Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website, and here in English, under a Creative Commons license (see below). Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
Here’s the first part, about business models for Open Hardware.

Definitions of Open Hardware

The current Open Source Hardware Draft Definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware and it says that Open Hardware is “a term for tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things“. The main difference with Open Source Software is that Open Source Software is collaborative, while Open Hardware is derivative: here a fork is the rule, not the exception.
Even if Open Hardware has become famous in the past 5 years, it has been around for years: The Apple I was built by hand by Steve Wozniak, and he and Jobs were members of the Home Brew Computer Club. The hardware hacking community has never gone away; it has just adapted to the changes in technology. Open Hardware is still in its first steps though, just like Open Source Software was in the 1980s, when the GNU project began, before all the infrastructure was created.
Interesting overviews of Open Hardware can be found on Make Magazine’s Blog, MIT Technology Review, Computerworld, O’Reilly Radar. Lists of existing Open Hardware projects can be found on the GOpen Hardware 2009 website, on the P2P Foundation website (here and here), on Make Magazine’s Blog, Open Innovation Projects and Open Knowledge Foundation. Open Hardware projects are not limited to gadget and interaction design projects, but they can also be about development aid projects.
Patrick McNamara defined 4 possible levels of Openness in Open Hardware projects, that can help us understand them better:

1. Closed: any hardware for which the creator of the hardware will not release any information.
2. Open Interface: all the documentation on how to make a piece of hardware perform the function for which it is designed is available (minimum level of openness).
3. Open Design: in which enough detailed documentation is provided that a functionally compatible device could be created by a third party.
4. Open Implementation: the complete bill of materials necessary to construct the device is available.

Arduino: a successful open hardware project

Arduino is arguably the most popular Open Hardware project: an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software; many versions of the Arduino hardware have been commercially produced to date. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. You can read a comprehensive introduction to Arduino on Wikipedia or on Alicia Gibbs’ thesis.
Most of Arduino official boards are manufactured by SmartProjects in Italy. The Arduino Pro, Pro Mini, and LilyPad are manufactured by SparkFun Electronics (USA). The Arduino Nano is manufactured by Gravitech (USA).
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01. Another 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.

I could stay there only few days (just for the workshop), and I could only feel that while Seoul is like a 24-hour fabbing and piracy shop, Singapore is design, business and marketing hub but with no manufacturing inside (just like big companies like Nike, for example). One of the main avenues is not full of design piracy shops like in Seoul but of multiple high-end brands and consumption. And at the same time, in Singapore the coexistence of the four main ethnic groups (Chinese, Malays, Indians, Europeans) is based not on integration but on the tolerance of their diversity, in the the most globalised country in the world.

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. Luckily, there were no cultural problems like in Seoul (Singapore was a British colony, after all), and even if the students were younger than in Seoul they were really smart and able to understand how Open Systems (and the Open P2P Design methodology) work in just three days. Moreover, we had the opportunity to learn from the Seoul workshop and change few details.

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. Presentations of the lectures

Here are the presentations of the lectures I gave during the workshops:
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01. An Open P2P Design workshop, in Seoul

And finally here we are to talk about what happened during the Seoul Workshop at IDAS, the penultimate date of the November 2009 tour.
First of all, I have to thank Roger Pitiot for this great opportunity, for the great time we had preparing this workshop and for the perfect organization he managed to set up with his team of students (Miae Kim was there too ;-) ).
Many thanks to Hyun Shin Jo from Kookmin University and Won Taik Kim from IDAS for their collaboration as co-conductors, and to Jay Yoon from Creative Commons Korea for explaining Creative Commons and Open Culture to the students in Korean, helping us thus communicating with them such a big issue.
Here’s a report on the Creative Commons Korea website, if you can read Korean of course!

I won’t talk too much about Seoul itself: on one side I had very little time to see it, and on the other side I prefer to focus on the workshop, here in the blog. But just let me say that being in a city which is the World Design Capital for 2010, with a completely different culture and so nice and very different people was very refreshing. Beside all the glittering lights of a never ending row of always open shops and street food stands, there is in Seoul an already working Distributed Manufacturing Systems that produces small series with low cost prices in 24-48 hours. Let’s see if they find a way to move from their consumerism and a whole avenue of design piracy shops towards a more sustainable, peer-to-peer and lighter distributed system of active citizens designers.

Back to our workshop: it was a very important one, not just for the setting, but because I had finally the opportunity to test the Open P2P Design methodology with other people and within a framework of time long enough (even if we would have liked it to last at least 5 days).
We had about 36 students the first day (Friday), but only half of them survived to the idea of working on Open Design during the whole weekend, and with such a culture shock. Because yes, it was a nice cultural clash on organizational terms (in Seoul everybody wakes up and go to bed very late; it’s very difficult to have students standing among the others asking questions and therefore a real collective interaction; and they do prefer to learn Open P2P Design starting from details and ending with the big picture rather than the other way around). But it was also a clash on cultural terms (it proved quite difficult to explain them the Activity Systems, since the words subject and object don’t have the same meaning their culture; the concepts of copy and copyright make a different sense, especially to the Chinese students). I have to thank Miae Kim for helping me explaining the Activity System to them in Korean!

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. The process and the outcomes of the workshop

Since we didn’t have enough time, we asked the students to organize themselves into groups, so that we could give each group an account to the main Subversion (SVN) repository. In this way, we could simulate how an Open Source community works, using the same software such communities use.
We divided them into 7 groups, each one with the name of a political leader (just for fun: think about opposite leaders collaborating in an Open Design project!):

• Barack Obama
• Ernesto Che Guevara
• George Bush
• Kim Jung Il
• Mao Zedong
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Ronald Reagan

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Just a quick post: here are my presentations for the first day (What is Open Design?), the second day (What is Open P2P Design) and the fourth day (What Is The Distributed Manufacturing Scenario?). In the next post I will write about what happened in the workshop and the outcome we got.

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01. Open P2P Design workshops

The last part of the November 2009 tour took place very far, in South Korea (in Seoul) and in Singapore where I facilitated two workshops together with Roger Pitiot. Both workshops share the same structure and contents, even if the Singapore one had to be one day shorter (3 days instead of 4).
Let’s start reporting these workshops with the structure and the contents, something we had been working for months and we can easily replicate in other contexts in the future.
With the next posts I will explain in details what has been done in both workshops.

02. Workshop Contents

Design 2.0: designers meet social networks and new technologies for distributed systems

What is Design 2.0, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect

• complex problems
• increasing importance of design
• open innovation
• opening design

• • with new technologies
  • Knowledge sharing
  • social networks
  • fabbing

Open P2P Design: how to organize open projects for distributed systems

What is Open P2P Design, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect enable distributed creativity

• collaborative activity for complex problem solving
• metadesign for open process
• co-design for open projects

The Workshop will answer the following questions:

What is Open Design and how can we develop it with a community in a collaborative way?
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