Genomineerde Rotterdam designprijs 2011: Waag Society – Open Design from Premsela, The Netherlands Inst. on Vimeo.

Continuing the serie of interviews about Open Design, DIY, Fabbing and related issues, I have now the pleasure to interview Bas van Abel. Bas works as a Creative Director at Waag Society, where he co-founded of Waag Society’s FabLab, directs the Open Design Lab and edited the Open Design Now book. By the way, don’t forget to vote for Bas’ and Waag’s work about Open Design here on the Rotterdam Design Prize website.

Bas van Abel: Amsterdam probably has the largest creative industry in The Netherlands with a big focus on innovation, which is a great context for open design and Fablabs. Waag Society has always been an influential organization in this Dutch – and Amsterdam creative industry on the policy and institutional level. With the Fablab we’ve created a making and meeting place for everyone to get involved from both a top level (municipality, education) and grass roots level (designers, artist, individuals, SME’s).

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society promotes the idea of open source and related issues like Open Data, Open Design, Open Content and O pen Hardware. How can they interact and mix in common projects?

Bas van Abel: All of these issues share common principles, though the infrastructure needed (licensing, tools, methods) are very specific. There are also big differences in the maturity of the domains. For open source software there is a clear definition, it has it’s own cultural background, the tools are ready available and there are successful business models. Open design and open wetware for example are far from clearly defined. Therefore I think it is important to specifically experiment on different domains and get a clear image of the needs and implications before creating cross-over projects. That doesn’t mean off-course that you shouldn’t use open source software for creating open design platforms. It is just about where you put the focus of your research.

Massimo Menichinelli: While hackerspaces usually start independently, it seems that Fab Labs always start within an existing institution: a foundation, a school, a museum.. Why do you think this happens? How could we use this strategy to start a new Fab Lab?

Bas van Abel: The idea of the Fablab is easy to comprehend and to adopt. The potential is clear and it functions as a huge global innovation hub, based on collaboration and sharing with a clear distributed organization model. It creates economic benefits and it prepares us for a future industrial model. This makes it very attractive for institutions to host such a lab. It connects easily to existing programs and structures, opposed to a more “chaotic” hackerspace.
Furthermore, the whole context makes it fairly easy for institutions to get funding to start a lab.

Meet My Maker from Waag Society on Vimeo.

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society is collaborating with Droog Design for the open design project “Design for Download”. What are the possible business models for Open Design, and could the collaboration with Droog Design make it less controversial and more popular?

Bas van Abel: I’d like to make something clear first. For me, being able to download design based on a new industrial model doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s Open Design. Shapeways and Ponoko are doing this as well and I wouldn’t call them Open Design platforms. They are however part of the context of open design. Droog approached it from this industrial perspective, while our perspective was from a more social disruptive one. I think they are very much related (a new industrial model will change social, economic and political modes), but the approach is different. That was also the exciting part about this collaboration.

The technical framework we have been developing within the collaboration is very similar to what Ponoko is doing with it’s maker system. Though the “design for download” business models are much more consumer oriented. We’ve been looking at the added value for consumers if you have on demand production and DIY production. With on demand production the business models are based on distributed production (could be a Fablab) and the consumer experience is in using the tools to design part their own product. With DIY production the focus of the business models are much more on services from DIY facilities. Making becomes part of the consumer product experience.

And about making Open Design less controversial with the collaboration with Droog Design, I think this definitely contributed to the acceptance within “design culture”, but we have been working on several projects, which have helped making open design more popular. We are very excited by our Open Design Lab nomination for the Rotterdam Design Prize, which is a great acknowledgment on the importance of Open Design.

Massimo Menichinelli: What do you think Open Design will be: users fabbing professional designers’ projects or designers and users collaborating in the design process? Or will there be a division between bottom-up user-driven design and elite professional designers’ and companies’ projects?

Bas van Abel: Yes, yes and yes. To me open design is about ownership and responsibility. Openness is a way of creating transparency. We need more transparency in general to be more emphatic with the things created around us. Open design is just part of this change towards more transparency. What this does to the role of the designer is just a small aspect of this change. More transparency will have an impact on society as a whole.

Massimo Menichinelli: The digital fabrication ecosystem at the moment consists of onlice services (like Shapeways), Fab Labs, hackerspaces, commercial high-end tools and cheap open hardware tools. Chris Anderson even suggested to manufacture DIY and Open products in China. How will these interact among each other?

Bas van Abel: You only have to look at the current shanzhai developments in Shenzhen to see where this is going in China. There hackerspaces are popping up working on all kinds of open design/hardware projects based on micro-manufacturing. It’s where the economic benefits of open and community based small-scale manufacturing are taking shape. Shanzhai has for a while been seen as piracy, but it is far past that and turning into a true open grassroots manufacturing model.

