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?