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 (223)
(more…)

After the first post about UrbanLabs, and the second one with the slideshow I presented there, I’m going to talk now about the methodology we adopted within the groups, and how they self-organized.

01. Methodology: Open Space Technology

We adopted the Open Space Technology:

Open Space Technology (OST) offers a method to run meetings of groups of any size. (“Technology” in this case means tool — a process; a method.) OST represents a self-organising process; participants construct the agenda and schedule during the meeting itself.
[...]
OST meetings have a single facilitator who initiates and concludes the meeting and explains the general method. The facilitator has no other role in the meeting and does not control the actual gathering in any way.

Here you can find more resources about Open Space Technology:

• http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm
• http://www.openingspace.net/openSpaceTechnology_method.shtml
• http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/does-open-facilitation-favour-groupthink/2008/10/06

It is therefore a design methodology based on self-organizing groups, and we can consider it as a real participative design methodology. And as I was the facilitator (or enabler) of the Group A about Collaborative Activities and Open Innovation, I hade the chance to test it and learn a lot about such participative dynamics.

I’ve already said that the event was a collective experimentation that goes on in the future, a collective learning process about designing collaborative projects. It was an event where really everyone learnt so much: organizers, facilitators, participants. Maybe because it was its first edition, or perhaps because social systems always generate new networks and situations every time. In fact, with this methodology UrbanLabs became a self-organizing Community with open and peer-to-peer processes: an Open P2P Community with a marketplace participation. What we tried to do was facilitate the participants self-organize in groups in order to start designing projects and building new networks.

I’ve already explained the methodology within the slideshow I presented, here I suggest you some videos in order to understand it more easily.
What’s important about Open Space Technology and its roles and laws, is that it is a tool to make the most of the workshop groups’ scarce resources (time and participants) in order to let all the participants find their own way to participate and enjoy the event.

Here’s a video of an Open Space unconference described in three minutes:

(more…)

Here is a video of Charles Leadbeater on TED, about Pro-Ams (“innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards”) and Open Innovation.

The theme of the video is closely related to this book (that I found very useful while developing my thesis): “The Pro-Am Revolution. How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society written by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller in 2004, available under a Creative Commons license from Demos.
(more…)

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

(more…)

Notes:

1. p.7 [↩]

After my first impressions, here is my slideshow I used on the first day of UrbanLabs. I was given the possibility to held a brief presentation before the participants in the group proposed some projects and then started to gather in order to talk about those projects.
We all were not sure about presentations, because we had so little time for the groups, but I tried to give this presentation (and it was my first presentation about Open P2P Design in Spanish) in order to give the group a starting point and a direction for the projects.

Maybe it was too long, maybe it was too rich of inputs, but a lot of people gathered to watch it and participate in the group (it was one of the biggest groups of UrbanLabs): this means that people are very interested in Open Innovation now, and especially in methodologies for enabling Open Innovations such Open P2P Design is.

It has two sections: the first is about understanding Open P2P Communities (analysis is the first step in a design process) and how to approach them, and the second part is about the methodology adopted in UrbanLabs, but I’d like to talk about it a little more in another post…

UrbanLabs08_Grupo_A_presentacion_Massimo_Menichinelli.pdf (1.7 Mb in Spanish)

Do you have any suggestion about it?

(…to be continued)

A week after UrbanLabs 08, I can finally write a post (the first of 3 posts) with my general impressions about it while I caught the flu!
It was an event that I’ve been waiting for since several months, and that by its nature it was very quickly between so many changes in language between Castilian Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian!

I would have liked very much to participate to such an event even if only as simple participant, and I was invited as a facilitator! For this reason I’d like to thank Ramon Sangüesa, Enric Senabre and Josep Vives for the opportunity they gave me, for the hospitality and for helping me in the role of facilitator.

One of the best things about these events is always the opportunity to know a person who is behind a blog or an initiative known for some time only in the web. It’s very hard to write about all the people I met there, in addition to the organizers reported above, but I try to point out some of them here.
First of all the other facilitators (albeit with some of them we met very briefly because everyone was so involved with the event): Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, Boris Mir, Juan Freire, Carlos Guadián, Roc Fages.

(more…)

I’m sorry I have not written very much in the past two months but I’ve been busy with a new job and moving to another city…meanwhile, I’m working for a new version of the site, 1.1, to launch when I will publish my new little book that will summarize my thesis and one year of blogging.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest you an event which will take place in Turin, 11-16 March: Toshare Festival.

