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.

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.

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:

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!

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?

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.

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 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.

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:

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.

You can also read it and embed it from Scribd:

Openwear E-book Final

Or from Issuu:

Analog phone calls degraded with distance; we now have the Internet. Analog computations degraded with time; we now have PCs. But today’s most advanced manufacturing processes, whether additive or subtractive, remain analog because the materials themselves don’t contain information. Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, will present research on digital materials, and discuss its implications for the future of making things.

via | Digital Fabber

After the interview with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen from Openwear.org, I have now the pleasure to interview Peter Troxler, an independent researcher (see his personal website here) and one of the few researchers (if not the only one) that are investigating the business models of Fab Labs and Open Design.
Peter Troxler is also one of the editors of the forthcoming Open Design Now book and runs Square One, an independent research company at the intersection of business administration, society and technology. He has also been an instructor at Fab Academy and Business Developer at Fab Lab Luzern.

Peter Troxler: I am not entirely sure this assessment is actually correct. Let’s look at the two topics, Fab Labs and Open Design, seperately.

01. Fab Labs
It is obvious that the Netherlands has seen a quick growth in number of Fab Labs — from one in 2007/2008 to 6 labs (on the official list and 3 more (mobile, Maastricht, Enschede) that are not on the list now (2010/11). Also, with 9 Labs for 16 million inhabitants this is probably the highest density; the US has 19 Fab Labs for 311 million of people (at this density the Netherlands would only have 1 Fab Lab).

But we should not forget, that Fab Labs are only one player in the fabbing universe; there are Tech Shops, Hacker Spaces, “Offene Werkstätten” (in Germany) etc. that also provide a personal manufacturing infrastructure. According to hackerspaces.org, Germany has some 56 HS, about 40 “Offene Werkstätten” and a handful of Fab Lab initiatives.
And I am just starting to understand what’s going on in France …

So the apparent pole position of the Netherlands might need to be taken “cum grano salis”.

Probably another element helped spread the Fab Lab idea in the Netherlands: the fact that it is just such a small and relatively densely populated country. Ideas can spread really quickly, and that might be the reason why many things are adopted quickly over here.

2. Open Design

Open Design is somewhat vaguely defined. And open design in general is very much in its infancy. If you restrict it to open source type approaches in industrial/product design, you’ll find pockets of it in Berlin, the Dutch Randstad, and probably the Bay Area (US). If you look at fashion, open design has a longer history, and maybe Italy might figure more prominently on the map.

An interesting aside in this context is, that Asian artists/designers traditionally used to get more cudos by copying old masters while the Western culture (at least as of the 19th century romantic illusion of the lone creator as promoted by Diderot) seems more inclined to admire “original creation”.

But then there is the whole area of design where we talk about hardware and electronics — there the Netherlands figure probably not even as second runner up, but you would have to analyse open hardware project collections such as those of Make Magazine and Kerstin Balka’s http://open-innovation-projects.org/ to get some idea of national figure — I have not done that so far and actually don’t intend to do that.

It’s difficult to say, why the Netherlands would be the fore-runner of Fab Labs and Open Design.

What strikes me is that the Netherlands also have one of the least transparent and “greedy” ecosystem of private organisations collecting royalties for all sorts of intellectual property (there seem to be over 20 organisations in the Netherlands collecting (and allegedly re-distributing) such fees).

Having said that, one could think that actually this country is sort of obsessed with dealing with intellectual property. The Netherlands is — to my knowledge — the only country where the national Creative Commons chapter received substantial government funding over a prolonged period of time. It is certainly highly speculative to use that as an explanation for the apparent attention for Open Design in the Netherlands.

Similarly, one would also have to speculate about the role of design in general in the Dutch society — at least in the national self-perception Dutch Design is almost equalled to a (if not *the*) international benchmark of good design. This creates an environment where it is not unlikely that all sorts of off-mainstream projects do get to benefit from the critical mass interested in the overall topic.

The design business is focused around big names who all act more as brands than as designers. Only in the best cases, the star designer acts as the mentor, the more typical role is that of selecting products from the myriad of unknown designers … a mechanism well hidden to the public.