A very interesting conversation on the future impact of Shanzhai can be found here: http://www.iftf.org/ShanzhaiFutures

Will Open Design have a place within traditional manufacturing companies or will it work only with individual or community-based fabbing?

Digital production, online platforms for knowledge sharing, information access, exchange systems and social networks radically change the structure of society.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we have been building in mass production, a non-transparent, centralized and closed system. There is still a big gap between the principles and drivers in our “digital world” and our “physical world”. Open design, hackerspaces, shanzhai, Fablabs, DIY… they are all moving towards closing this gap.

Looking at the future, I believe we are heading for a world where our societal, industrial and economical models will be based on the same principles we use in our current communication systems. It’s distributed, social and transparent.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design and Fab Labs need tools (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) but also supply chains, partnerships, services, … How can we design a system that enables people to develop Open Design projects?

Bas van Abel: When you’re talking about the open source part of open design, we need to know what is the source of design. This is a far more complicated question than with software, though I think it is possible to start creating systems for this. I always see the analogy with cooking. You have a very culturally embedded local production with local ingredients, but you also have an international exchange system in the form of recipes. On top of that the production facilities (the kitchen) and the tools are pretty standardized. If you take this to open design, a common design language for exchange could be layered the same way. Our kitchen is for example the Fablab and the local materials, the recipes are the instructions and finely the secret ingredient is your designer signature.

Off-course we also need to create collaboration systems etc., but I think a common language is where we have to start. Only this way we can truly work in an open and distributed way.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design now seems to be based on small individual projects instead of large, collaborative and community-based projects. What I’m trying to do with Open P2P Design is to start the design process from communities (or at least include them in it) helping them to self-organize a collaborative design process. What do you think about this issue?

Bas van Abel: Good luck ;-) !
It sounds a bit corny, but I think the biggest open design project we are working on is society itself. Design is more and more being used as a mechanism to solve societal issues. Within this context, design processes need to be open, transparent and reciprocal. We need systems that are able to organize this ongoing and ever changing design process. Open P2P Design is a great initiative, which I think reflects one of our current societal challenges.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree with this idea? How could we further explore it?

Bas van Abel: Like I said, I believe Open design creates transparency, which creates more ownership, which creates more responsibility. Open design is therefore a driver for a more responsible, emphatic society, where efficiency is not based on purely on costs, but also on conditions, energy and relevance.

Also, if we want to drive towards a next industrial revolution we also have to develop new energy sources. A great vision on industrial revolutions has been defined by Jeremy Rifkin, who stresses the critical combination of new energy and communication systems to drive industrial revolutions. We have a distributed communication system, but we still work with central energy systems. Fablabs and open design can be great platforms for developing distributed renewable energy systems.

A brief recap: the openp2pdesign.org project started in March 2005 with my Master Degree Thesis in the Faculty of Design of the Milan Polytechnic. Therefore, for the first year (March 2005 – April 2006) openp2pdesign.org was just a work in progress while I was producing the first source code. As since back then the concepts of Open Design and Open P2P Design were in their early days and there were very few opportunities to develop them further, I started openp2pdesign.org in order to provide a space for collective discussion and further research. It took then form of a website towards the end of 2006, opening the 2007 as a multilanguage blog, “Open Peer-to-Peer Design. Design for Complexity” in English, Italian and Spanish. During the following years, the project has become quite successful, with workshops, lectures or panels in many countries, including Italy, Spain, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico. Meanwhile, I also moved to Helsinki to further investigate Open Design and Open P2P Design in the Media Lab of the Aalto University – School of Art and Design.

But now, the most important thing I want to share with you in this post is this: if you remember, in the old post I mentioned, I wrote this:

During the next months, we will design the collaborative activity of the open source community of openp2pdesign.org; and yes, we are going to use the Open P2P Design methodology for this task. You can track this process in the meta.openp2pdesign.org page. Once this collaborative activity is stable, we will open it to the participation and everybody will be able to join us and be part of it.
We hope it will be ready by the end of 2010, meanwhile the blog will work, and you can follow our projects in it or subscribing to our newsletter on the Contact page or here below:

