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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Here’s a nice and well designed and documented infographic poster about User-Centred Design by Pascal Raabe. And since he published it under a CC BY-NC-SA license, I’m redistributing here it as a pdf file.

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One week after being in Helsinki, I went to Cáceres, for the Creative Cities in Imagination Society: 5th Congress of Creativity and Innovation where I gave a workshop about using the Open P2P Design methodology in cities in order to experiment with social and economic innovation starting with citizenship creativity. I have to say that I was struck by the perfect organization of such a big event, in region that I’ve been told is the poorest of Spain!

You can find my presentation, in Spanish, here.

As I had very little time for the workshop, I decided to use it to explain the Open P2P Design methodology to the participants instead of trying to do something. I had also prepared a short guide/toolkit, written in Spanish, for developing Open P2P Design projects that I published online on Issuu and Scribd and that I gave to the participants.
You can also download it from the Source section: Open P2P Design, co-diseñar una actividad colaborativa abierta con/para una comunidad y su localidad (225)
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The Story of Co-Design from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

A short and sweet animation illustrating the “Co-Design” process.

01. Net-Map: a social network analysis toolbox

Net-Map is a visualization and facilitation tool developed by Eva Schiffer that can be very useful for design processes for/with Community/Locality Systems.

Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes. By creating Influence Network Maps, individuals and groups can clarify their own view of a situation, foster discussion, and develop a strategic approach to their networking activities. More specifically, Net-Map helps players to determine

• 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. It helps users to answer questions such as: Do you need to strengthen the links to an influential potential supporter (high influence, same goals)? Do you have to be aware of an influential actor who doesn’t share your goals? Can increased networking help empower your dis-empowered beneficiaries?

Basically, Net-Map is low-tech tool for developing social network analysis within communities. It is a tool that: (more…)

After some months of designing and prototyping, I am so happy to annouce you that the openp2pdesign.org store page on Lulu.com is now finally open at http://lulu.com/openp2pdesign.
You will find there all the print version of the books published within the openp2pdesign.org project.

The first book you can already find there is the print version of openp2pdesign.org_1.1, which I already published online in September 2008. Three versions are available: one in English, one in Italian and one in Spanish. I had to work further on it in order to print it correctly using Lulu.com’s print service experimenting both with Scribus (I used Scribus 1.3.4 unstable but more advanced version, and it was really unstable and with some bugs) and Lulu.com (I encountered some problems with bleeding and after some prototypes I decided to avoid any elements close to the page margins, due to strange cutting problems with Lulu.com). And after all this experimentation, I decided to publish it only in black and white (but with CMYK cover) because otherwise it would cost too much.
And after this period of experimentation, my knowledge of book designing, printing and publishing has grown very much, and from this moment it will be easier for me to publish a book in the openp2pdesign.org project: expect more books coming in the future!

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