A couple of weeks ago I was part of the 2011 edition of DMY Berlin, together with the Open Helsinki group inside the MakerLab. This event was part of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. Even if I was there only for the last two days (and it’s always difficult to get attention in a Design Festival, especially in such a noisy place), there was a good feedback from the visitors, especially on the last day.
I gave two lectures twice and helped few visitors understand and develop open processes and businesses, see below for the details, the presentations and the toolkit for designing open processes.
You can see more pictures from the event from Miska Knapek‘s Flickr account.

DMY Opening from robertanderson on Vimeo.

Open P2P Design

Open P2P Design brings open source and peer-to-peer dynamics inside a community-centered design process, in order to have real co-design projects with people and their communities. We can use Open P2P Design for co-designing Open Design processes or commercial or public services with open and peer-to-peer dynamics, starting from communities and involving them inside the design process. We can also use it for analyzing an existing business and opening to collaboration some of its activities, or design new ones in order to start a collaboration with a community of users.

Markets and business models for Open and DIY projects

Which are the possible business models for Open projects like Open Design and Open Hardware? And what about running a Fab Lab or a similar place? Which strategies can we adopt in order to have successful DIY Craft projects? People that want to organize collaborative spaces or companies need to think about how to run their business in a
sustainable way, but even single or groups of Open Designers could get more insights for their project if they discover the possible business models. Let’s have a look at the existing markets, the common business models and the possible future scenarios.
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Following the previous post, let’s still talk about Open Design in the Fashion Design sector and about the EDUfashion project (and its openwear.org brand). Few weeks ago I was invited in their event: EDUfashion Conference – Refashioning fashion: new scenarios of clothing – 2nd June 2011.

I didn’t talk about Open P2P Design and how to co-design open processes and systems; instead I talked about the business models behind the current Open and DIY projects. Running an Open business is part of the big theme “how to co-design open systems”, and it’s something I’m increasingly investigating more and more (and it seems there is a lot of interest in it).
Here’s my presentation; soon I will blog about a longer presentation about the same issues I gave in Berlin few days later:

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Just in case you haven’t read it yet, Openwear.org released a report about sustainability, openness and P2P production in the world of fashion design. The report has been realized with the contribution of: Studio Poper, Ljubljana; Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Milan; Copenhagen Business School, Center for Creative Encounters, Copenhagen; Ethical Economy, London; Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engeneering, University of Ljubljana. You can download the .pdf file from openwear.org here. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The report, curated by Bertram Niessen, features also (but there’s much more inside!) the interview I gave him for the Digicult magazine, Digimag.

You can also read it and embed it from Scribd:

Openwear E-book Final

Or from Issuu:

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 here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. 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.
After the part about Open Hardware and the part about Fab Labs, here’s now the third part, about business models for DIY Craft.

DIY Craft and Microproductions: “traditional” makers

Beside Open Hardware, there is another bottom-up movement that’s slowly growing: the world of do-it-yourself (DIY) and microproductions of craft and fashion design products. There are many people designing and creating handmade product, clothes, bags and accessories, most of them consider it as an hobby, but an increasing number of people are trying to make a living on it, whether alone as an hobby (DIY) or in small groups trying to start small enterprises (microproductions). It’s not a new trend actually: the DIY culture dates back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, and craft has always existed though it was almost replaced by factories and large-scale manufacturing since the Industrial Revolution (at least in the most developed countries).

While at first sight the DIY craft world seems not to be related too much with the Open Culture, at least traditionally, it is now increasingly learning and adopting tools and processes from it, including new technologies into fashion like hardware as well (like the open hardware Lilypad Arduino, for example). As Tim O’Reilly reported in 2008, the Open Source movement underscores how communities can share expertise and build on that knowledge, and the DIY world is adopting this attitude right now. According to him the Maker movement is not just DIY, but the way in which computing is re-engaging with the physical world instead of the virtual, and this is tomorrow’s big business. Open Hardware, DIY craft, fashion microproductions, Open Design are gathering with increasing success into an informal and greater Maker movement, consisting of all the people that learn from doing and share the knowledge about it together in communities. An increasing number of documentaries, books, magazines, tutorials, conferences about managing DIY Crafts projects and businesses has been made available since few years. Maybe one reason of the success of this movement is the recession, that has moved the line between what’s produced at home and what’s purchased in markets. Anyway, selling a consulting or support service or content is the first business model for DIY Craft.