The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit. The Piemonte Share Festival is an international cultural event that probes the vast panorama of new technologies and investigates their applications in art and design.

Because of recent advances in digital fabrication technology, manufacturing is becoming a digital art and culture enterprise. The exciting advent of 3d printing, rapid prototyping, and rapid manufacturing is of profound importance to SHARE, for it bring the power to create physical objects to the techno-artist’s lab-bench, studio and atelier. It means that digital artists, whose work was once mostly virtual, can create in the actual.

I’m going to be there on saturday March 15th, if you plan to go there and want to meet me just leave a comment here or write me at this e-mail address..

SATURDAY March 15th 2008
Accademia Albertina, Via Accademia 6 – Torino

11:00 a.m.
King Kong Microplex, via Po 21 – Torino
Aha-Pre Camp
The biggest Italian community regarding digital art (http://www.ecn.org/aha) created as a part of AHA networking project – Activism-Hacking-Artivism (http://barcamp.org/aha), that meet to organize a possible future Italian ahaCamp, concerning hacktivism and art activism. The pre/ahaCamp, at the Share Festival in Turin is the first collective meeting for the members of the mailing-list.

02:00 p.m.
A Manifesto for Networked Objects
Now objects are on-line too – blogjects , blogging objects. Once “things” are connected to the Internet, they immediately become part of the relational system, thus improving and boosting the connections in the social network, and they finally define a new relationship between presence and mobility in the physical world. With a pervading Internet network objects are now “citizens” of our space, with the possibility to communicate and interact with them.
- Julian Bleecker, university professor University of Southern California

03:00 p.m.
Manufacturing Digital Art
In the 90s digital art was referring to immateriality, now the society has a more natural relationship with technologies, thus letting what is immaterial to become real, and experimenting new interaction processes between man and machine, that has completely become part of everyday life in the meantime. Manufacturing is also referring to digital art, where such equipment as Arduino and the explosive advent of 3D printers and devices for digital manufacturing led to integrate what is digital into what is real.
- Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder
- Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero, artists

04:30 p.m.
Manufacturing Future Designs
Donal Norman presents his latest book, “Design del futuro”, where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.
- Donald Norman, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science
- Bruce Sterling, writer
- Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine
- Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino

See you soon!

“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

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04 « Intro.05 « Intro.06 « Intro.07 « Intro.08 « Intro.09 « Intro.10

These Open Peer-to-Peer design steps should be considered more as guidelines than a complete methodology: we should apply them, test them, study them more (as in research as in practice).

And this is the right time to study and test these participative practices. We can say that there have been two cases that show a change in how society perceive this kind of participation: Times’ decision to choose Web 2.0 users as person of the year¹, and the Nobel Peace prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus for inventing micro-credit services² (this kind of service is not related to Open Source and Peer-to-Peer, but is based on communities and activities that are open and peer-to-peer as well).

It is now possible to say where Open Peer-to-Peer guidelines can be applied and studied.

1. Design and research directions

There are four main directions where Open Peer-to-Peer guidelines could be applied and studied:

1. improve local conditions
   Opportunities for projects related to specific local dimensions are increasing visibly, and therefore an Open Peer-to-Peer design methodology is very interesting, because it offers more chances of success in involving local communities and in addressing complex projects. Moreover, it has been developed for such projects.
2. develop / deliver commercial / non-profit community-based services
   The importance of involving active users, not anymore as individuals but as a community, is gaining consensus both for business activities and non-profit or institutional ones. An Open Peer-to-Peer methodology can be used here as it allows community involvement giving it a real active and peer-to-peer role in creating content and developing projects.
3. organize complex design processes based on participation
   The Open Source organizational forms / design methodologies have proved with Linux to be able to develop complex projects in a relatively short time through an open and equal participation. The Open Peer-to-Peer Open methodology has been developed from them, and therefore can be applied to projects where there is awareness of its complexity (and need for a relatively quick solution).
4. design for contexts with scarce resources or economic return probabilities
   Thanks to their ability to involve participants beyond the more restricted logical market, Open Peer-to-Peer communities can find an application in disadvantaged contexts too. It is difficult to develop/deliver product/service systems to countries and markets characterized by scarce resources (or poor prospects for profit), but there are now economic strategies that study this: the Bottom of the Pyramid ones³. An Open Peer-to-Peer methodology can be applied in these strategies because it allows the development of projects based on a community of volunteers (thereby reducing the economic resources necessary), and because it can involve local communities in all these contexts inside the design process (succeeding to get projects suited to specific socio-cultural contexts). And it can develop and provide product/service systems that seeks to reconstitute/strengthen the social fabric, and not product/service offering unsustainable lifestyles both environmentally and socially.

