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 [↩]

In this post I’d like to suggest you a Creative Commons-licensed reading, to announce you an event I’m going to participate to and start an open discussion about their common subject: what will probably be the future of Industrial Design and Manufacturing, and how we can draw a map of it?

First, I suggest you reading this publication, Future of Making Map, published by Institute for the Future here: http://iftf.org/node/1766.

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences— the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

[...]

There is much to be learned from the maker mindset of collaboration, creativity, and open access. Yet the maker culture will not replace traditional industry. In the future, traditional manufacturers and maverick makers will be closely linked— sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but frequently blurring the boundaries that separate them. Success will occur when the two cultures are woven together in new and interesting ways.

via | core77

It’s a very interesting map that points out the

• Drivers
• Trends
• Signals
• Suggestions (Make the Future)

that could lead to a scenario of distributed design and manufacturing systems. It shows the social and technological phenomena driving (drivers) these trends (contrasting where we are in 2008 with where we will be in 2018), signals (a company, network, project, product, idea, or innovation) and suggestions for using the map for travelling or, better, going to where it’s heading to.

And then I’d like to announce you that I’m very honoured to participate at the I Realize 09 event in Turin on June 9-10, as a co-facilitator for the Post-Industrial Design Workshop with the Turin-based Design Studio ToDo (Thanks Giorgio for inviting me!).

And as you can see on the workshop page, we are going to study and draw a map about the future of Post-Industrial Design, starting from Generative Design, Open Processes and Projects, Fabbing, Open P2P Marketplaces…
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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 a very long work, openp2pdesign.org version 1.1 is ready, both in its website form and in its book form!
Starting in February of 2007 with the initial idea to publish my master degree thesis and further study these subjects, we reached now a first milestone.

openp2pdesig.org version 1.1

In the past one year and half my skills as a webdesigner improved a lot and it was time now to redesign and reorganize the whole website.
The website has been redesigned starting with the Fervens – A theme created by Design Disease and distributed by Smashing Magazine. Some details still need to be refined but it is working now! For any suggestion or question just leave a comment in this post.

openp2pdesign.org_1.1: the book

After a very long work, my master degree thesis has been resumed in three languages (English, Italian, Spanish) and published under a Creative Commons license in a pdf file using open source software like OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus on Ubuntu Linux.

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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.

And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.

The aim of the event is to think and propose new projects, practices and usages for cities and citizens, based on existing examples of appropriation of information technology and communication (ICT) and of innovation originating from social demands. The interaction between digital technology, digital culture and citizens’ space provides opportunities for citizen action affecting many different areas and open up potentially more creative and innovative participatory dynamics. These innovations can be translated into new opportunities for socio-economic development and local cultural as well as for strengthening civic networks and their mechanisms of participation in urban governance. The local objective, therefore, from a global perspective and tools.

The news that gives me great satisfaction is that Ramon Sanguesa invitated me to participate as a facilitator for Group A, Productive collaborative innovation: concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field. So this will be a very important opportunity to confront, share and experiment the themes of open innovation for communities and cities through the role of facilitator (enabler).

The intention of the six groups is to enable spaces for conversation, discussion and planning for specific projects related to each of the six subjects. The objectives of the Group A are:

• to work on collaborative innovation for civic-based and business-based projects;
• explore the concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field;
• explore the open and collaborative design; see how the concept of the culture changes after the collaborative and innovative “digital culture”.

Before the event, the pages of each working group the contextual framework and potential contents and projects that may arise, as well as initiatives, are developed in the pages of each working group. Each can be edited by its facilitator and other people interested in attending the working group, while broadening the discussion in the respective discussion page.

Other good reasons to follow this event are the presence of Michel Bauwens from P2P Foundation and of Juan Freire.

Registration is free for the first 100 seats, and then, for organisational reasons, there are still 50 seats reserved with a registration fee of 50 euros. And during those days it will be possible to follow the conference through videostreaming on the website.

I hope you will participate in the website and in the Citilab!

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Unlike a traditional, linear, design process, Open Peer-to-Peer Design is non-linear and characterized by multiple parallell processes because of the large number of agents and their interactions. An Open Peer-to-Peer design process thus provides the basis for developing more parallel projects, an ecosystem of designer agents with a memetic evolution of the projects that are more “suitable” to the community, whose selection will lead to better results.

An Open Peer-to-Peer design process is characterized by openness and sharing of the project (the source code for software) of the platform and of the activities that it allows once provided to the community by the designers. The community will test and modify it several times and in several directions (in the software, compiling the binary code), until a satisfactory version is reached (the stable version of the software) and self-organization is ensured.

The source code of the project (community source code) consists of tools from design services, with the introduction of a description of the reputation levels within the community, the license that governes cooperation and the access to the results, a social network map able to show weaknesses and strengths in the community. The source code is accessible to all participants, who are testing it with increasing level of reality (the platform is gradually built during this phase) reporting to the design community any errors (bugs in software) present. The higher the number of participants, the greater the chance that errors are detected and corrected.
During the design process and at its end, the community will self-organize modifying the project if necessary, as far as possible; it is this ability to self-organize and improve the local conditions that makes the communities alive and interesting.