What has happened since then? Well, everybody has been very busy, and the participation of the new members has been really low (4 posts in 1 year and half). Meanwhile, other people joined the project but unfortunately still 99,9% of the work was done by me. Information has been scattered among this website, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and other external websites. This project needs then to rearrange all the resources that it has been mapping during these years, and to do it in a really collaborative way (so far, there were some technical limitations that prevented many people from entering).
Even if busy with many projects (some of them still have to appear on this web!), I’ve been researching and testing how to improve this website and make it really an open source project. After many tests, finally the moment has arrived! If you go to meta.openp2pdesign.org, you will find that the redesign process has already started, and if you want, you can join it. We will use Trac and Subversion software (as in the development of many open source projects) and the Open P2P Design methodology for designing how openp2pdesign.org project will work as a community dedicated to a set of collaborative activities. There is also a mailing list for discussion about the redesign of the project here:

http://lists.meta.openp2pdesign.org/listinfo.cgi/discussion-meta.openp2pdesign.org

If you want to understand better the tools and process that will be used, have a look at this recent presentation:

Here are few things to keep in mind about the openp2pdesign.org project and its redesign:

• as in many open source projects, with this project I need to “scratch an itch” i.e. map and studying resources about designing collaborative, open and complex projects; we can further discuss about this, but this is the starting point;
• ideally, the redesign process will never be completed: it will always be possible to modify and improve the project;
• content published on the website will be released as open content or open data; however, this does not mean that absolutely everything will be open: we will discuss together what shall be more or less open and which licenses to use (for example, the work I’m doing in the Aalto University can be open only to some extent because I have to follow existing rules and dynamics);
• it doesn’t need to become a big project or to develop very quickly: it needs to be a good and useful project for understanding better open, complex and collaborative design (quality is preferred over quantity);
• you can join the redesign process, or wait until the new website will be up and running to join it; in any case, the best thing is to follow openp2pdesign.org and learn a bit about Open P2P Design;
• the redesign process is also a way for further testing and refining the Open P2P Design methodology itself, I hope you can help me in finding bugs or in proposing suggestions.

One more thing: but what it is supposed to be openp2pdesign.org? It is not a start-up (at least not yet): the idea is to have a common space for studying how to design open, collaborative and complex projects, and to do this in an open source way. It is a place for anybody interested in find resources, tools, knowledge about design for open, collaborative and complex projects. But of course, if you join the project and help with the redesign process, you can help us in redefining also the project.
You should be interested in openp2pdesign.org if you usually ask yourself these questions:

• What does it mean to develop an Open Design project, or to develop a collaborative design project for a community or complex system?
• Where can I find the closest place for developing Open Design projects
• Where can I find tools and resources for developing projects for complex social systems?
• Where can I find a place for discussion about designing for communities and about co-design?
• Where can I find the closest place for fabbing an Open Design project?
• (and many other questions… you can leave a comment suggesting related needs!)

As a conclusion, blogging now will be less important until a new platform will be developed. If you want to participate in the process, go to meta.openp2pdesign.org or send an e-mail to meta [at] openp2pdesign.org asking for a Subversion (SVN) and Trac account. If you don’t want to participate in the process but want to see / use the new website / community when it will be available, just subscribe to the newsletter and we will keep you updated. In this project, open doesn’t just mean something that you can download for free, but that we welcome any participant in further improving this collaborative effort, so we will be happy if you join and help us!

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).

But to be truly open the data must follow some rules: to be complete, raw, actual, accessible, machine readable, non exclusive, in an open format, and under a free license. To encourage this movement there are also new “open data contest”, for programmers/developers/citizens… but at the end we need a policy for the access of information, toward an Open Government (see what they are doing in Iceland with they crowdsourced constitution), it’s only a trust issue.

She also reminds us some principles:

• Users as designers design for/with them, not for the stakeholders
• Questioning the question “Do we really need it?”, from a sustainability point of view consider also the “do-it-with-what-you-have”
• Reciprocity (the most important) the exchanges must be in the two-way (example with Facebook that can profit from personal data while we can’t use our own data collected), as for the right to access to information, it’s a matter of openness and trust.
• privacy by design (it’s a design requirement, not a security issue)

(you can see her talk here)

Shawn Micheal O’Keefe

Like the “open” for Marleen, for him Participation is the new norm (in the creative process), this real feedback loop allowing to go beyond the mere customization. Collaboration (and sharing in case that interest others) becomes the framework for success and the future of the creative process.

Beside the example of Threadless (an online infrastructure+logistic permitting to crowd-source t-shirt design), and a well-done remark (exploit-sourcing: one-way “spec works” with no reciprocity or any feedback versus crowd-sourcing), he shared with us his experience of the organization of the event South by Southwest (SXSW) in which the panelists are chosen in part by the crowd.
At this interesting question from the public “did collaboration change the business model of SXSW ?”
He answered “Not very much (logistic is the same), but participation and involvement in the selection process is good for the quality of the event (as if it were tailored by/for the community).
As for this other noticeable example of collaboration: Iceland outsourcing its constitution, the more people are involved in an open process the merrier the result is.

Concluding that the future of design is community and passion.

