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).
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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.
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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:

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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!).

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

There’s one more reason for going to Barcelona these months: Full Print3d. Printing Objects, an exhibition about 3D Printing in the Disseny Hub Barcelona. Unfortunately I had no time to blog it before, but the exhibition is from 16.06.2010 to 29.05.2011, so there’s still time to visit it.
All of the objects presented at Full Print3d were created using different additive manufacturing processes and are organize into six thematic areas: freeform, variation, customization, complexity, materiality, and finally, applications and research. Some examples are products from Fluid Forms, Freedom of Creation and Nervous System.

The exhibition was curated by Marta Malé–Alemany, architect and co-director of the Masters Program at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) (where I gave a lecture one year ago).
I collaborated with Marta for the exhibition (that’s why I’m in the credits), and my little help was mainly about researching the strategic applications of 3D printing with a broader perspective: I’m not interested in the technology details so much, but more in how these technologies can be used for developing Open Design projects and in general, Open and Complex projects.

Marta Malé-Alemany talking about the exhibition (in Catalan):

Full Print3d. Imprimint objectes from DHUB on Vimeo.

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Back in March 2010, I was invited at a seminar organized by Ricerca Urbana Milano, in order to explain openp2pdesign.org with other interesting projects from Italy. The seminar took place at the Universitá Statale di Milano, Faculty of Political Science. A nice overview of the event can be read in Italian here.

Il mondo sta cambiando sotto i nostri occhi. Dopo il web 2.0 e il free software, vediamo svilupparsi l’Open Design, l’ Open Hardware e persino l’Open Biotech. Possiamo intravedere nuove relazioni di produzione, nuovi modelli business, nuove forme di organizzazione economica e sociale. Le grandi imprese si adattano e stanno nascendo nuove forme ibride, fra impresa sociale e Open Business. Questo evento intende cominciare ad esaminare la portata di questo fenomeno. Quali sono le tendenze in atto? Cosa succede in Italia? Quali sono i nuovi modelli organizzativi? Cosa bisogna fare per cambiare il mondo?

01.Openwear.org

The event started with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen showing the EDUfashion / openwear.org european project.

EDUfashion is a two-year project financed with the support of the European Commission for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. EDUfashion developed Openwear.org, an online community created for sharing values, accessing to knowledge and practice of collaborative and distributed work. Openwear.org is where makers, fashion producers, small local enterprises, educational institutions can network to participating in the production of a new vision of fashion based on micro-communities and sustainability. They even created their own license for the brand and a brand manual.

We are experiencing a twin trend diffusing across the fashion sector. On the one hand consumer demand is being increasingly oriented toward “ethical” fashion items, meaning no sweatshop, ecologically sustainable, locally produced, and fairly traded apparel. On the other side, we’re witnessing the emergence of self-organized employment focusing on independent, socially engaged, critical and multitasking creative production driven more by communal needs than market imperatives or consumer fads. We think that here lies a new perspective on fashion that can be translated into reality by exploring the forces that are behind these consumer and producer trends.
[...]
EDUfashion project’s main objective is to foster community, collaboration and innovation to provide a new vision and practice for fashion. Our main goal is to support the dissemination of knowledge, skills and practices so to empower a self-managed workforce, in order to create an alternative learning environment for sustainable garment crafting and selling. Itʼll connect various individuals and groups, to enable them to act as small, sustainable enterprises, which will gather under a single open-source participatory brand whose benefits will be shared.

Forward to Basics – Openwear Collaborative Collection Workshop from Openwear on Vimeo.

Openwear Brand Tutorial from Openwear on Vimeo.

02. openp2pdesign.org

I then presented openp2pdesign.org with this presentation (in Italian): (more…)

In February 2010 I was invited to give a lecture about Open P2P Design and to be part of the jury for the students’ projects in the Open Source Design class (one of the few first classes ever organized):

This course this oriented to the design, generation and production of an open source and shared platform to promote the online exchange of knowledge, this will permit to prompt the customization and personalization of elements as furniture. The goal is to create an Internet based interface (web 3.0) that will allow to interchange, share, download and upload designs all over the world.

I was invited by Marta Malé-Alemany, and the other members of the jury were Lucas Cappelli, José Pérez de Lama (from hackitectura.net and Universidad de Sevilla), Areti Nikolopoulou (from The commons factory together with José Pérez de Lama), Mara Balestrini.