Collaboration and sharing therefore are structurally not part of the behavioral patterns designers typically have at their disposal, certainly not with peers. They might be OK to collaborate in constellations where they are the only ones who can claim to have some credibility of being able to design professionally. Designing in a way that other designers could interact with a design — even more demanding: a design still under development — is not part of what designers are good at … probably from both sides: leading designing and participating in designing.

Lastly, a designer’s belief that long, hard, specialist work would eventually result in one successful product that would generate income and pay for the investment does not allow for a model where “everybody is a designer”. The two business models they know are the mass market and the niche market.

So there is a lot of education needed, a lot of communication — in a way that appeals to designers — to actually promote Open Design, to make them dare innovate their profession (which is a rather young one). Even if you look at what for instance Ronen Kadushin dreams of — it’s becoming the curator of an Open Design collection. And his most successful business model (apart from speaking on Open Design, which might or might not pay well) is the niche market — selling originals.

And there are educational approaches needed, as practiced by Ronen Kadushin, by Caroline Hummels or by Mushon Zer-Aviv, that actually create collaborative design experiences in education.

Massimo Menichinelli: Which are the main business models for Fab Labs and Open Design? Any advice for starting one of these projects?

Peter Troxler: As it stands, there are probably four Fab Lab business models — you have seen the FabFolk wiki and written about it yourself. This is pretty much where we stand right now. Out of the fifty-odd current Fab Labs, there are probably only very few that survive on their own with a commercial business model (if we exclude subsidies and patrons). Yet there are the shoestring/grassroots labs that survive because they are *not* operating according to commercial conditions, live on infrastructure that is already paid for and are run by people who don’t need a “return on investment” if they buy a laser cutter …

For Open Design, I think I have to be quiet at the moment, I’d have to speculate and lie … there is a huge potential to transform the OSS business models to design, but this transformation would have to be done collaboratively between OSS experienced people, designers and business model innovators. While I’d see myself as one of the latter, I’m none of the former two.

But then: let’s speculate while we’re at it ;)

There is a lot of talk on the Internet these days about monetary and social value and how the latter will or could eventually become more important than the former. This of course sends a lot of hope in the direction of those actually creating social value — artists, musicians, designers, etc., not the big corporates and not the derivatives market.

Another thing that is mentioned quite often are alternative currencies. These are not new initiatives, but many of them gain new momentum from the possibilities of the Internet and p2p networks etc.

Such ideas and systems shift the business models out of the purely state money sphere — but they don’t really answer the question of the business model.

As it stands and to my insufficient understanding, today designers work for design agencies that in turn work for manufacturers. And as in many other creative industries, those are the middle men who do the business with the products (results) of creativity. They assume that to be able to sell these products, consumers have to be prevented from making or copying these products themselves (we could add here the discussion on copyrights etc.); but more importantly competitors have to be prevented from copying the products — and that’s probably the mental block for manufacturers to adopt open design easily. In music, it has been discussed at length how to reshape a business model in a world of open (e.g. Masnick, Mike (2009, 5 February). My MidemNet Presentation: Trent Reznor And The Formula For Future Music Business Models. Techdirt. Blogpost available at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090201/1408273588.shtml)

This is stating the obvious:

• concentrate not on selling products but instead on selling expertise
• sell products while trying to keep ahead of the competition

(from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing)

Equally, there are the various declinations of Kevin Kelly’s famous “Eight Generatives” of “Better Than Free”.

And there is the very practical (personal) portfolio model which tackling the underlying issue of how to survive as a designer, mixing paid and unpaid, open and closed projects — I’m digressing.

Massimo Menichinelli:Which kind of “users” are more interested in Fab Labs and Open Design? Could we extend the user base to non-designers as well?

Peter Troxler: At this very moment I think its probably the non-designers (or not yet designers) who are most interested in Open Design, and I see it as a huge task to have designers even consider open design as an option — they get so brainwashed into the closed/copyright/genius thinking.

Massimo Menichinelli: The main approach to Open Design and Fab Labs is technology-driven (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) and usually starts from a project and then maybe a community will gather around it. I think this approach could be further developed by instead starting from the users and the communities they are part of. What do you think about this issue?