(you can his talk here)

Odette Valentine

We know that fashion relies on shared knowledge (as science and soon design), it’s already an example of a functioning free culture. But what happen when we mix clothing and digital communication technologies ?

As for many disciplines, digital tools are pushing the boundaries (possibilities for printing patterns, experiments, or even 3D Printing in fashion). What’s interesting in open-source fashion and mass-custom, is not about economy, but making individual and allowing expression of talent.
Thus tomorrow will be more about personal, autonomous, and symbiotic creation. She had a nice example of social creation with the “sweat shop cafe couture” where people can come to craft their clothes. The “I made it” is socially inclusive but permit also exclusive creations.

(you can see her talk here)

Jean-Louis Frechin

He remind us not to forget that the language is a system of though that influences us (and shapes how we think I will add).
Thus, we can’t hope to copy/paste an anglo-saxon thing here (referring to the design thinking trends), and Design has to change. From the comfortable bourgeois crafts, to the Bauhaus and the aesthetic of serial democratic product, or Ulm and the industrial rationalization individualization… what’s the next step ?

What will be the aesthetic of our times ? How are we going to do things ?
Arguing that digital personal fabrication change the “how”, but doesn’t change the things in themselves.

(you can now see his talk here)

Neil Gershenfeld

Having seen the video of his conference in this previous post, I already knew most of the presentation but it was nice to see him in person.

He explained us that additive manufacturing is great but limited, because it’s still just consist of “smooching stuff” (not a great difference between the principle of a glue gun and 3D printing). And he’s sorry that people are focused on it while he think that the next step is “object=code”, where object-code could assemble themselves like the ribosome in our DNA (and they already have made some interesting proof of concept at the MIT). By the way, this idea of a “codeable” matters to make objects that we can easily transform, reminded me this video of a “living kitchen“.

On the Fab Lab side, he compared them as a new Internet, changing how we work/learn/play and contributing to an empowerment of the people (empowerment ->education->problem solving->jobs creation->innovation/invention). Of course this bottom-up approach is disruptive, producing innovative peoples, distributed learning, and creating, new networks.
But we have faced similar moment of old-new method… look at what we finally have today in the music industry: a whole ecology of various actors. He said that we need this ecology in fabrication.
And Fab Labs, with their educative mission, can be like libraries: sustainable by community.

Finally I noticed a greater emphasis on organization than on fabrication (example of child in Africa educating themselves through the Fab Lab because they don’t fit in the school, but after that can’t integrate the classic system): we need to invent a new system.

(you can now see his talk here)

Bror Salmelin

As a Policy Advisor to the Director of the European Commission, it was very interesting to see that (representing the institutions for me) they seems to be quite aware (more than I thought) of the coming changes:

Policy is crucial, and open-design is a major issue of change, creating solutions for the industry/organization/society.
For 2020 the Europe have some goals for a smart-growth and many action areas, among them: making legislatives propositions, investing in a faster infrastructure (fiber Internet), increasing the amount invested in Research & Innovation (from a small amount that I don’t know to 3% of the global GNB).
While presenting this digital agenda of the Europe, everything seems cool but I noticed it include also a “stronger Intellectual Propriety” (curious, after talking about openness).

Linear innovation is dead, long live experimental mentality, and we must adapt our education and everything to that. About this coming Knowledge Economy he mentioned the “National Intellectual Capital” report, comparing 40 country (nic40.org)
Fab Lab and all are essential for this evolution from a closed to an open and then a networked innovation system, we have the infrastructure but we need to connect all that together.
And for how to design the EU innovation system he pointed us to the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission: europa.eu/fp7/ict.

(you can now see his talk here)

//Question time//

A question from the public mixed the idea of reciprocity, and the users-designers relation.
Bror first compared it as “want/need” versus “something-from-someone-who-knows”, the top-down approach will seem unbearable if the diy/sharing culture continue to arise, let people try by themselves.
For Marleen it’s a question of transparency : we must open the black box of the design process, show how to make sustainable product without IP, opening knowledge for more understanding, and maybe that will lead us to an open-society.

The afternoon it was the launching of the book OpenDesignNow, with a little workshop/discussion.

During the talk they reminded us an interesting fact about copyright: we tend to forget that its quite recent in our history… while before the relation between copy and inspiration was not as criticized as today.

And I noted an interesting example about the changes that implied: it seems that Giuseppe Verdi has been less productive after the introduction of copyrights. The goal was to protect the authors to allow them to pursue their creation, but doesn’t it looks counter-productive?

I thought it’s as if you have the choice between “living from what you have done” (selling the same thing again and again) versus  “living by doing what you like”… both are understandable but the later seem less boring and more prone to improve things and life, because unlike our resources, creativity (or how we use them) is infinite.