01. Another Open P2P Design workshop, in Singapore

After the Seoul workshop, I flew to Singapore for another Open P2P Design workshop with Roger Pitiot at the School of Art, Design & Media of the Nanyang Technological University. The Singapore workshop took place as one of the event of the Singapore Design Festival 2009 and was organized with the help of professor Fabrizio Galli, who organized there a workshop that is already almost a FabLab.

I could stay there only few days (just for the workshop), and I could only feel that while Seoul is like a 24-hour fabbing and piracy shop, Singapore is design, business and marketing hub but with no manufacturing inside (just like big companies like Nike, for example). One of the main avenues is not full of design piracy shops like in Seoul but of multiple high-end brands and consumption. And at the same time, in Singapore the coexistence of the four main ethnic groups (Chinese, Malays, Indians, Europeans) is based not on integration but on the tolerance of their diversity, in the the most globalised country in the world.

The workshop was one day shorter than the Seoul one (and the last day was an Islamic Holiday), we started with around 19 students and ended with around 10 students. Luckily, there were no cultural problems like in Seoul (Singapore was a British colony, after all), and even if the students were younger than in Seoul they were really smart and able to understand how Open Systems (and the Open P2P Design methodology) work in just three days. Moreover, we had the opportunity to learn from the Seoul workshop and change few details.

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. Presentations of the lectures

Here are the presentations of the lectures I gave during the workshops:
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01. An Open P2P Design workshop, in Seoul

And finally here we are to talk about what happened during the Seoul Workshop at IDAS, the penultimate date of the November 2009 tour.
First of all, I have to thank Roger Pitiot for this great opportunity, for the great time we had preparing this workshop and for the perfect organization he managed to set up with his team of students (Miae Kim was there too ;-) ).
Many thanks to Hyun Shin Jo from Kookmin University and Won Taik Kim from IDAS for their collaboration as co-conductors, and to Jay Yoon from Creative Commons Korea for explaining Creative Commons and Open Culture to the students in Korean, helping us thus communicating with them such a big issue.
Here’s a report on the Creative Commons Korea website, if you can read Korean of course!

I won’t talk too much about Seoul itself: on one side I had very little time to see it, and on the other side I prefer to focus on the workshop, here in the blog. But just let me say that being in a city which is the World Design Capital for 2010, with a completely different culture and so nice and very different people was very refreshing. Beside all the glittering lights of a never ending row of always open shops and street food stands, there is in Seoul an already working Distributed Manufacturing Systems that produces small series with low cost prices in 24-48 hours. Let’s see if they find a way to move from their consumerism and a whole avenue of design piracy shops towards a more sustainable, peer-to-peer and lighter distributed system of active citizens designers.

Back to our workshop: it was a very important one, not just for the setting, but because I had finally the opportunity to test the Open P2P Design methodology with other people and within a framework of time long enough (even if we would have liked it to last at least 5 days).
We had about 36 students the first day (Friday), but only half of them survived to the idea of working on Open Design during the whole weekend, and with such a culture shock. Because yes, it was a nice cultural clash on organizational terms (in Seoul everybody wakes up and go to bed very late; it’s very difficult to have students standing among the others asking questions and therefore a real collective interaction; and they do prefer to learn Open P2P Design starting from details and ending with the big picture rather than the other way around). But it was also a clash on cultural terms (it proved quite difficult to explain them the Activity Systems, since the words subject and object don’t have the same meaning their culture; the concepts of copy and copyright make a different sense, especially to the Chinese students). I have to thank Miae Kim for helping me explaining the Activity System to them in Korean!

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. The process and the outcomes of the workshop

Since we didn’t have enough time, we asked the students to organize themselves into groups, so that we could give each group an account to the main Subversion (SVN) repository. In this way, we could simulate how an Open Source community works, using the same software such communities use.
We divided them into 7 groups, each one with the name of a political leader (just for fun: think about opposite leaders collaborating in an Open Design project!):

• Barack Obama
• Ernesto Che Guevara
• George Bush
• Kim Jung Il
• Mao Zedong
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Ronald Reagan

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Just a quick post: here are my presentations for the first day (What is Open Design?), the second day (What is Open P2P Design) and the fourth day (What Is The Distributed Manufacturing Scenario?). In the next post I will write about what happened in the workshop and the outcome we got.

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