Just in case you haven’t read it yet, Openwear.org released a report about sustainability, openness and P2P production in the world of fashion design. The report has been realized with the contribution of: Studio Poper, Ljubljana; Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Milan; Copenhagen Business School, Center for Creative Encounters, Copenhagen; Ethical Economy, London; Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engeneering, University of Ljubljana. You can download the .pdf file from openwear.org here. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The report, curated by Bertram Niessen, features also (but there’s much more inside!) the interview I gave him for the Digicult magazine, Digimag.

You can also read it and embed it from Scribd:

Openwear E-book Final

Or from Issuu:

After some months of waiting, the documentary about Arduino (the most famous and successful Open Hardware project) is now finally ready and online at http://arduinothedocumentary.org/.
The documentary was made by Rodrigo Calvo Eguren y Raúl Díez Alaejos and it was commissioned by Laboral Centro de Arte, an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain. Moreover, Laboral just opened a Fab Lab last November.

Other interesting resources about Arduino are:

• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?, an article written by Clive Thompson on Wired;
• New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool, a thesis written by Alicia Gibb.

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

A brief update about the Sharing Economy (after the previous post about Design and Sharing).

Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research released “The New Sharing Economy” study that indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources as well.

The greatest areas of opportunity for new sharing businesses are those where a lot of services do not currently exist within a specific industry category and where a large number of people are currently either a) sharing casually (not through an organized community or service) or b) not sharing at all but would be interested to share. They include transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces.

Peer-to-peer sharing allows for potentially unbounded scalability, access to more resources and often at closer proximity to us. Because peer-to-peer companies aren’t subject to the overhead cost of purchasing and maintaining a “fleet” of assets all their own, the cost to renters is often lower; moreover, members have the opportunity to monetize their own possessions. These peer-based “marketplaces” help the environment by using the resources we already available more efficiently rather than manufacturing more new goods.

The New Sharing Economy

NOTE: this post was originally written for the P2P Foundation blog on September 22nd 2010, but since it’s a quite interesting issue and its contents fit within openp2pdesign.org, I republished it here. The original post is here: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/design-in-the-age-of-sharing/2010/09/22

01. Sharing by Design

A recent post on Shareable made me think about how the culture of Sharing has been changing the discipline of Design after the success of Open Source and the Web 2.0.
We are researching and discussing how we can bring collaboration into design processes and how we can use design processes to foster collaboration, but what about developing design projects for facilitating the sharing of physical goods?

Keara Schwartz wrote a post on Shareable, trying to start a conversation about this issue; however, that post is not really deep and inspiring since she finds that the only barrier to sharing products is the lack of trust in other people we have in sharing physical products. According to Keara Schwartz, we can share digital information easily, but not physical goods as well because we don’t believe other people will take care of them as we would do; she then suggest that products might be designed differently in order to facilitate their sharing.
I believe though that this is not the point: we don’t share products because our socio-economic system has developed in that direction, not because products are not designed for being shared. And designing for facilitating the sharing has wider (and older) implications.

Nonetheless, that post is a good starting point in order to think about the issue of Design for Sharing: we have to notice that Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that “tells the story of sharing, covering the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life”. And its tagline is Sharing by Design, implying that sharing can be enabled with design.

02. Access by Design

We could argue now that we are entering into the Age of Sharing, since after the success of Open Source and of Web 2.0 new terms, theories, technologies, products and services that are based on the concept of sharing (and collaboration) are increasingly introduced. But these trends started before, though a little bit different, as Jeremy Rifkin clearly explained in his book The Age of Access:

In the hypercapitalist economy, buying things in markets and owning property become outmoded ideas, while “just-in-time” access to nearly every kind of service, through vast commercial networks operating in cyberspace, becomes the norm. We increasingly pay for the experience of using things-in the form of subscriptions, memberships, leases, and retainers-rather than for the things themselves. [...]
Rifkin argues that the capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of human time and experience.

As Rifkin noted, the transition from owning products to accessing them through a service started long time before the rise of the Web 2.0; it is therefore a longer trend coming from the evolution of society and economy. Design for Access came before Design for Sharing. Design, and especially Product Design, in the Age of Access means above all Product Stewardship, a concept developed as a Design for Sustainability effort with the aim of involving all the stakeholders of the life cycle of a product. With this approach, we ask all the stakeholders to take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management of products. If we want to just access a product instead of owning it (and maybe the service is built upon its sharing it with other people), we need a lot of different players that actually manage it through its life cycle.

Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning for, and if necessary, paying for the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life. This may be achieved, in part, by redesigning products to use fewer harmful substances, to be more durable, reuseable and recyclable, and to make products from recycled materials. For retailers and consumers, this means taking an active role in ensuring the proper disposal or recycling of an end-of-life product.

Accessing a product, instead of owning it, means that the traditional life cycle of a product has to change and to be shared among all its stakeholders. Design for Access and for Sharing is more about new processes than new product typologies and technologies: it could be a way to design more proper and sustainable products (like the Universal Design / Design for All approaches). (more…)

Here’s a nice and well designed and documented infographic poster about User-Centred Design by Pascal Raabe. And since he published it under a CC BY-NC-SA license, I’m redistributing here it as a pdf file.

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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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After some months of designing and prototyping, I am so happy to annouce you that the openp2pdesign.org store page on Lulu.com is now finally open at http://lulu.com/openp2pdesign.
You will find there all the print version of the books published within the openp2pdesign.org project.

The first book you can already find there is the print version of openp2pdesign.org_1.1, which I already published online in September 2008. Three versions are available: one in English, one in Italian and one in Spanish. I had to work further on it in order to print it correctly using Lulu.com’s print service experimenting both with Scribus (I used Scribus 1.3.4 unstable but more advanced version, and it was really unstable and with some bugs) and Lulu.com (I encountered some problems with bleeding and after some prototypes I decided to avoid any elements close to the page margins, due to strange cutting problems with Lulu.com). And after all this experimentation, I decided to publish it only in black and white (but with CMYK cover) because otherwise it would cost too much.
And after this period of experimentation, my knowledge of book designing, printing and publishing has grown very much, and from this moment it will be easier for me to publish a book in the openp2pdesign.org project: expect more books coming in the future!

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Neon Organic 0052 (sketch) from watz on Vimeo.

Here is an interview wih Marius Watz from Generator.x and Code&Form about Generative Art.

It is interesting for us because it is closely related to complexity, software and design as the generative system could follow genetic and evolutionary rules or using open source software or code (but consider that it does not happen always).

From Wikipedia:

Generative art is a system oriented art practice where the common denominator is the use of systems as a production method. To meet the definition of generative art, an artwork must be self-contained and operate with some degree of autonomy. The workings of systems in generative art might resemble, or rely on, various scientific theories such as Complexity science and Information theory. The systems of generative artworks have many similarities with systems found in various areas of science. Such systems may exhibit order and/or disorder, as well as a varying degree of complexity, making behavioral prediction difficult. However, such systems still contain a defined relationship between cause and effect. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” (Musical Dice Game) 1757 is an early example of a generative system based on randomness. The structure was based on an element of order on one hand, and disorder on the other.

An artist or creator will usually set down certain ground-rules or formulae and/or templates materials, and will then set a random or semi-random process to work on those elements. The results will remain somewhat within set limits, but may also be subject to subtle or even startling mutations. The idea of putting the art making process in the place of a pre-generated artwork is a key feature in generative art, highlighting the process-orientation as an essential characteristic. Generative artists such as Hans Haacke have explored processes of physical and biological systems in artistic context.

Generative art describes a strategy for artistic practice, not a style or genre of work. The artist describes a rule-based system external to him/herself that either produces works of art or is itself a work of art.

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After the first post and second post about Open Architectural Design at MIT, here you can find a thesis about the MIT Open Source Building Alliance Operation (OSBA) developed by Kalaya Kovidvisith at MIT and submitted on June 2007: “Open Source Building Alliance Ecology. The Internet Framework for Consumer Driven Participative Design”.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to apply a theory of Open Source to building industries, and illustrate how the augmentations of Internet services can improve the usability of Open Source for the design-build architecture.
This thesis proposes then HOU.SYS, an online community for the Open Source Building, as an alternative approach for a participative platform in mass customization of small housing and its related products, technologies and services.

This thesis reexamines the basic assumptions of how building products are distributed through the Open Source environment. By analyzing the impact of e-Business and Internet technology driving community participation, the integration of (1) four online Business models: Dell, Open Source, iTunes, and eBay, and (2) the advent of mass-customization through the revolution of Internet technology, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) for architecture and architectural product design and development will be established. The results of this evaluation identify the effective factors for the Internet augmentation framework to achieve the usability of Open Source for the design-build housing industry, and reinforce the changing relationship between home buyers, architects, and manufacturers prior to making a final housing product.

And from the conclusions:
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