It was a great week and I think if things keep going like that, we’re on a nice track of changes !

Just after my participation in the Maker Lab at the DMY Berlin 2011, I finally had the chance to meet and interview Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant from Open Design City, a co-working and community-based space for making hosted in the Betahaus (Berlin, Germany). The following interview is the result of a reconstruction of a great half a day of sharing of ideas and talking in Berlin.
(By the way: I’m going to be again in Berlin next week for the Open Knowledge Conference: I’ll be part of a panel and workshop on creating a standard for Open Hardware and Design, more details on the website of the event.)

Massimo Menichinelli: Could you please tell us the story of Open Design City, how it started and what is planned for the near future?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Open Design City happened by accident, starting from an existing community, with an event in Betahaus in February 2010.
Various makers from Berlin and other places met for an Open Design Event, which resulted in a dinner party, numerous products, experiments and the documentary “delivered in beta”. The design festival DMY Berlin then was interested in having a Maker space, 200 square meters of space, with a budget of 3000 € for materials and transportation provided by Etsy (Editor’s note: Etsy has an office in Berlin, here). Then Betahaus wanted to start a Fab Lab, and before the MakerLab, we opened the space in Betahaus, catalysed by the community formed in creating the MakerLab. We confronted business models, asked the community about how to organize (and then create) the space. People brought tools, resources and ideas in the space, that was not defined in the beginning. We left it up to the community to share tools, skills, machines and organize events and workshops to launch the space.
Everything in the place has been built or donated by the members, except for a series of tools donated by the marketing department at Bosch. Then CNC machines and a Makerbot arrived later.

We are now in a transition process, recruiting more members in order to cope with the rental costs, and trying to establish a long-term business plan (because everything happened by accident). Since we don’t have a legal status yet, we are not receiving any subsidies from government or companies, the space is offered by Betahuas but all the money comes from members, so there’s need to find more money.
We are trying to establish connections with companies that may benefit from the space, but in any case the community comes first for us. It is a space by the community for the community, and we are trying to create opportunities for the community to make money through workshops and more services.

Massimo Menichinelli: What is the current situation in Berlin for Fab Labs and Open Design? What kind of impact a Fab Lab like yours could have in Berlin?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant It’s very hard to get fundings from the government, moreover there are interesting projects and artists but not so much industry and no other Fab Labs.
There are many coworking spaces but with no focus on open design or fabbing technologies. There are some Hackerspaces with RepRaps and small workshops, and some other places offer access to cnc machines by paying per hours.
There is also a space for reusable materials in Pankow, and a well equipped workshops for artists from bbk-kulturwerk. Then there is the internet platform “verbund offener werkstätten”, a German wide association for open workshops and fab labs.

Generally, Berlin does not have a tradition of industry and factories, but there are many DIY workshops from the squatting times in the ’80s; most of them are closed now, but there’s still this tradition in the city.
Moreover, there are a lot of projects about Open Source in Berlin (Creative Commons, Freifunk, …) and therefore there are many overlapping communities.

Massimo Menichinelli: Fab Labs are still a new experiment, and there is the need to develop proper business models. What’s your experience in the field, and which are the problems that you encountered in managing a Fab Lab? Any advice for starting a Fab Lab?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant A budget or business plan is not necessary for starting a Fab Lab, you just need enough people that want to be part of it. And tell the right story about the space, so people will start contributing naturally. Start with spaces and the community, then consider later the tools and machines (most of the usual tools of Fab Labs are not so important actually). It’s also important to have different skills present, from electronics to product to social programming.

Massimo Menichinelli: In your experience, which kind of users are more interested in your Fab Lab: designers, makers, artists…? Could we extend the user base to non-designers as well?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Our user base is really broad, and it’s diversity what makes this space so interesting: hackers, artists, economists, philosophers, designers…
It’s a communication issue: the way you communicate the space attracts different people, from open hardware to open data, privacy, self-production. We are striving to maintain the user base so different and that people can engage with peer-to-peer dynamics.
We are currently developing the project of a mobile infrastructure for tools in the city (collaborating with ngos and the green movement).

Massimo Menichinelli: How does Open Design City work? What are the structure and rules that you have, and could they be implemented in other cities as well or are they specifically related to the Berlin / Germany context?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We decide with the community (asking them for propositions): they announce events and they are responsible for their organization.
There’s a center in the organization (Jay and Chris are responsible), but we’re trying to decentralize it more and It’s an ongoing challenge. We are also trying to define how the space is legally defined: there is no legal infrastructure now, so it opens opportunities but there are drawbacks (for example you can’t look for funding).
Anyway, if you think there’s something that could be improved in the space, just do it!

