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Workshop: Post-Industrial Design @ I Realize 09, Turin

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Post-Industrial Design Workshop: organization

Post-Industrial Design Workshop
at I Realize 09
a project by ToDo and openp2pdesign.org

Facilitated by Giorgio Olivero and Massimo Menichinelli

More reports on openp2pdesign.org here, and here.

Post-Industrial Design Workshop: participants

Agata Tringale (CSP)
Augusta (Popi) Giovannoli (CSP)
Maurizio Muraro
Gian Luca Matteucci (CSP)
Francesca Valsecchi (Politecnico di Milano)
Alberto Cottica (Kublai)
Nadia El-Imam
Costantino Bongiorno (Dorkbot Milano)
Federico Weber (openp2pdesign.org)
Stephen Williams (Fluid Forms)
Michal Piasecki (ULC)
Alberto Buzio (Politecnico di Torino)
Elena Gianni (Politecnico di Torino)
Federica Protti (Telecom)
Francesco Buonomo (Politecnico di Torino)
Riccardo Mongelluzzo (ToDo)
Marco Rivetti (architetto)
Andrea Pinchi (ToDo)
Paola Leto (Agenzia Territoriale per la Casa)
Giuseppe Sorrentino (Yet Matilde)

Post-Industrial Design Workshop: the concept

A workshop exploring the ongoing evolution of a new scenario for design in the information society.
Ingredients:

CoDEsigners (Designers + coders):
a new breed of designers are creating and programming their own digital tools, applying computational strategies to design. Instead of designing static products, they create dynamic processes open to end-users contribution to generate a virtually infinite series of mass-customized products. Objects that are able to change and evolve through an ongoing dialogue with their own users. Is this a new kind of participatory design?
Fluid workflows:
Digital fabrication technologies (lasercut, CNC mills, 3D print) make the production of small quantities or unique pieces economically viable. Products can be marketed online and on-demand skipping the route of mass-production.
We are witnessing a growing number of companies specialized in tailor-made solutions for small production and logistics, like Ponoko or Shapeways.
Design-to-order:
a direct contact between designers and consumers, together with the availability of online tools to design and customize products will give birth to a new market? Mass customization and personalization will ever become something more interesting and radical then writing your own name on a pair of sneakers?

Post-Industrial Design Workshop: the process

The Post-Industrial Design workshop was organized with the goals of studying the post-industrial design scenario, sharing knowledge and building networks among the participants, and designing three maps that summarize the scenario. These three maps were defined by the I Realize organization as: “NEEDS” – the unmet needs, the unsolved problems, “DISRUPTIVE SOLUTIONS” – possible disruptive (technological?) solutions for the identified problems, “EXISTING ANSWERS” – possible answers/solutions (i.e. start-ups, technologies, ideas, groups, etc.) already existing but not well known yet.
Starting from these instructions, the organization of the maps was slightly modified during the workshop and in the end the actual structure of the maps was: “NEEDS” – the unmet needs, the unsolved problems, “EXISTING ANSWERS” – possible answers/solutions (i.e. start-ups, technologies, ideas, groups, etc.) already existing but not well known yet, “DISRUPTIVE SOLUTIONS” – possible disruptive projects as solutions for the identified problems that start from the existing answers.

Post Industrial Design workshop at I Realize 09: The process

View more presentations from Massimo Menichinelli.

In order to develop such maps, we conceived a mix between two facilitating methodologies, Open Space Technology and the Net-Map Toolbox.
Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss how many different actors are connected and influence their community and locality. Net-Map helps players to determine in a simple and cheap way what actors are involved in a given network, how they are linked, how influential they are, and what their goals are. Determining linkages, levels of influence, and goals allows users to be more strategic about how they act in these complex situations. The tool is low-tech and low-cost and can be used when working with rural community members with low formal education as well as with policy makers or international development actors.
Open Space Technology (OST) represents a self-organising process; participants construct the agenda and schedule during the meeting itself. OST meetings have a single facilitator who initiates and concludes the meeting and explains the general method. The facilitator has no other role in the meeting and does not control the actual gathering in any way.
At the beginning of an Open Space the participants sit in a circle, and the facilitator will greet the people and briefly re-state the theme of their gathering, and then eh/she will invite all participants to identify any issue or opportunity related to the theme. Participants willing to raise a topic will write it on a sheet of paper or post-it and announce it to the group before choosing a time and a place for discussion and posting it on a wall. That wall becomes the agenda for the meeting.

Anyone can suggest an issue, and the person that does it has a real passion for the issue and can therefore start the discussion on it. That person also must make sure that a report of the discussion is done and posted on another wall so that any participant can access the content of the discussion at all times. When all issues have been posted, participants sign up and attend those individual sessions. After the opening and agenda creation, the individual groups go to work. The attendees organize each session; people may freely decide which session they want to attend, and may switch to another one at any time.

The Open Space Technology operates in a very simple fashion, and OST meetings require very little planning up-front. The organizers set no agenda and prepare only a very rough schedule; the meeting largely self-organises as the facilitator remains largely invisible and has no control over the meeting itself.

Both are elegant, low-intensity and evoluted facilitation methodology, but they were not suitable for the goals of the Post-Industrial Design workshop. Open Space Technology is more properly used when there is need for more parallel discussions or project running at the same time. Net-Map is aimed at mapping the social neworks within a community and a locality; but we needed to design one map together at the same time, and we needed to map networks between concepts, trends, technological and social innovations, startups, rather than local actors. We then decided to mix the two methodologies in order to have a more suitable one for our goals.