Participation in this design process is open and equal, but is also governed by two principles: self-selection and reputation, which give place to different levels of participation in the various design phases, according to the possession of knowledge needed in each project phase. The different phases of the design process, therefore, require different levels of participation and therefore commitment and visibility of the participants. These different levels give place to different typical phases (similar to some phases of the community of practice) of the life of the communities: potential, coalescing, stable, self-organization and expansion, decline.

analysis

The project begins with an analysis of the participants, in order to understand the existing and therefore usable resources, limitations, critical points. Through the analysis, the designers begin to know the participants, prefiguring which features the community’s activity could have in the future. The objective of this phase is to define the objectives and the strategy on which the concept of the community’s activity will be build. The analysis, carried out through ethnographic investigation and social networks analysis, will cover the platform, the characteristics of the individual participants if possible, as well as existing activities.

concept

Once the analysis of the participants, of their activities and their social networks is done, a first concept of the community’s activity (and its platform) is developed. The designers then develop an initial version (we might say the 0.0.1 version) of the project of the activity/platform, formalized in the community source code.

parallel co-design / test / setting-up

Once developed, the concept is shown to the participants and collectively discussed. From now begins a phase of co-design of the activity/platform, characterized by steady growth of commitment, energy and visibility by the participants. At this stage, the concept of activity is developed collaboratively to get a functioning project, a “stable” source code (version 1.0).
The participants test the community source code of the community simulating the activity, in order to understand what are the weaknesses, errors (bugs in the community source code). The source code is subjected to a peer-review process, in which both the designers (who observe the simulation) and the participants report errors and the necessary changes. Once a bug is identified the source code is modified and again a testing begins with the new code.

In order to simulate the activity, participants must share the conditions necessary to carry out the activity, represented by the platform. Rules and roles should be developed and adopted, and the artifacts that are not already present will be built or acquired. This means that along with the continuation of the co-design / test process, the platform is implemented and when the project reaches the stable version, the participants can begin the regular activity, strengthening then the sense of community.
Once the co-design / test ends, the project will already be done, there are no phases of production nor execution. As in software, then the source code (the project) gives place to the binary code (the work done by the participants).

self-organization

After the first “stable version” (1.0.0) of the source code is reached, the community will be largely formed: during the simulation / activity new social relationships will have formed. A stable version of the source code means that it can be “compiled” (ie, done) and used by anyone without the possibility of critical errors. At this stage, therefore, the community is able to carry out the activity and self-organize without the contribution of the designer: if his role was that of a facilitator (enabler), now the community is able to act successfully alone.

At this point, ideally, the role of the designer is not needed anymore; however, the community will always need its contribution in the future: the designer has always knowledge and expertise useful to provide support to the community in response to changes in the outside world.
Also, if the community activity is a design one, the desinger’s capabilities make them important in the community, and they will continue to be part of also during the self-organization phase.

These observations represent therefore an initial proposal (1.1) for an Open Peer-to-Peer design guidelines, in a broader process of studying a comprehensive methodology.

Finally, what are the future opportunities and directions for the application and study of these design guidelines?

(to be continued)

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Once we define the platform, it is possible to comprehend what, effectively, a designer can design for an Open Peer-to-Peer community. It still remains to define how this project plan can be carried out holding account of the complexity of the community. It is necessary to define a design methodology (or at least some guidelines) that can improve the open and peer-to-peer participation of the community and its complexity.
The community is a complex system, and there is the need of a design methodology able to face its complexity without reducing it. As we have seen before, Open Peer-to-Peer organizational forms seem promising in supplying greater probabilities to face complex problems and to elaborate complex artifacts. That happens just thanks to their own intrinsic complexity: the complexity of the project reflects the complexity of the community, and both strengthen each other. Whe we design an activity, the community itself (a complex system) designs a complex project collectively (its own organization and the necessary conditions).

Moreover, a project dedicated to a community must hold on account the characteristics of the context in which it lives, especially the territorial characteristics that become resources once the community realize their importance. This is an ulterior reason for giving it a greater opportunity of direct participation to the design process, as a community can recognize the usable resources better than others. This is therefore a design approach that take advantage of the participation of a potentially elevated number of participants, through a complex process characterized by its specific path (path dependency), oriented to several the levels of interaction: between participants, participants and community, community and another community, communities and institutions, community and society. We should therefore adopt a design approach based on participation, in order to use the knowledge of the participants to getter better results.

We can therefore say that a project directed to an Open Peer-to-Peer community should be itself Open Peer-to-Peer, based on the participation of the community to the design process (open: open to the participation), to whose members is recognized an equal and active role (peer-to-peer: the acknowledgment of other people’s competences and acquaintances). An Open Peer-to-Peer design process therefore becomes a co-design process, where designer and participants collaborate (a collective intelligence) constituting a wider design community.

The designer therefore assumes a specific role in the projects directed to Open Peer-to-Peer communities. Thanks to his/her competences, a designer can supply the instruments of self-organization and the optimal conditions for an activity to take form, assuming a role of an enabler and not of a provider (or supplier of defined solutions). No more a simple supplier of his/her own creativity, but an enabler of distributed creativity. No more a simple design process that produces definitive solutions, but a design process that support communities so that they can develop appropriate solutions to their own needs and characteristics.

We can see that the same shift is happening in the local institutions too, where local government is transforming into governance. A redefinition of the role of the local institution that becomes an enabler of the participation and the coordination between public entities and private and social ones, and not a provider of rules and services¹.

A designer can be an enabler naturally, since his/her competences make him/her able to establish connections between customers and enterprises, therefore mediating between different interests. Thanks to his/her abilities to visualize in advance, a designer can at the same time manage multiple and discordant interests, remembering the advantages that derive from a collective collaboration. Moreover, an enabler should supply support to reach the self-organization of the members in the short term, avoiding to render them depending on him/her in the long term. The goal of a designer is therefore the social enabler of the development of communities; the role that Linus Torvalds chose to assume in the development of Linux, avoiding the more traditional one of designer-provider².

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2004) Vicari Haddock S., La città contemporanea, Il Mulino, Bologna [↩]
2. (2000) Kuwabara K., Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos, First Monday, volume 5, number 3, March 2000, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_3/kuwabara/index.html [↩]