Massimo Menichinelli: While Fab Labs have grown considerably in terms of popularity, Open Design is still more controversial: many designers and companies fear or don’t like the idea of open collaborative processes and the sharing of the design drawings. How could we overcome this problem?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We should start with real examples, we have to prototype some products, just to show the strategic power of Open Design. There’s a lot of theory around business models for Open Design, we should demonstrate them as a real possibility. Otherwise it’s just idealism, while Open Design should be part of the economy and we should communicate that’s not only about giving stuff for free.
At the moment is just a leap of fatih to be enagaged in the Open Design world, and we are not so motivated by money. ;-)

Massimo Menichinelli: I started researching about Open Design in 2005, and in 6 years the situation has changed a lot: from isolated experiments to a full ecosystem emerging right now. It is always difficult to make forecast, but how do you see Open Design and Fab Labs in 5 years?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant The future of Open Design is not here but in Africa or Asia or South America. If China close their Intellectual Property policies, there won’t be any future for Open Design, and we look at Shanzai as a good examples of what can be ahead.
There is a need therefore to change laws, they are not clear and limitate people, especially for what regards IP. We will have also to explore new legal frameworks and business models that are community-guided.
Finally, we have also to study more how to do product hacking, it will be interesting to understand how Open Design interacts with closed design cases and companies.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree? How could we further explore this direction?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant With openness you can create innovation and knowledge in a distributed model and if you have an open process, it’s also about renewing resources as well. It’s about the commons, and it’s hard to find the right strategy on a legal level (or to change the economic system). Furthermore, there should also be a long term vision; there are not so many theories that are well grounded, with probably the exception of Michel Bauwens. And then there’s of course the need of proper business models.

The challenge is: how do I make money from Open Design? Because once you have Open Design, anybody can solve problems because there’s free access to knowledge and tools that are open. Another question is: what are people’s objectives? We should ask it ourselves before saying we should need money or a project should be open. If I already have the life I want to live, should I care who’s making money?

In open design, value lies in the return of the artisan: a company can’t get and offer the same emotional connections and feeling. And the enemy to fight in order to reach sustainability, is planned obsolence. If we manage to use Open Design to solve this, we will reach sustainability. Furthermore, open existing products to fix this planned obsolence problem and make them not obsolete is the key, so we can understand what can be improved (material, energy efficiency, …). We also studied how to create bioplastics, but the materials shrink too much, so there should be more investigation about it.
As a conclusion: as a designers we are trained to develop everything new, from scratch, but it’s not true that this is what we really need… how many chairs are already there?

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.

Open P2P Design Toolkit: bring your project!

Beside the lectures, I had prepared for the Maker Lab a a toolkit for helping designers, makers, companies and whoever is interested in developing an Open and collaborative project, starting from a community or from an existing activity. The toolkit can be download here in the Source section or on Scribd and Issuu.

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:

The event was very nice and insightful and it was great to finally have time to do something together with Openwear.org. Furthermore, it confirms that Open Design has a really great place in the fashion industry (something I must confess I was’t aware before meeting the people from Openwear.org 2 years ago). Among the many interesting speakers, I’d like to outline the presentation of Jen Ballie, a PhD student at the Textile Futures Research Group and Consultancy whose research is about the intersection of co-design, web 2.0 and sustainability for the fashion industry.

You can also read it and embed it from Scribd:

Openwear E-book Final

Or from Issuu:

Analog phone calls degraded with distance; we now have the Internet. Analog computations degraded with time; we now have PCs. But today’s most advanced manufacturing processes, whether additive or subtractive, remain analog because the materials themselves don’t contain information. Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, will present research on digital materials, and discuss its implications for the future of making things.

via | Digital Fabber

After the interview with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen from Openwear.org, I have now the pleasure to interview Peter Troxler, an independent researcher (see his personal website here) and one of the few researchers (if not the only one) that are investigating the business models of Fab Labs and Open Design.
Peter Troxler is also one of the editors of the forthcoming Open Design Now book and runs Square One, an independent research company at the intersection of business administration, society and technology. He has also been an instructor at Fab Academy and Business Developer at Fab Lab Luzern.

Peter Troxler: I am not entirely sure this assessment is actually correct. Let’s look at the two topics, Fab Labs and Open Design, seperately.

01. Fab Labs
It is obvious that the Netherlands has seen a quick growth in number of Fab Labs — from one in 2007/2008 to 6 labs (on the official list and 3 more (mobile, Maastricht, Enschede) that are not on the list now (2010/11). Also, with 9 Labs for 16 million inhabitants this is probably the highest density; the US has 19 Fab Labs for 311 million of people (at this density the Netherlands would only have 1 Fab Lab).

