to create opportunities for the community to make money through workshops and more services.

Massimo Menichinelli: What is the current situation in Berlin for Fab Labs and Open Design? What kind of impact a Fab Lab like yours could have in Berlin?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant It’s very hard to get fundings from the government, moreover there are interesting projects and artists but not so much industry and no other Fab Labs.
There are many coworking spaces but with no focus on open design or fabbing technologies. There are some Hackerspaces with RepRaps and small workshops, and some other places offer access to cnc machines by paying per hours.
There is also a space for reusable materials in Pankow, and a well equipped workshops for artists from bbk-kulturwerk. Then there is the internet platform “verbund offener werkstätten”, a German wide association for open workshops and fab labs.

Generally, Berlin does not have a tradition of industry and factories, but there are many DIY workshops from the squatting times in the ’80s; most of them are closed now, but there’s still this tradition in the city.
Moreover, there are a lot of projects about Open Source in Berlin (Creative Commons, Freifunk, …) and therefore there are many overlapping communities.

Massimo Menichinelli: Fab Labs are still a new experiment, and there is the need to develop proper business models. What’s your experience in the field, and which are the problems that you encountered in managing a Fab Lab? Any advice for starting a Fab Lab?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant A budget or business plan is not necessary for starting a Fab Lab, you just need enough people that want to be part of it. And tell the right story about the space, so people will start contributing naturally. Start with spaces and the community, then consider later the tools and machines (most of the usual tools of Fab Labs are not so important actually). It’s also important to have different skills present, from electronics to product to social programming.

Massimo Menichinelli: In your experience, which kind of users are more interested in your Fab Lab: designers, makers, artists…? Could we extend the user base to non-designers as well?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Our user base is really broad, and it’s diversity what makes this space so interesting: hackers, artists, economists, philosophers, designers…
It’s a communication issue: the way you communicate the space attracts different people, from open hardware to open data, privacy, self-production. We are striving to maintain the user base so different and that people can engage with peer-to-peer dynamics.
We are currently developing the project of a mobile infrastructure for tools in the city (collaborating with ngos and the green movement).

Massimo Menichinelli: How does Open Design City work? What are the structure and rules that you have, and could they be implemented in other cities as well or are they specifically related to the Berlin / Germany context?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We decide with the community (asking them for propositions): they announce events and they are responsible for their organization.
There’s a center in the organization (Jay and Chris are responsible), but we’re trying to decentralize it more and It’s an ongoing challenge. We are also trying to define how the space is legally defined: there is no legal infrastructure now, so it opens opportunities but there are drawbacks (for example you can’t look for funding).
Anyway, if you think there’s something that could be improved in the space, just do it!

Massimo Menichinelli: While Fab Labs have grown considerably in terms of popularity, Open Design is still more controversial: many designers and companies fear or don’t like the idea of open collaborative processes and the sharing of the design drawings. How could we overcome this problem?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We should start with real examples, we have to prototype some products, just to show the strategic power of Open Design. There’s a lot of theory around business models for Open Design, we should demonstrate them as a real possibility. Otherwise it’s just idealism, while Open Design should be part of the economy and we should communicate that’s not only about giving stuff for free.
At the moment is just a leap of fatih to be enagaged in the Open Design world, and we are not so motivated by money. ;-)

Massimo Menichinelli: I started researching about Open Design in 2005, and in 6 years the situation has changed a lot: from isolated experiments to a full ecosystem emerging right now. It is always difficult to make forecast, but how do you see Open Design and Fab Labs in 5 years?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant The future of Open Design is not here but in Africa or Asia or South America. If China close their Intellectual Property policies, there won’t be any future for Open Design, and we look at Shanzai as a good examples of what can be ahead.
There is a need therefore to change laws, they are not clear and limitate people, especially for what regards IP. We will have also to explore new legal frameworks and business models that are community-guided.
Finally, we have also to study more how to do product hacking, it will be interesting to understand how Open Design interacts with closed design cases and companies.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree? How could we further explore this direction?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant With openness you can create innovation and knowledge in a distributed model and if you have an open process, it’s also about renewing resources as well. It’s about the commons, and it’s hard to find the right strategy on a legal level (or to change the economic system). Furthermore, there should also be a long term vision; there are not so many theories that are well grounded, with probably the exception of Michel Bauwens. And then there’s of course the need of proper business models.