Peter Troxler: In my opinion it is vital to start a FabLab with some minimal community and all successful FabLabs have chosen that route … or if they have not managed to find that community (or create it), the projects have stopped. So I’d not agree with you when you say the main approach is technology-driven. However, technology can obviously be a key motivator for a community — we want to have this laser cutter, so let’s join forces to get one.

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?

Peter Troxler: I like this observation, and it is true, there is a whole buzz going on around Fab Labs and Open Design. I’m expecting this to continue for a little while, and there is plenty of room for it.

I see a few challenges ahead, though (and I’m particularly speaking for the Fab Lab network now).

1. Growth of the network has been exponential, the number of labs doubling every 18 months. Yet the network is relatively weak, with few key nodes for keeping up the standards, keeping everybody in the loop etc. These nodes are already feeling the strain this growth puts on them and mechanisms are being established to increase that capacity.
2. The network still has to learn to work as a community, to establish stronger links, to start sharing between the labs etc.
3. With FabLabs and Open Design we are still in the phase of early adopters. If we adopt Geoffrey A. Moore’s Chasm model, the big challenge we face is getting the early majority involved in FabLabs and Open Design. It could well be that in the U.S. of A. this process has already started with the proposed National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010.
4. With that growth comes the challenge of nationalisation. It is likely that the US network will grow substantially, maybe advancing more quickly than other regions / nations in developing their own community. We currently see the same tendency in all countries “francophones”. The Fab Lab community needs to make an effort to not split into silos.
   In Open Design, I feel we see the same split: fashion, industrial design, accessories, …
   Silos weaken the movement.
5. Equally, there is the danger (or challenge) of proliferation, of competing “schools” of Open Design and fabbing, each pretending to be “the only right way of …” — i.e. the real challenge is to bring the different schools together in a way that they can accept them as different schools but going in the same direction.

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). Is it true and how could we further explore this direction?

Peter Troxler: The short answer obviously is no, it is not true. The long answer is that it’s probably more likely that people with an open source mind have also a green mind, and that the two approaches go very well together ideologically, if you will. Of course every Fab Lab should strive to be as ecologically sustainable as practicable, and every Open Design should make the most careful use of natural resources and (grey) energy. But that is actually a requirement for all our activities, whether open source or not.

04. Technocraft: An exhibition about Product Hacking

Yves Béhar (founder of the fuseproject design agency) and famous for being the designer of the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO laptop, curated his first exhibition last year: TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers, and Design in the Age of Individuality ( July 10, 2010 – October 3, 2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, USA).

TechnoCRAFT looked at the different ways that consumers are personalizing design products with their own creativity and individuality in an age of mass-production: the exhibition included six subthemes:

• crowdsourcing
• platforms
• blueprints
• hacks
• incompletes
• modules

Beside being curated by a famous designer, this exhibition is important since it tracked the history of hacking in the design history and pointed to its future development. Some of the designers / products included in the exhibition were:

• Eames Hack
• 5.5 designers
• Studio Proxy for Ikea Hacks
• Cyclecide
• Greg Lynn with the Recycled Toy Furniture
• Enzo Mari with Autoprogettazione (originally designed in 1974, now in production for Artek)
• Marijn van der Poll with the Do hit chair for Droog Design

For further insights, you can read this interview of Yves Béhar for the Domus magazine:

technology is in many ways opening new horizons in the world of craft by allowing new ways for designers and crafters to: a) learn and share techniques b) to find a new marketplace for their wares.

For me, the designer is always in charge of creating great experiences around the products they design… But who are these experiences created for? A consumer or buyer. [...] many of the ways in which consumers intervene on products by making them more unique to individuals simply means that the ergonomics, the function and the aesthetic is adapted to one’s specific needs… This is a traditional view of design’s purpose.

For some pictures about the products showed in the exhibition, have a look at the DesignBoom article.