But we should not forget, that Fab Labs are only one player in the fabbing universe; there are Tech Shops, Hacker Spaces, “Offene Werkstätten” (in Germany) etc. that also provide a personal manufacturing infrastructure. According to hackerspaces.org, Germany has some 56 HS, about 40 “Offene Werkstätten” and a handful of Fab Lab initiatives.
And I am just starting to understand what’s going on in France …

So the apparent pole position of the Netherlands might need to be taken “cum grano salis”.

Probably another element helped spread the Fab Lab idea in the Netherlands: the fact that it is just such a small and relatively densely populated country. Ideas can spread really quickly, and that might be the reason why many things are adopted quickly over here.

2. Open Design

Open Design is somewhat vaguely defined. And open design in general is very much in its infancy. If you restrict it to open source type approaches in industrial/product design, you’ll find pockets of it in Berlin, the Dutch Randstad, and probably the Bay Area (US). If you look at fashion, open design has a longer history, and maybe Italy might figure more prominently on the map.

An interesting aside in this context is, that Asian artists/designers traditionally used to get more cudos by copying old masters while the Western culture (at least as of the 19th century romantic illusion of the lone creator as promoted by Diderot) seems more inclined to admire “original creation”.

But then there is the whole area of design where we talk about hardware and electronics — there the Netherlands figure probably not even as second runner up, but you would have to analyse open hardware project collections such as those of Make Magazine and Kerstin Balka’s http://open-innovation-projects.org/ to get some idea of national figure — I have not done that so far and actually don’t intend to do that.

It’s difficult to say, why the Netherlands would be the fore-runner of Fab Labs and Open Design.

What strikes me is that the Netherlands also have one of the least transparent and “greedy” ecosystem of private organisations collecting royalties for all sorts of intellectual property (there seem to be over 20 organisations in the Netherlands collecting (and allegedly re-distributing) such fees).

Having said that, one could think that actually this country is sort of obsessed with dealing with intellectual property. The Netherlands is — to my knowledge — the only country where the national Creative Commons chapter received substantial government funding over a prolonged period of time. It is certainly highly speculative to use that as an explanation for the apparent attention for Open Design in the Netherlands.

Similarly, one would also have to speculate about the role of design in general in the Dutch society — at least in the national self-perception Dutch Design is almost equalled to a (if not *the*) international benchmark of good design. This creates an environment where it is not unlikely that all sorts of off-mainstream projects do get to benefit from the critical mass interested in the overall topic.

The design business is focused around big names who all act more as brands than as designers. Only in the best cases, the star designer acts as the mentor, the more typical role is that of selecting products from the myriad of unknown designers … a mechanism well hidden to the public.

Collaboration and sharing therefore are structurally not part of the behavioral patterns designers typically have at their disposal, certainly not with peers. They might be OK to collaborate in constellations where they are the only ones who can claim to have some credibility of being able to design professionally. Designing in a way that other designers could interact with a design — even more demanding: a design still under development — is not part of what designers are good at … probably from both sides: leading designing and participating in designing.

Lastly, a designer’s belief that long, hard, specialist work would eventually result in one successful product that would generate income and pay for the investment does not allow for a model where “everybody is a designer”. The two business models they know are the mass market and the niche market.

So there is a lot of education needed, a lot of communication — in a way that appeals to designers — to actually promote Open Design, to make them dare innovate their profession (which is a rather young one). Even if you look at what for instance Ronen Kadushin dreams of — it’s becoming the curator of an Open Design collection. And his most successful business model (apart from speaking on Open Design, which might or might not pay well) is the niche market — selling originals.

And there are educational approaches needed, as practiced by Ronen Kadushin, by Caroline Hummels or by Mushon Zer-Aviv, that actually create collaborative design experiences in education.

Massimo Menichinelli: Which are the main business models for Fab Labs and Open Design? Any advice for starting one of these projects?

Peter Troxler: As it stands, there are probably four Fab Lab business models — you have seen the FabFolk wiki and written about it yourself. This is pretty much where we stand right now. Out of the fifty-odd current Fab Labs, there are probably only very few that survive on their own with a commercial business model (if we exclude subsidies and patrons). Yet there are the shoestring/grassroots labs that survive because they are *not* operating according to commercial conditions, live on infrastructure that is already paid for and are run by people who don’t need a “return on investment” if they buy a laser cutter …

For Open Design, I think I have to be quiet at the moment, I’d have to speculate and lie … there is a huge potential to transform the OSS business models to design, but this transformation would have to be done collaboratively between OSS experienced people, designers and business model innovators. While I’d see myself as one of the latter, I’m none of the former two.

