A Framework for Understanding the Possible Intersections of Design with Open, P2P, Diffuse, Distributed and Decentralized Systems

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Here is another post on a recent journal article related to my research on enabling the collaborative design of collaborative processes within my doctoral studies at the Media Lab Helsinki within the Aalto University – School of Art, Design and Architecture – Department of Media.

In a previous post I published another recent paper about the Open Meta-Design framework that was presented at the 6th International Forum of Design as a Process Systems & Design: Beyond Processes and Thinking, June 22nd – 24th, 2016 Universitat Politècnica de València.

Here instead I present an article written for the Disegno – The Journal of Design Culture for a specific call titled Copytheft – Post-disciplinary Approaches to Cultural Practices Transgressing Copyright Boundaries. Here I developed a preliminary framework for understanding all the possible intersections among Design with Open Source, P2P and Distributed (and Diffuse and Decentralized) Systems. Basically, I reorganized 10 years of research into a framework for understanding how to enable mass participation with design. It is still preliminary (and in the conclusions I outlined some possible strategies for improving it), but I’m really proud, satisfied and excited of having finally built a framework based on years of reading, browsing, discussing, travelling, experimenting and writing!

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You can download the paper here on this website or from on Academia.edu and on Research Gate. You can also download the article and full journal issue on the Disegno website…

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Nuovo libro: Fab Lab e maker. Laboratori, progettisti, comunità e imprese in Italia

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Fab Lab e maker Laboratori, progettisti, comunità e imprese in Italia

Note: this post is in Italian since the book is written in Italian…

Non é semplice sintetizzare anni di lavoro, insegnamento, ricerca, discussione, ma si tratta di una attività importante non solo come ricercatore, ma anche per capire meglio il percorso fatto e orientarsi verso quello futuro. Ho recentemente avuto la fortuna di sintetizzare il mio lavoro di studio, ricerca, insegnamento e consulenza nel mondo dei Fab Lab e dei maker in un libro, “Fab Lab e maker. Laboratori, progettisti, comunità e imprese in Italia” scritto per Quodlibet all’interno della sezione Design. Nel libro ho potuto raccontare cosa sia un Fab Lab, le sue tecnologie, la storia della comunità italiana, gli aspetti economici e sociali, e soprattutto la relazione tra Fab Lab, maker e design (e, ogni tanto, anche il mio percorso tra questi temi), non solo con testo ma anche con immagini. Spero che sia utile per capire il fenomeno e, per Fab Lab e Maker, raccontarlo.

Le tecnologie digitali hanno completamente rifondato il lavoro e l’economia, ma la portata dei cambiamenti indotti e la profondità del loro impatto sulla nostra vita non hanno ancora esaurito la loro spinta propulsiva. Il mondo digitale sta infatti trasformando progressivamente vari settori economici, soprattutto attraverso le nuove tecnologie manifatturiere, grazie alle quali la Fabbricazione Digitale (o Digital Fabrication) è ora una realtà concreta, fatta di fresature di precisione, di taglio al laser, e soprattutto di stampa 3D. Le tecnologie digitali sono

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A proposal for an Open Meta-Design framework: extending Open P2P Design through research

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My research on enabling the collaborative design of collaborative processes is going on, especially with my doctoral studies at the Media Lab Helsinki within the Aalto University – School of Art, Design and Architecture – Department of Media.

Recently, I presented it to an audience of Makers within the ViennaOpen 2016 event within Maker Faire Vienna 2016. My research started in 2005 with my MSC in Industrial Design degree on the topic of Open P2P Design, which has then been refined into the Open Meta-Design concept after a series of international workshops. The Open Meta-Design concept has been recently developed into a framework and presented as a paper in the
6th International Forum of Design as a Process Systems & Design: Beyond Processes and Thinking, June 22nd – 24th, 2016 Universitat Politècnica de València with the title The meta-design of systems: how design, data and software enable the organizing of open, distributed, and collaborative processes”, written together with Francesca Valsecchi (9 years later, we finally wrote another paper together).

