- Current projects
- Past projects
- Thesis: Collaborative Networks 1.1
- Paper: Confsl 2007
- Book: openp2pdesign.org_1.1
- Workshop: UrbanLabs 08 @ Citilab
- Workshop: Post-Industrial Design @ I Realize 09, Turin
- Speaker: Media Ecologies & Post-Industrial Production Conference: Manchester, 2009
- Keynote speech: Open 2009 Symposium, Helsinki
- Workshop: Creative Cities in Imagination Society, Cáceres 2009
- Open P2P Design Workshop: Seoul + Singapore 2009
- Report: Business models for Open Hardware, Fab Labs, DIY Craft
- Speaker: EDUfashion Conference – Ljubljana, Slovenia 2011
- Lecture: Open Design @ Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico) 2011
- Speaker + Facilitator: DMY Berlin 2011, Berlin – Germany
01. 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.
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.
02. Pictures of the workshop
03. Presentations of the lectures
Here are the presentations of the lectures Massimo Menichinelli gave during the workshops:
04. The process and the outcomes of the workshop
We had encountered some problems with the accounts names in Seoul, and therefore we decided to choose easier name for such a short workshop, and we used the name of some of the protagonists of Quentin Tarantino‘s movie Reservoir Dogs:
- Mr. Blue
- Mr. Brown
- Mr. Orange
- Mr. Pink
In order to explain to the students how to use the Open P2P Design methodology, we co-designed with them an Open Design collaborative activity, just like in the Seoul workshop. The core idea of Open P2P Design is that an Open Source community is not only the publishing of a file, but a whole community that interacts and self-organize around a collective project. Therefore, it’s not enough to publish a file, but we need a community-centered design approach (like Open P2P Design) in order to enable Open systems.
We asked them to think about developing an Open Design community among the NTU students: the workshop would have been the first step, for the development of the proposal of an Open Design collaborative activity. After the workshop, the students would have been able to show the project to all the NTU students and ask them to join the project and modify it, forming thus a real Open Source community.
We started developing with them the Community Analysis (here) of the NTU students we were designing the Open Design collaborative activity for, focusing on their activity of resting in the University (an issue the participants noted as problematic for them). But this time I took note of the collective discussion not on a blackboard but with XMind, a great open source software for mindmapping. Frome the same mindmap, we can export a text file or an image, or upload it on the XMind website and embed it on other websites as well:
We can even export a text file from Xmind (for diffing and compare it with previous versions easily), and the result would be this:
Resting 1. subject 1.1 community of the students of NTU 1.2 Design School 1.3 600 students 1.4 no spaces for resting inside university 1.5 they spend a lot of time commuting 1.6 working at a desk all the time 1.7 no 24 hour cafe 2. object 2.1 body 2.2 mind 2.3 soul 3. rules 3.1 they cannot sleep inside the building 3.2 they cannot sleep outside the building 3.3 they cannot sleep during the class 3.4 they can sleep in open lab 4. roles 4.1 other students 4.2 security guards 4.3 professors 5. artifacts 5.1 material 5.1.1 chairs 5.1.2 desktop 5.1.3 floor 5.1.4 sofa 5.1.5 coffee 5.1.6 tea 5.1.7 pillow 5.1.8 candy 5.2 immaterial 5.2.1 forum 5.3 cognitive 6. community 6.1 University 7. Participation 7.1 top-down 8. reputation levels 8.1 security guards 8.1.1 technicians 8.1.1.1 school administration 8.1.1.1.1 dean 8.1.1.1.1.1 professors
We then co-design the Participation Matrix (here) of the whole Open Design collaborative activity, that is how open and participatory is the process of setting up the community with the other students of NTU that did not attend the workshop.
As you can see, in the first steps (analysis – organizing the design process) the whole community of the students is not involved in the process (because these steps represent the workshop). The design of the concept has a indirect participation (because during the workshop the students developed some concepts on the basis of the community analysis), and then we enter in a phase where all the members of the community will have shared or full control.
We will have a meeting with all the students that did not participate in the workshop (shared control for organizing the meeting) for the discussion of the Open Design project with them. And after the meeting, we will co-design the products with them (with shared control as well). We will then fully “outsource” the manufacturing and the managing the end of life of the products to the members of the community, while the core group (the students that participated at the workshop and designed this concept of Open Design Activity) will distribute the products on a shared control basis with the other members.
We then co-designed the Open Design Collaborative Activity (here) (based on the previous community analysis): you can see it here below; if the embedded mindmap is too small, click on the popup button on the right bottom.
And then here we have the System Map of the Open Design Collaborative Activity we co-designed, with the connections among all the roles and the kind of flows that take place within this connections. All the roles surrounded by a red dashed line are part of the Open Design community, all the other ones are stakeholders / providers (maybe the repository is not actually a role but a virtual place: the students outlined its importance as a role among the interactions; anyway, let’s not forget that there is somebody actually managing the repository, that is, running the “repository” role). With this rough System Map you can see all the interactions and the flows (of information, money, prototypes and products) that take place within the community. We can note that the students decided to have an critical role within the community, the Public Relation role, that handles (and redistribute) the money and the final product.
We had then a proposal for each group, that you can find in the trunk folder in the SVN repository. They’re just quick and rough proposals (we did not have enough time); anyway I would like to show you the proposal from the MrBrown group and its two versions.
The MrBrown group proposed this poster for communicating the Open Design project to all the NTU students:
And then another group quickly modified the poster, slightly changing the tag line and the name of the project (outlining a possible similarity of the name with the shape of the product): not a big change, but the proof that the students understood that Open Design is about slowly modifying a project collectively, in order to make it evolve better.
You can find the complete subversion repository of the workshop (with all its contents and versions) here on the WebSVN page.
05. Reflections on the Singapore workshop
Even if the workshop was just 3 days long, it worked really well, without the technical and cultural problems we had experienced in the Seoul workshop. After all, the students appreciated and understood the importance of the Open Design and Open P2P Design concepts; there is enough content to organize a one year course and to further explain all the technical, legal and economic aspects of Open Design. Furthermore, it would have been great to have time to physically fab / prototype a project, in order to understand the bits-atoms relationships that will take place in the future.
Short workshops like these are very important for testing and refining the methodology, but they actually are more simulations than experiencing real collaboration, since there is no time to let the students use the collaborative software for a long time.
Let’s consider some issues regarding the tools:
- XMind is very good for live mindmapping and for embedding; even if it’s open source, we may think about using other file formats that can be shared among more mindmapping softwares (like the FreeMind one).
- Subversion is a great software, but it’s not completely suitable for designers yet and, at the same time, they’re not used at working with a Version Control System; therefore, the tool should be developed more for a better usability, and the designers should start studying such systems for storing and making backups of their projects. The real weak point of Subversion (and all the other Version Control Systems as well) is that it works really well with code (text), but not with other file type (images, audio, video, 3D models, technical drawings, and so on): it’s a tool developed by software coders for coding software, not for designing projects. Subversion works well with all the file type, but it’s very difficult to compare other file formats than text; there are workarounds and little hacks for comparing images (and few Subversion clients like TortoiseSVN do this), but we still need a client that shows the difference between versions of other file formats as well, in order to work collaboratively.
- Trac is quite difficult to install but can be used easily by the students; there are other issue tracking and software forges systems that could be used that are easier to install.
- Furthermore, which kind of file format and technical drawing should be used for collaborative design projects is an issue that should be investigated extensively in the future. I’m currently investigating this issue, and soon there will be a book (or possibly more) about mapping all the tools for Open and Collaborative projects!
December 3rd, 2011 20:22
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