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!).

Even if you already know (almost) everything about Complex Systems, don’t miss the opportunity to watch online The Secret Life of Chaos, an excellent BBC documentary.
The documentary starts from Alan Turing and his research on morphogenesis, it then explains chaos (“one of the most unwelcome discovery in science”), feedback loops, fractals, flocks, evolution, self-organization. The documentary ends with evolutionary and genetic algorithms for solving problems and designing, showing how simplicity evolves into complexity, starting from simple rules repeated over and over. After watching this documentary, it should be very clear why design could (and should) learn how to deal with complex systems, even though we should update our idea of designer:

One of the things that makes people so uncomfortable, about this idea of, if you will, spontaneous pattern formation is that somehow or other you don’t need a creator. But perhaps a really clever designer, what he would do, is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen, in all of it’s wonder, and all of it’s beauty.

And then if you go on and read Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos by Ko Kuwabara (and this article as well), you will understand why I think that open source is a great strategy for dealing with complex problem and systems.

(Just a note about complexity and pop culture: after watching this, I bet it is easier for you now to understand that Tron:Legacy is about the dualism chaos vs. order, and why the movie prefers the former).

Here’s the video of MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty at TED@MotorCity (Detroit), explaining that

America was built by makers — curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries.

via | Ponoko

After the post about code_swarm, here’s another post about the visualization of Open Source communities, and this time I’m going to introduce you the other important software for this task: Gource. code_swarm and Gource are the most complete softwares rigth now for visualizing activities in a repository (and both are open source); there are of course other scripts or strategies, but less important, so I will cover them in the future.

But while with code_swarm it’s easier to see how the community grows and change shape, with Gource we can have a better look at what the users are actually working on. Instead of focusing on the form of the community (be it a social network or another visual metaphor), Gource focuses on the form of the software being developed, analysing it as network of interacting pieces of code. We can then see where the users actually work and we can also see them in a better way than with code_swarm (Gource supports the use of Gravatars for visualizing the users).
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Here are some videos that visualize our Social and Economic Complex System with different perspectives. They are indeed not just good examples of well done infographic and movie design, but also inspiring examples about how to visualize the Economy in its complexity. Design for Complexity means also using design to explain complexity and make it easy for people to understand.

Let’s start with the Crisis of the Credit that clearly explains how the financial crisis of the years 2007 – … started.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

We can watch now a short and funny explanation (but not so rich and complete actually) about Greece’s current financial crisis.

The Greek Crisis Explained, Episode 1 from NOMINT on Vimeo.

The Greek Crisis Explained, Episode 2 from NOMINT on Vimeo.

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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.

Here’s a good video interview to Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi), a computational designer merging code, design, art & craft skills. He is famous for his toxiclibs project, an open source library collection for computational design tasks with Processing.
In this interesting interview Karsten Schmidt talks about the current state of design (graphic design and computational design) and its relationship with open source tools: software and coding are increasingly becoming important tools for designers (and they are changing the design discipline at the same time).

Computational Design from Mark Webster on Vimeo.

via | open architecture open design

I discovered that another documentary on DIY culture, Hackerspaces and the Maker movements has just been released yesterday by Ryan Varga on Vimeo.
Even if a bit short (16 minutes), it is a good documentary, and its release shows how these topics are gaining popularity and coverage rapidly.

We Make Things. from Ryan Varga on Vimeo.

One of the first documentaries of this kind was Handmade Nation, a DVD documentary and a book. Here’s a trailer:

And now we just have to wait Electromagnate to finish a documentary that explores the state and direction of the Maker and Hackerspace movement in America. (more…)

Here’s the old good story of LEGO Mindstorms and how they learned that active users can co-create important value with a company (hacking their product / services). But this time, instead of reading this story in a book, we can listen to Eric von Hippel telling it (and we can watch the videoclips too!).

via | digg

When you start a FabLab, is more important to know its role within a city than to know exactly how to operate machines.

A Shift: a documentary on FabLab in The Netherlands. from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Visitors and managers of the FabLabs in The Netherlands tell the story of FabLab.
Please take your time watching it. It is not YouTube bite sized ;)

Nederlandse versie: http://vimeo.com/11275970

via | FabLab.nl