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You can download the paper here on this website or from on Academia.edu. You can also download the full proceedings here. A first sketch of a code for it is online on GitHub, and now the full development of an Open Meta-Design platform and its testing with start. Stay also tuned for another paper that will be published soon…

Here’s the BibTeX …

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Design of collaborative processes at ViennaOpen 2016 – Maker Faire Vienna

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A quick update about Open P2P Design and its related research. I was invited to present my research at ViennaOpen 2016 within Maker Faire Vienna 2016 (which gathered 6000 visitors) during April 2016. This was another great opportunity for presenting the research and getting feedback on its current status (even if more recent advancements are under review and will be published soon in conferences and journals).

For the fifth year in a row, ViennaOpen is festival that deals with contemporary changes in technology and society. ViennaOpen is a collaborative initiative of individuals, groups and projects. An open innovative process, it deals with all aspects of openness. This year’s motto is how to open things. The first part of the festival is organised during the first Maker Fair Vienna.

Here’s a video overview of Maker Faire Vienna 2016:

ViennaOpen2016 @ Maker Faire Vienna from neuearbeit on Vimeo.

All the videos of the event are finally online, here in this article you can find my interview and presentation. The day before the presentation I was interviewed about Open Design and the Maker Movement:

ViennaOpen 2016 – Maker Faire – Interview with Massimo Menichinelli from neuearbeit on Vimeo.

And here is finally my presentation about Open P2P Design, Open Meta-Design and the design of collaborative processes.

ViennaOpen 2016 – Lecture by MASSIMO MENICHINELLI Open Innovation: design of collaborative processes from neuearbeit on Vimeo.…

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A map of Fab Labs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces… on Twitter

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As you probably have noticed, I haven’t post nor updated the website in a while. I’ve been very busy in lecturing, research, Fab Lab development, consultancy and many more things, and I haven’t had the time for posting. I will probably try soon to summarize everything. But for the moment, here’s a paper that was just published.

Have you ever wondered how is the global community of Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces structured?
Which kind of community do they form?
Who has more trust in the community?

Well, here’s the short answer in just a picture:

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The long explanation can be found in a paper I wrote last year. I first presented it as a poster at the Twitter for Research conference in Lyon, then transformed it into a paper, and here it is now ready! You can find the book with all the proceedings in paper and Kindle version or as open access. Or just my paper here in high resolution or here in low resolution or on Academia.edu. This research started as an exercise, but the gathered data was very interesting and there are interesting insights on how the global community of Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces is structured, where trust and influence can be localized and so on. Probably one of the first maps of the global community of Maker laboratories.

You can cite the article as:

Menichinelli, M. (2016). Mapping the structure of the …

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“Open Meta-Design”: a book chapter about workshops for organizing collaborative processes

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Open Meta-Design: Tools for Designing Collaborative Processes

This website has been quite inactive recently, because I’ve been very busy on other fronts: I’ve been lecturing Open Design at SUPSI in Lugano, Switzerland (within the Master in Advanced Studies in Interaction Design); I’ve been lecturing Digital Fabrication in Helsinki at Aalto University (within the Media Lab Helsinki). I’ve been writing for the CheFuturo magazine and for the Make in Italy CDB Foundation (where I’m working as director). And many more things! But research has been progressing, and among many forthcoming publications, I managed to write a book chapter about the previous experiences of Open P2P Design workshops in Helsinki in 2011 and Seoul and Singapore in 2009. The chapter was published in the “Empowering Users through Design” book (edited by David Bihanic) with the title “Open Meta-Design: Tools for Designing Collaborative Processes”. This is therefore the most updated version of Open P2P Design (now simplified into Open Meta-design):

The experience of the Open Source and P2P distributed systems represent a promising direction for the organization of collaborative networks, since their processes and organizational forms have been applied in fields other than the software development industry including biotechnology, pharmaceutical drug research, education, micro-credit financial services and also design. Until now, almost all of these cases have been designed and brought to the users focusing more on the technologies than on the users’ needs and their possible active role, and almost none of them has analyzed in

…
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Le organizzazioni dei FabLab e la costruzione di un FabLab