05. An event and a book, from Styria (Austria)

Another (and quite important) sign that Open Design is becoming mainstream comes from Styria (one of the federal states of Austria). In February 2011, Creative Industries Styria organized the fourth Creative Industries Convention in Graz and it was devoted to the topic of Open Design hosting a speech by Ronen Kadushin (most probably the first real Open Designer).
After the event, they produced a free documentation about Open Design that is now available. It is an important step because the document clearly shows there is an official interest in Open Design by public institutions in Styria.
Just to give you an idea of the document, the best quote comes from Paul Atkinson that wrote:

In order to maintain a significant role in the design and production of goods, professional designers will have to lose their egos and change their role from the design of finished products to the creation of systems that will give people the freedom to create high quality designs of their own; systems which free the user from requiring specialist skills in design, yet which produce results retaining the designer’s original intention. The better a particular designer’s system works, the more successful that designer will be. Designers unwilling to change risk becoming ghosts of the profession.

There are many authors, including Cory Doctorow (the author of Makers, the first novel about Open Designers), Lev Manovich (author of Software Takes Command), Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of the Networks), Hannes Walter and Fluid Forms (one of the first designers to use digital fabrication tools to manufacture and sell our own generative design products independently), Bre Pettis (one of the creator of the Makerbot, the open hardware 3D printer), Ponoko (the first worldwide laser cutting service for anybody) and Peter Troxler (the most important researcher about Fab Labs).

You can dowload it here (and since they released it under a Creative Commons license, I uploaded it to Issuu and Scribd as well, so you can read it and embed it, it’s here below).

06. Open Design in Design Festivals: Berlin, and Milan

06.01 DMY Maker Lab 2010 (and 2011), in Berlin

DMY Maker Lab Trailer from KS12 on Vimeo.

Most probably the first Design Festival to have a place for Open Design is DMY in Berlin, where in 2010 they had the Maker Lab space for many workshops. I already covered it one year ago in this post. This year there will be another Maker Lab, so wait for announcements about its program soon!

06.02 Maker Lab, in Milan (2011)

The same people behind the Maker Lab at DMY Berlin (i.e. the Open Design City Fab Lab and coworking space in Berlin) are bringing part of that experience to Milan this year, for the Salone del Mobile 2011 (the famous furniture fair).

At the MakerLab Milan, we will provide a focal point for the community to take actions to positively hack their urban environment. Bringing tools, resources and expertise from Berlin, the MakerLab Milan will collaborate directly with different elements of the Milan Maker, Hacker and Public Culture to share skills, ideas and tools with which the community of Milan can engage in a physical dialogue with their public space.

In tune with the Salone del Mobile and the Public Design Festival we will run a Public Hacking workshop. We will Invite people to bring their own chairs, and locally found materials, then hack, modify and up-cycle them.

06.03 WeFab, in Milan (2011)

Beside MakerLab, and the presentation of Droog’s Design for Download project, this year there will be another important event: WeFab.
WeFab is a three-day event hosted by our friends OpenWear (the collaborative clothing platform) and Vectorealism (a digital fabrication facility based in Milan).
WeFab will feature objects, workshops, installations, performances, live music shows, dj set, a temporary shop selling handmade productions and a conference session hosted by the University of Milan (see also the article on Domus Magazine).

Getting Ready for WeFab – 1 from Openwear on Vimeo.

The event will explore the cross-fertilization of new production technologies and collaborative ways to design and make products; it will also feature the Design Smash contest, where designers from all across Europe will go from idea input to output of real object/accessory by the end of the evening with different fabbing machines available. And there will be the first working Makerbot in Milan! :)
This means that you will be able to design and fab a fashion and product design project during the event!

Getting Ready for WeFab – 2 from Openwear on Vimeo.

06.04 The Milan Breakfasts: talking about Open Design

Premsela and the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) host The Milan Breakfasts at Studio Zeta Milano in Milan, and on April 15th morning there will be a discussion about Open Design with Paul Atkinson, Gijs Bakker, Joost Grootens, Yves Behar, Marti Guixé.
Also Domus will host a talk called Open Source City: Collective Design, but it is unclear yet what it will be about.

06.05 Freedom of Creation: live 3D printing

Even Freedom of Creation will have a live 3D-printing performance in which they will co-create with the public (it seems that you can bring your own 3D files to print them), Together with Wallpaper magazine.