Piracy as a common business model for Fashion Design

The business models of Fashion Design can take a secret form, that has a direct connection with the Open Culture and that can be useful for building new business models for DIY Craft: piracy. Like Shanzai in China, we actually have more innovation and economic revenues when all the actors of a manufacturing ecosystem collaborate and share knowledge and project, and this shows that Open Source and Piracy are indeed a viable business model.
Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman described the importance of copying in the Fashion Design ecosystem really well in their article “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design”: there are no copyright or patent protections in Fashion Design, there are only trademark protections. This means that any wear or fashion product can be copied entirely, except for the brand. The lack of copyright actually accelerates creativity and innovation: one side effects of a culture of copying is the faster establishing of trends and the faster induced obsolescence, leading to more sales and revenue, and to more creativity and innovation (because the life cycle of a fashion design is increasingly shorter). Look for example at Fast Fashion brands like Zara and H&M, which are benefiting from this, copying famous high-end fashion designs and manufacturing them at lower prices (for a different market than the high end one). (more…)

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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Here are some videos that visualize our Social and Economic Complex System with different perspectives. They are indeed not just good examples of well done infographic and movie design, but also inspiring examples about how to visualize the Economy in its complexity. Design for Complexity means also using design to explain complexity and make it easy for people to understand.

Let’s start with the Crisis of the Credit that clearly explains how the financial crisis of the years 2007 – … started.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

We can watch now a short and funny explanation (but not so rich and complete actually) about Greece’s current financial crisis.

The Greek Crisis Explained, Episode 1 from NOMINT on Vimeo.

The Greek Crisis Explained, Episode 2 from NOMINT on Vimeo.

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After the post about Design in the Age of Sharing and the post about the emerging Sharing Economy, here’s now an infographic about the same topic.

Collaborative Consumption Infographic By Promotional Codes

A brief update about the Sharing Economy (after the previous post about Design and Sharing).

Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research released “The New Sharing Economy” study that indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources as well.

The greatest areas of opportunity for new sharing businesses are those where a lot of services do not currently exist within a specific industry category and where a large number of people are currently either a) sharing casually (not through an organized community or service) or b) not sharing at all but would be interested to share. They include transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces.

Peer-to-peer sharing allows for potentially unbounded scalability, access to more resources and often at closer proximity to us. Because peer-to-peer companies aren’t subject to the overhead cost of purchasing and maintaining a “fleet” of assets all their own, the cost to renters is often lower; moreover, members have the opportunity to monetize their own possessions. These peer-based “marketplaces” help the environment by using the resources we already available more efficiently rather than manufacturing more new goods.

The New Sharing Economy

Here are more resources on the Open Money concept, technologies and projects.

These are the tags I use on delicious to store and organize all the links about Open Money and Local Currencies:
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+money
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+open_money
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+local_currency

Some Twitter users you should follow:
http://twitter.com/openmoney
http://twitter.com/metacurrency
http://twitter.com/newcurrency
http://twitter.com/thetransitioner
http://twitter.com/fer_ananda
http://twitter.com/jfnoubel
http://twitter.com/flowplace
http://twitter.com/myrfa
http://twitter.com/zippy314
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Beside Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Manufacturing, there is another path the Open Everything phenomenon is taking: Open Money. Although the Open Money projects are in their early steps, they represent a very important strategic and metadesign move in order to enable the spreading of community-based open and p2p organizational forms.

The open money project aims to create the global infrastructure, tools, governance mechanisms and platforms that will give communities the capacity to create their own currencies with just a few clicks and thereby liberate their wealth potential.¹

We should note that these examples of Open Money can be understood as metacurrencies (and here comes the Metacurrency project), because Open Money projects are the design of the rules and artifacts needed for the design of a community’s own currency. Open Money projects will be for sure an important part of any platform for Open P2P Design projects (that are metadesign projects of open collaborative systems).

Here is a great video (with subtitles available) from the Wall Street Journal that clearly explains the Open Money concept and other similar projects:

Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms. Every community (associations, companies, cities, regions, states, professions, interest groups, etc) will be able to create their own currencies for their own marketplace.²

And here is another video (with subtitles) about the Metacurrency project:

Notes:

1. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]
2. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]