The challenge is: how do I make money from Open Design? Because once you have Open Design, anybody can solve problems because there’s free access to knowledge and tools that are open. Another question is: what are people’s objectives? We should ask it ourselves before saying we should need money or a project should be open. If I already have the life I want to live, should I care who’s making money?

In open design, value lies in the return of the artisan: a company can’t get and offer the same emotional connections and feeling. And the enemy to fight in order to reach sustainability, is planned obsolence. If we manage to use Open Design to solve this, we will reach sustainability. Furthermore, open existing products to fix this planned obsolence problem and make them not obsolete is the key, so we can understand what can be improved (material, energy efficiency, …). We also studied how to create bioplastics, but the materials shrink too much, so there should be more investigation about it.
As a conclusion: as a designers we are trained to develop everything new, from scratch, but it’s not true that this is what we really need… how many chairs are already there?

At DMY Berlin 2011 in the Maker Lab

Massimo Menichinelli — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:59:30 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was part of the 2011 edition of DMY Berlin, together with the Open Helsinki group inside the MakerLab. This event was part of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. Even if I was there only for the last two days (and it’s always difficult to get attention in a Design Festival, especially in such a noisy place), there was a good feedback from the visitors, especially on the last day.
I gave two lectures twice and helped few visitors understand and develop open processes and businesses, see below for the details, the presentations and the toolkit for designing open processes.
You can see more pictures from the event from Miska Knapek‘s Flickr account.

DMY Opening from robertanderson on Vimeo.

Open P2P Design

Open P2P Design brings open source and peer-to-peer dynamics inside a community-centered design process, in order to have real co-design projects with people and their communities. We can use Open P2P Design for co-designing Open Design processes or commercial or public services with open and peer-to-peer dynamics, starting from communities and involving them inside the design process. We can also use it for analyzing an existing business and opening to collaboration some of its activities, or design new ones in order to start a collaboration with a community of users.

Open P2P Design @ DMY Berlin 2011 – MakerLab

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

Markets and business models for Open and DIY projects

Which are the possible business models for Open projects like Open Design and Open Hardware? And what about running a Fab Lab or a similar place? Which strategies can we adopt in order to have successful DIY Craft projects? People that want to organize collaborative spaces or companies need to think about how to run their business in a
sustainable way, but even single or groups of Open Designers could get more insights for their project if they discover the possible business models. Let’s have a look at the existing markets, the common business models and the possible future scenarios.

Open Business @ DMY Berlin 2011 – MakerLab

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

Open P2P Design Toolkit: bring your project!

Beside the lectures, I had prepared for the Maker Lab a a toolkit for helping designers, makers, companies and whoever is interested in developing an Open and collaborative project, starting from a community or from an existing activity. The toolkit can be download here in the Source section or on Scribd and Issuu.

Open publication – Free publishing – More open design

On Open Business Models @ EDUfashion conference, Ljubljana 02/06/2011

Massimo Menichinelli — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:29:40 +0000

Following the previous post, let’s still talk about Open Design in the Fashion Design sector and about the EDUfashion project (and its openwear.org brand). Few weeks ago I was invited in their event: EDUfashion Conference – Refashioning fashion: new scenarios of clothing – 2nd June 2011.

I didn’t talk about Open P2P Design and how to co-design open processes and systems; instead I talked about the business models behind the current Open and DIY projects. Running an Open business is part of the big theme “how to co-design open systems”, and it’s something I’m increasingly investigating more and more (and it seems there is a lot of interest in it).
Here’s my presentation; soon I will blog about a longer presentation about the same issues I gave in Berlin few days later:

On Open Business @ EDUfashion conference – Ljubljana 02/06/2011

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli

The event was very nice and insightful and it was great to finally have time to do something together with Openwear.org. Furthermore, it confirms that Open Design has a really great place in the fashion industry (something I must confess I was’t aware before meeting the people from Openwear.org 2 years ago). Among the many interesting speakers, I’d like to outline the presentation of Jen Ballie, a PhD student at the Textile Futures Research Group and Consultancy whose research is about the intersection of co-design, web 2.0 and sustainability for the fashion industry.

Co everything part two

View more presentations from Jen Ballie

Massimo Banzi: The State of Arduino

Massimo Menichinelli — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:27:27 +0000

After the video of Neil Gershenfeld at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, here’s now the video of Massimo Banzi about the state of Arduino and of its community from the same event. One of the interesting things to note in his speech is the fact that Arduino is not evolving too quickly, its speed is slow enough for the community to adapt to its evolution.
And don’t forget that the first ArduinoCamp is going to be held on 18th-19th June in Milan (see you there!).