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Si é appena tenuto al FabLab di Torino un workshop di due giorni su come aprire e gestire un FabLab. Il workshop ha registrato il sold out dopo poche ore, visto il notevole successo cercheremo di replicarlo anche in giro per l’Italia. Qui a seguito la mia presentazione:

Aggiungo inoltre che ho iniziato a scrivere per CheFuturo! con un articolo sulle differenti piattaforme ed organizzazioni per la facilitazione e coordinazione dei FabLab. Lo riposto qui sotto la stessa licenza Creative Commons

I FabLab sono nati quasi per caso grazie al Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) presso il MIT, con un primo laboratorio a Boston, e poi con una costante crescita non pianifcata: spesso sono nati per una richiesta locale, vista l’utilità di questi laboratori. Si possono trovare FabLab in ogni continente, non solo negli Stati Uniti: da San Paolo in Brasile a Lima in Perú nell’America Latina, da Helsinki in Finlandia a Siviglia in Spagna in Europa, dal Ghana o Sud Africa in Africa, dall’Afghanistan all’India od Indonesia in Asia. Sono passati più di 10 anni dal primo FabLab, e 10 anni dalla prima conferenza mondiale dei FabLab (Fab10, la prossima conferenza annuale, si terra nel Luglio 2014 a Barcellona). La stessa organizzazione della rete dei FabLab si é sviluppata ed evoluta nel corso degli anni, dato che i FabLab sono nati quasi per caso: non c’é stato un …

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How to build a FabLab

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In May 2013 I was invited to OuiShare Fest in Paris, where I gave a short workshop about setting up a FabLab. Here below you can see the presentation. Meanwhile, the workshop has evolved to an article for Shareable that you can find originally here, and that I’m reposting here below. It is a short article, there is material enough for writing a book… maybe it could be an idea for another project!

How to build a FabLab, from Shareable

FabLabs are a global network of local labs, enabling invention by providing access to tools for digital fabrication. This is the definition of FabLab according to the Fab Charter, the manifesto that expresses the principles and values behind FabLabs. Started by accident by the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, the FabLabs movement is now 10 years old and is continuously evolving, with the number of new labs doubling every year and half.

FabLabs can be understood from different perspectives. I’ve already written on this topic, so here I will just recap the main concepts. A FabLab can be understood as a physical space with tools and machines for digital fabrication; a community of people that collaborate and share some values and capabilities; and a node in a global network that seeks a balance between being completely independent and local and being completely …

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FABMoney: a p2p currency for collaboration in FabLabs

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At Maker Faire Rome 2013 I gave a short presentation about Open Design during the main opening conference, but I also gave another presentation during a small conference about FabLabs and Peer-to-Peer Economy. I preferred to wait a bit and talk about it in a separate post, since it covers a project that I started by accident in 2012 but that I would like to develop further: FABMoney.

At the beginning of 2012 I got a scholarship for attending the FabAcademy, the distributed educational format of the FabLab network. It was a hard but really interesting experience, enabling me to work even better with digital fabrication technologies and hardware. You can read all the exercises and documentation on my page here: everything has been documented, including the final project, FABMoney. It just started as an exercise (a device able to read RFID tokens and able to create a digital transaction between them, you can find all the source code here) and all the description on the FabAcademy page, but I think it has the potentiality to further strengthen the social impact of FabLabs.
I’ve already blogged about local and open currencies here, and I’ve been reading many books on the topic, and it is clear now that local and open currencies are the right direction for building specific interactions inside communities (each currency design implements different behaviors). The current concept of FABMoney is of a …

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Speaking at Maker Faire Rome 2013

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After many months of preparation, Italy finally had a Maker Faire, and in this case it was the main European edition: Maker Faire Rome. The event was a huge success, with many makers and exhibitors coming from all over Europe; it was also a great moment for meeting again friends in the maker community from other countries. I had already met the people from Maker Faire Rome while I was in Helsinki last spring, lecturing my digital fabrication course at Aalto University.

During the opening conference I gave a very brief and introductory speech about Open Design, The emergence of Open Design, here is the presentation:

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