In order to facilitate the participants in discussing these maps in just few hours, we conceived a structure that narrows down the possibilities in order to avoid wasting of time while giving enough free room for the discussion at the same time. We started from an Open Space-like board and post-its in order to let participants propose the needs of the Post-Industrial Design scenario. As we needed just one discussion, we avoided a time/space board for organizing different discussions, and we provided instead a board divided into the stages of the life of a design project. In this way participants found a structure that helped them thinking about the scenario and organizing the needs, having at the same time a more complete and systemic view of the design process that includes all the stakeholders and agents of the design system. We proposed these stages for the life of a design project:

design;
manufacturing;
distribution;
use;
end-of-life.

We decided to further divide these stages along three more issues, in order to further help participants thinking about the impact of the design process. We asked them to reflect upon these aspects for each need found:

social aspects;
economical aspects;
environmental aspects.

Note that these are the traditional spheres of sustainability: since the 1980s, human sustainability has implied the integration of economic, social and environmental spheres (or triple bottom line) to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
The triple bottom line (also known as “people, planet, profit”) captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success: economic, ecological and social. In this way we facilitated the participants in thinking about the impact and the sustainability of each need.
This the board we presented for the discussion of the needs and as a starting point for the whole workshop (because from the needs we can find then answers and solutions):

Table 1.
Post-Industrial Design
NEEDS	design	manufacturing	distribution	use	end of life
social side
economical side
environmental side
Board layout for collaborative mapping

Starting from this board, we spent one hour and a half for each map. We let participants form groups in an Open Space-like way for the discussion of the elements to put on the board, and after that we all discussed the elements found while one facilitator started designing a map on a netbook connected to a large display that everyone could watch in real time.

From the collaborative discussion of the needs map, we found that six words are going to be redefined during the transition to the Post-industrial Design:

identity;
knowledge;
social networks;
roles;
processes;
limits/choices.

We used these six keywords as the starting point for the answers and solutions map (instead that the first board) as we found it was easier for all the participants and it was a natural prosecution of the first map.

Open Source Maps

The Post-Industrial Design workshop, with such a collaborative nature (and too little time for discussing in depth the whole post-industrial scenario), was organized in way to be the more open possible. We used open source softwares and the whole outcome from the workshop is distributed as open source content. In this way, the process, the tools and the contents are open and accessible for further evolution.
We used Xmind, an open source, Java and Eclipse-based multiplatform desktop application, in order to design the maps and share the map files later. XMind, combined with online sharing service, provides a way to enable both team brainstorming and personal mind mapping. It features a Web 2.0 community for the sharing and embedding of the maps. With Xmind is possible to create mindmap or less hyerarchical maps, with images, markers and relationships/connections (with a weight, a direction and tag).
Within each map, we used a modified version of the Erectus icon set as a way to describe the stages of the life of the design process, so that each element of the map can be categorized easily.

The element of the Answers map have a list of subtopics that further describe them and their advance and impact; we could not fill all the details during the short time of the workshop but this is a task that can be done by everyone later, as the maps are open source. These are the subtopics:

typology (people, institution, enterprise, technological innovation, social innovation, need, opportunity, …)
link
location
license
progress status (%)
social aspects
environmental aspects
economical aspects

We decided then to release everything under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

With this license everyone is free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

with these specifications:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

Here are the Needs map, the Existing Answers Map and the Disruptive Solutions Map.You can download them as .xmind and .png files in the Source page, map category.

Maps for a rodmap towards a Post-Industrial Design scenario

The three maps here included are almost the same we developed during the workshop, with just a little post-production. We could have done one map including the elements of the three maps, but it was in contrast with the goals of the workshop, and it would have taken even more time, limiting the open strategy we chose.
From the collaborative discussion of the needs map, we found that six words are going to be redefined during the transition to the Post-industrial Design:

identity (of the designers, of the users, of the companies, of the brands, of the products);
knowledge (within alle the processes and life stage, and its new culture of management and sharing);
social networks (more participation of social networks within the processes brings new business models);
roles (who will be the designer or the user? who will be the manufacturer?);
processes (design, manufacturing, distribution, end-of-life will be radically different);
limits/choices (of the design project, of the product features, of the processes).

This six keywords found are an interesting way of analysing any new technology, startup or social innovation and were useful for the prosecution of the workshop. Witihin the answers map, we started collecting any case of technologies, business and social innovation that will have a key role in the transition towards the post-industrial design scenario. Anyone can further develop this map, in order to have an always updated state-of-the-art map, useful for any practicioner.
What is more important about these two maps (and this give an idea of the importance of such maps and workshops) is that they were helpful for the participants so much they presented not just hypotetical solutions, but instead they discussed almost ready projects. While we were expecting single and simple solutions, the participants proposed systemic projects:

CreativeCommons design database (an open design repository);
Itunes / Ikea platform (an open and p2p marketplace based on the Ikea supply chain and the Itunes store);
Thingbook (a social network for involving people in the life of products);
Knowledge chain (a new proposal and process for knowledge management in the design field);
Product chain (a social network for the sharing of physical products and not just information).

From the collective discussion during the workshop and from the reflections of the facilitators, we understood that there is a need for places and times like this, in order to fully study, understand and develop the coming post-industrial design scenario. Events like this are very important, but there is a need for an always accessible place were citizens (designers, users, companies, institutions, non-profit organizations) can meet, test and discuss new technologies and social innovations for the whole community. Places like Hackerspaces or FabLab or Citilab, where people can use and develop new manufacturing technologies and share knowledge, are a great example of what we can put in practice in order to move towards this new scenario in a partecipated way. This is why we see new initiatives like The Hackspace Foundation (a non-profit, community organisation dedicated to providing hacker spaces in the UK) or 100Kgarages (a initiative aimed at the networking of designers, makers, fab lab, users).
These places are the starting point for distributed systems in the design and manufacturing processes, bringing new economical opportunities for the communities and the cities that are willing to experiment with them and open a place for the citizens’ participation.