Two months ago, I was interviewed by Bertram Niessen for the Digicult magazine, Digimag; that interview was published on the May 2010 issue, n. 54.
DIGICULT is an online/offline Italian platform, created to spread digital art and culture worldwide. It focuses on the impact of new technologies and modern sciences on art, design, culture and contemporary society. DIGICULT is based on participation of more than 40 professionals, representing a wide Italian Network of critics, curators and journalists in the field. DIGICULT is the editor of the magazine DIGIMAG, which focuses on some cultural and artistic issues like internet art, hacktivism, electronica, video art, audiovideo, art & science, design, new media, software art, performing art.
Here is the Italian interview, and here’s their English translation (both are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license). Here it is, without the images (go to the original magazine for them and for Bertram’s introduction), but with more links I’ve added and a little bit of editing:
Bertram Niessen: Reading through your website, the subjects of posts range from social service design to car design. How would you then define open p2p design field of application/action?
Massimo Menichinelli: Open P2P Design is the proposal of a new design methodology for the co-designing of open and peer-to-peer collaborative activities with/for communities, through an indeed open and shared process aimed to co-design such active collaborations. A community-centered design, in short. I began developing this method in reaction to a lack: albeit the presence of an interest in replicating open and p2p organizational patterns, this issue has been researched uniquely through implementing the use of dedicated software and technologies so far, without a proper social planning (with sometimes ineffective results).
The fields in which this can be applied are potentially vast and still being defined. Think about the various cases of open methods implementation: we go from biotechnologies to mineral processing, like Goldcorp Inc. used them for! In sum, these systems can be applied to any activity we are aiming to turn into an open and collaborative one, or on top of that wherever it is thought that a cooperative activity might solve a specific issue through the presence of active participants.
Open P2P Design is not the design of communicative artifacts neither commodities, but rather the design of a collaborative activity (for instance design of services and other activities), which would itself be dedicated to the issue to be tackled (maybe then through the collaborative design of a communicative artifact or some commodity). I chose not to bound Open P2P Design action field solely to design since it would be limiting and also because it can actually represent a further way to diffuse open and peer-to-peer principles and dynamics.
As a general principle, the Open P2P Design method can be applied wherever we desire to arise a collaborative activity, both in already existing communities and in ones to be created.
We can develop cooperative activities within firms businesses as well as collaborate with them to create community-based cooperative businesses. An example of this are Open Innovation initiatives, where instead of merely catching information or offering activities where users/communities don’t have an option to intervene, it is chosen to really co-create together with a community the development of open innovation. We can also initiate collaborations within a firm, in case the sole adoption of a software appears to be insufficient to generate the aimed collaboration (i.e. the current Enterprise 2.0 approach).
On top of that we might even develop community-based businesses, as it happened with the GiffGaff telephone company, in which some of the company tasks are performed by users (and examples might continue with mass customization). I also believe users and communities must be involved in ‘bottom of the pyramid‘ targeted businesses, in order to avert inadequate suggestions (see The Onion satirical article in this regard), establishing an equal debate instead.
Concerning public administration, it is interesting to examine the Open Government form: this definition presently refers to the publication of government owned data, put under open licenses in order to facilitate citizens and organizations to independently visualize and present them. This move aims to increase institutions’ transparency in order to allow citizens to be more aware of public management and hence making aware choices. A big step forward, nonetheless we could push ourselves further, for instance developing open p2p and collaborative public services, as the RED Unit of the Design Council did in Britain. A further step forward might be turning activities that are now governments’ and public administrations’ prerogative activities into open, collaborative ones, as the documentary “Us Now” thoroughly shows .
Finally, public administrations can adopt this method in case they might need/want to develop collaborative networks within a definite territory or city, concerning the field of social development enterprises willing to reinforce local social and economic networks.
Furthermore, this system can be applied in order to develop creative projects such as Open Hardware and Open Design conceived as Open Product Design as well as Open Web Design, Open Interaction Design, Open Font Design, Open Movie Design, Open Game Design, Open Architecture and Open Fashion Design, just to give some examples.
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