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

via | digg

After FluidForms (read this old post), here is another innovative Swiss company based on mass-customization and user co-created content, mShape.
And they use too multi-layered wood and computer controlled milling machines, but here complexity comes from the behaviour of the users, from their co-creation that generates “a population of tables”.

It’s not an open p2p marketplace, it’s not a peer production example, but it is a very good example of user co-created design. You can’t buy other users’ tables, so it’s not a marketplace and relationships between users are not fostered (nor they are interested in them). Therefore, it’s not a community but a co-creation business/service.
Actually, you can buy an mShape table in two showrooms in Zurich, where:

Our partners can provide you with a Nokia mobile phone for the time of your design

So the most important thing of mShape is that it works using mobile techologies i.e. easy of use tecnologies that have a wide reach. Just note that every project that is strongly based on user participation needs an enabler designer rather than a conventional one, a designer capable of developing a meta-design project where the user will be the conventional designer.
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After the first post, here I suggest you another report from Nordic Innovation Centre, a longer and more detailed one, edited by Emily Wise and Casper Høgenhaven: “User-Driven Innovation. Context and Cases in the Nordic Region“.

In this report, user-driven innovation is defined as the process of tapping users’ knowledge in order to develop new products, services and concepts. A user-driven innovation process is based on an understanding of true user needs and a more systematic involvement of users.
This definition encompasses two key elements: an understanding of true user needs (in order to be able to define unique experiences), and systematic user involvement in the innovation process. Two frameworks – the innovation wheel and the framework for mapping UDI processes – are used to describe user-driven innovation processes in more detail. Eight case examples are presented, describing the process (step by step), specific methods employed, results and key lessons. The general context regarding user-driven innovation (research, education, public and private sector activities) in each of the Nordic countries is also presented.¹

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Notes:

1. p.7 [↩]

One of the key point of Open P2P Design is that the designer/s should become an enabler of the creativity that lays in a community/system. I will write something more about this theme in the future (a very long post is under construction), but for the moment I’d like to suggest you a brief example of a design studio that decided to act as an enabler of the customer’s creativity: Fluid Forms. Individual Design from Graz, Austria. This time I’d like to talk about their latest project, Fluid Earth.

Fluid Earth consist in an easy to use Online-Design-Tool, with which the user can design herself/himself unique objects (bowl or lamp) for the home, at home. The user can select a desired locality using GoogleMaps and see it represented as a lamp or a bowl. The selection can also be enlarged, decreased and shifted; at the same time the finished product is displayed as a 3D-Model.

Complexity here is not recreated artificially (as it happens in the generative design projects); instead it is gathered from an already existing database (localities and their geography and orography). The user is an agent that discover this complexity and transform it into a design project (in this case, however, complexity and localities are not addressed directly but only superficially, just at the aesthetic level).

Note that this is not a collaborative or collective project, it’s just a web-based mass-customization project; anyway, its importance lays in the idea that a design studio can work enabling not its creativity but someone else’s one (they call it meta-design).

Personal tastes are as different as people themselves.

For this reason Fluidforms offers everyone an individual Design. Our website enables you to design according to your own preferences with but a few clicks of the mouse. Create your own unique forms, and bring to life your own individual Design.

Individual Design involves designing not a single product, as in traditional design, but what we call a Meta-Design. A Meta-Design is a framework in which the consumer may modify his or her product. The designers job is to make sure that the consumer is supported in their design process and can not specify a product that does not reach functional or aesthetic requirements.

“User-driven innovation: when the user makes the difference”

The report is the result of an extensive pilot-project with an aim of clarifying the awareness and use of user-driven innovation in the Nordic countries.
[...]
This report is written, during the spring of 2007, by a group of students from the Norwegian University of Science And Technology (NTNU) in relation with, and as a part of, the subject TMM4220 Innovation in Technology led by Professor Sjur Dagestad.

[...] we can divide the types of innovation into three different categories; price-driven, technologydriven and user-driven innovation.

• Price-driven innovation focuses mainly on cost efficiency and strives toward having the lowest prices on the market. Examples of this may be different low-price airlines (like Norwegian or Sterling).
• In research or technology-driven innovation the product emerges from the availability of new technology principles and devices. And the aim here is to gain a technological advantage over the competitors by being the first to introduce these new principles in the market. We find examples of this in the medical industry.
• Third, we have user-driven innovation where the innovation process is about exploiting the knowledge about the customer when trying to answer explicit and immediate needs in the market. The focus here is to develop a product or service which meet these demands in a better way than the product or service did before.

Featured companies are:

• Electrolux (Sweden – white goods)
• Lego (Denmark – toys)
• Coloplast (Denmark – medical products)
• Nokia (Finland – mobile phones)
• Laerdal Medical (Norway – basic and advanced life support training products and emergency medical equipment)
• Tomra (reverse vending machines)
• Trolltech (Norway – computer software)
• Plastoform AS (Norway – Nordic Seahunter)
• Funcom (Norway computer and console games)
• Deuter (Germany – backpacks, suitcases and bags)
• Sweet Protection (Norway – protective sports clothing)
• Cycleurope (DBS) (Norway – bicycles)
• HardRocx (Norway – bicycles)

via | putting people first @Experientia

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

Another proof that Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics are spreading in Design comes from the Design Management Forum 2007, 9-10 November, Cologne. This event is about design as process and tool (and therefore not results) for better business, and this year the focus is on Communities, Co-Creation, Web 2.0, Social Networks.

Small, medium-sized and large enterprises need to respond to these developments. They need to design both their structures and decision processes and their planning, development and design processes in a new way which includes their customers. How can we make this happen? What are the possibilities to design the co-operation between enterprises and customers? Hierarchies are already dissolving in enterprises, and being replaced by interlaced structures. At the same time responsibilities grow for everyone. The 4th Design Management Forum discusses the role and limits of design in the context of these new challenges and debates solutions for sustainable innovation and design strategies.

Here’s the program (in German).
Unfortunately, the whole website is in German (and I don’t speak German) and most of the presentations will be held in German, but here you can download a short presentation in English

Just take a look at the workshops that will be held at the conference:

1. Design as an Initiator of new business fields?
Jens Krause from the Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology of the Leeds University (Great Britain) will clarify what we can learn from current research on social network architecture with animals and humans and apply this to restructure organizations.

2. Customer Co-Design
Users in the computer game industry have become designers and decision-makers. Thomas Zeitner, managing director of Electronic Arts in Cologne, will present examples and existing possibilities of ”customer co-creation”.

3. Explorative user Research
Clemens Marek, director of ergonomics at the Ford plant in Cologne, will reveal how findings from a systematic acquisition of insights of user behaviour and characteristics affect the planning, development and design in the automobile industry.

4. Integration of communities in design processes
Today, communities exist everywhere and cover every aspect of human activity. For television programs they have been a decision parameter for a long time. Axel Beyer, director of the television entertainment at the WDR Cologne, will report on his experiences with the phenomenon ”community building“, based on examples from television entertainment programs.

via | core77