2. A research for a social knowledge discipline

For a design discipline that begins to take an interest not only in technological innovation but also in social innovation, the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude can offer useful elements and many possible directions of research.
So far, most of the interest towards the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude has been revolved around the organization of scientific research or entertainment services. It is possible too to study also other areas where it is possible to develop Open Peer-to-Peer community-based services (and hence economic activity and business). There is a potentially vast and promising field: all the cases specifically linked to the social dimension, and therefore public services, non-profit organizations and strategies that may belong to the commercial sector but linked to the Bottom of the Pyramid strategies.
For example, in the case of public services, the eGovernement strategies implemented so far (and, in general, the reform strategies of public services) have not reached a large number of people and the desired outcomes. This is the reason why the introduction of the Open Peer-to-Peer methodology is possible, as it provides an active role of users in the co-creation and delivery of services. An introduction that proposes the Open Peer-to-Peer communities and attitude as useful not only at the operational level but also at the strategic level, where local institutions assume the role of their facilitators. With the shift from local government to governance, local institutions are becoming facilitators of participation (of both civil society and the economy sector). In particular, Charles Leadbeater⁴ and Hilary Cottam⁵ and the Demos⁶ think-tank , for example, are moving in this direction.
Fields of application of this attitude and its organizational forms are therefore wide; the attention to the “social side” has two advantages. The first is that we work in an environment suitable for the introduction of this attitude (for the affinity to the participatory and collaborative dimension, and the need to solve real unaddressed problems). The second consists in the possibility of studying the social dimension of an Open Peer-to-Peer project, something this context can offer more than others.

There are many critical aspects in the relationship between design and the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude that could be studied. Here there are the most important ones:

• How can design relate with the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude?
  The Open Peer-to-Peer attitude is a recent and evolving one, and brings with it new values and new strategies; therefore it is necessary to study this attitude in depth, and also study how the discipline of design can relate to it. And then how the role of the designer, the design process and the object of the project change.
• How does design relate with these Open Peer-to-Peer Communities and their local dimension?
  We should not forget that these Open Peer-to-Peer communities have their own local dimension (even if they are distributed). And the relationship with the local dimension is one of the latest trends that can be found in Web 2.0 services.
  Fortunately, the discipline of design is studying how to relate with the local dimension since several years.
• How does design relate with the knowledge produced and shared within a community?
  Knowledge and its sharing (or not) is a tricky issue and currently of great interest and the subject of debates and reflections. In this case, we should understand how to manage knowledge both within the discipline of design and both within communities characterized by an Open Peer-to-Peer attitude.
• How does design relate with the complexity of a community?
  A community is an organizational form with a degree of complexity, and this is intuitive. Nevertheless, some studies on Open Peer-to-Peer organizational forms showed how they have a high complexity and the ability to improve it in solving complex problems (a capability that the other disciplines are looking with interest now). But the concepts related to the complexity and the their relationship with design are a recent phenomena, which require deeper researches.
• How does design relate with the relationship between market economies and gift economies?
  These Open Peer-to-Peer communities present different forms of economic organization, that lays between the market economy and the gift economy. This characteristic should be studied in depth to understand the extent to which they can survive in an different economic environment, and the extent to which this characteristic can be extended in society, through the contact with other communities.

The research and implementation of this Open Peer-to-Peer attitude within the design discipline can bring new opportunities both to the design practice and the design research. And introducing an attitude that has at its center the collective construction and sharing of knowledge can make a further step in the configuration of design as a knowledge discipline for a knowledge society.

(the end)

Notes:

1. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html [↩]
2. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/press.html [↩]
3. (2004) Prahalad, C.K, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Wharton School Publishing [↩]
4. (2006) Cottam H., Leadbeater C., The User Generated State: Public Services 2.0, http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/public-services-20.aspx [↩]
5. http://www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/health/ [↩]
6. http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/userledservicedesigninlocalauthorities/overview http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/participativepublicservices/overview and other publications [↩]