But then: let’s speculate while we’re at it ;)

There is a lot of talk on the Internet these days about monetary and social value and how the latter will or could eventually become more important than the former. This of course sends a lot of hope in the direction of those actually creating social value — artists, musicians, designers, etc., not the big corporates and not the derivatives market.

Another thing that is mentioned quite often are alternative currencies. These are not new initiatives, but many of them gain new momentum from the possibilities of the Internet and p2p networks etc.

Such ideas and systems shift the business models out of the purely state money sphere — but they don’t really answer the question of the business model.

As it stands and to my insufficient understanding, today designers work for design agencies that in turn work for manufacturers. And as in many other creative industries, those are the middle men who do the business with the products (results) of creativity. They assume that to be able to sell these products, consumers have to be prevented from making or copying these products themselves (we could add here the discussion on copyrights etc.); but more importantly competitors have to be prevented from copying the products — and that’s probably the mental block for manufacturers to adopt open design easily. In music, it has been discussed at length how to reshape a business model in a world of open (e.g. Masnick, Mike (2009, 5 February). My MidemNet Presentation: Trent Reznor And The Formula For Future Music Business Models. Techdirt. Blogpost available at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090201/1408273588.shtml)

This is stating the obvious:

• concentrate not on selling products but instead on selling expertise
• sell products while trying to keep ahead of the competition

(from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing)

Equally, there are the various declinations of Kevin Kelly’s famous “Eight Generatives” of “Better Than Free”.

And there is the very practical (personal) portfolio model which tackling the underlying issue of how to survive as a designer, mixing paid and unpaid, open and closed projects — I’m digressing.

Massimo Menichinelli:Which kind of “users” are more interested in Fab Labs and Open Design? Could we extend the user base to non-designers as well?

Peter Troxler: At this very moment I think its probably the non-designers (or not yet designers) who are most interested in Open Design, and I see it as a huge task to have designers even consider open design as an option — they get so brainwashed into the closed/copyright/genius thinking.

Massimo Menichinelli: The main approach to Open Design and Fab Labs is technology-driven (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) and usually starts from a project and then maybe a community will gather around it. I think this approach could be further developed by instead starting from the users and the communities they are part of. What do you think about this issue?

Peter Troxler: In my opinion it is vital to start a FabLab with some minimal community and all successful FabLabs have chosen that route … or if they have not managed to find that community (or create it), the projects have stopped. So I’d not agree with you when you say the main approach is technology-driven. However, technology can obviously be a key motivator for a community — we want to have this laser cutter, so let’s join forces to get one.

Massimo Menichinelli: I started researching about Open Design in 2005, and in 6 years the situation has changed a lot: from isolated experiments to a full ecosystem emerging right now. It is always difficult to make forecast, but how do you see Open Design and Fab Labs in 5 years?

Peter Troxler: I like this observation, and it is true, there is a whole buzz going on around Fab Labs and Open Design. I’m expecting this to continue for a little while, and there is plenty of room for it.

I see a few challenges ahead, though (and I’m particularly speaking for the Fab Lab network now).

1. Growth of the network has been exponential, the number of labs doubling every 18 months. Yet the network is relatively weak, with few key nodes for keeping up the standards, keeping everybody in the loop etc. These nodes are already feeling the strain this growth puts on them and mechanisms are being established to increase that capacity.
2. The network still has to learn to work as a community, to establish stronger links, to start sharing between the labs etc.
3. With FabLabs and Open Design we are still in the phase of early adopters. If we adopt Geoffrey A. Moore’s Chasm model, the big challenge we face is getting the early majority involved in FabLabs and Open Design. It could well be that in the U.S. of A. this process has already started with the proposed National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010.
4. With that growth comes the challenge of nationalisation. It is likely that the US network will grow substantially, maybe advancing more quickly than other regions / nations in developing their own community. We currently see the same tendency in all countries “francophones”. The Fab Lab community needs to make an effort to not split into silos.
   In Open Design, I feel we see the same split: fashion, industrial design, accessories, …
   Silos weaken the movement.
5. Equally, there is the danger (or challenge) of proliferation, of competing “schools” of Open Design and fabbing, each pretending to be “the only right way of …” — i.e. the real challenge is to bring the different schools together in a way that they can accept them as different schools but going in the same direction.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Is it true and how could we further explore this direction?

Peter Troxler: The short answer obviously is no, it is not true. The long answer is that it’s probably more likely that people with an open source mind have also a green mind, and that the two approaches go very well together ideologically, if you will. Of course every Fab Lab should strive to be as ecologically sustainable as practicable, and every Open Design should make the most careful use of natural resources and (grey) energy. But that is actually a requirement for all our activities, whether open source or not.