From 17th to 26th June, there was “Futur En Seine” in Paris, a popular festival about life and digital creation. I had the chance to be here during a whole week, hosted and working in the temporary FabLab² as a finalist of the (Un)limited Design Contest.
More details of the work in progress on my blog, flickr, and on thingiverse for the files of my project of a folding shelve (Ronen Kadushin and other liked it ^^).

It was a very good occasion to taste what could be a Fab Lab, from the designer point of view (its addictive to have access to all these tools), but also for the public (I think we evangelized a wide audience) and the interaction with them (we made plenty of things for/with many people). And now everyone want a permanent Fab Lab at the “Citée des Sciences et de l’Industrie”.

Besides that, there were a lots of conferences (I missed “what tools for amateurs in a Fab Lab context?”, but we can read about here, in French) and many events/workshop (for diy enthusiasts, kids, to learn 3D softwares, or Arduino,etc.) see also this pearltree.

I was very occupied by the Fab Lab, but I could attend at least some conferences, including the one I was waiting for : The Future of Creation (with Neil!).
I took many notes but what’s following is the most important things I keep from this presentation and for each speaker.

There was two major keyword : open, and collaborative.
From the enlightenment of creativity, that spread with the democratization of digital tools and the rise of the sharing culture, to the basic freedom of the commons that are needed to really enable that sort of renaissance of a new free creative culture.

Marleen Stikker

She bets that in the future it will be “open design by default”, open as the new norm in design, including all the design process. With the digital and distributed manufacturing revolution, products are personal again and we can put them online or share them like music. That disrupts all the known business models, and design people are afraid but more and more understand the shift: cut the middle man, share blueprint not product.

She also insists on open knowledge, because knowledge empower peoples, we must understand how things are made (like they said “if you can’t open it…you don’t own it”). And with the Open Data movement, all is new again, allowing anyone to make meaning from data. And when having a bunch of personal data, we can and tend to quantify ourselves. Imagine now that everyone not only use the data but can also add their own, by sharing them, like for the citizen research (not counting butterflies, but your CO² footprint by example).

But to be truly open the data must follow some rules: to be complete, raw, actual, accessible, machine readable, non exclusive, in an open format, and under a free license. To encourage this movement there are also new “open data contest”, for programmers/developers/citizens… but at the end we need a policy for the access of information, toward an Open Government (see what they are doing in Iceland with they crowdsourced constitution), it’s only a trust issue.

She also reminds us some principles:

• Users as designers design for/with them, not for the stakeholders
• Questioning the question “Do we really need it?”, from a sustainability point of view consider also the “do-it-with-what-you-have”
• Reciprocity (the most important) the exchanges must be in the two-way (example with Facebook that can profit from personal data while we can’t use our own data collected), as for the right to access to information, it’s a matter of openness and trust.
• privacy by design (it’s a design requirement, not a security issue)

(you can see her talk here)

Shawn Micheal O’Keefe

Like the “open” for Marleen, for him Participation is the new norm (in the creative process), this real feedback loop allowing to go beyond the mere customization. Collaboration (and sharing in case that interest others) becomes the framework for success and the future of the creative process.

Beside the example of Threadless (an online infrastructure+logistic permitting to crowd-source t-shirt design), and a well-done remark (exploit-sourcing: one-way “spec works” with no reciprocity or any feedback versus crowd-sourcing), he shared with us his experience of the organization of the event South by Southwest (SXSW) in which the panelists are chosen in part by the crowd.
At this interesting question from the public “did collaboration change the business model of SXSW ?”
He answered “Not very much (logistic is the same), but participation and involvement in the selection process is good for the quality of the event (as if it were tailored by/for the community).
As for this other noticeable example of collaboration: Iceland outsourcing its constitution, the more people are involved in an open process the merrier the result is.

Concluding that the future of design is community and passion.

(you can his talk here)

Odette Valentine

We know that fashion relies on shared knowledge (as science and soon design), it’s already an example of a functioning free culture. But what happen when we mix clothing and digital communication technologies ?

As for many disciplines, digital tools are pushing the boundaries (possibilities for printing patterns, experiments, or even 3D Printing in fashion). What’s interesting in open-source fashion and mass-custom, is not about economy, but making individual and allowing expression of talent.
Thus tomorrow will be more about personal, autonomous, and symbiotic creation. She had a nice example of social creation with the “sweat shop cafe couture” where people can come to craft their clothes. The “I made it” is socially inclusive but permit also exclusive creations.

(you can see her talk here)

Jean-Louis Frechin

He remind us not to forget that the language is a system of though that influences us (and shapes how we think I will add).
Thus, we can’t hope to copy/paste an anglo-saxon thing here (referring to the design thinking trends), and Design has to change. From the comfortable bourgeois crafts, to the Bauhaus and the aesthetic of serial democratic product, or Ulm and the industrial rationalization individualization… what’s the next step ?

What will be the aesthetic of our times ? How are we going to do things ?
Arguing that digital personal fabrication change the “how”, but doesn’t change the things in themselves.

(you can now see his talk here)

Neil Gershenfeld

Having seen the video of his conference in this previous post, I already knew most of the presentation but it was nice to see him in person.

He explained us that additive manufacturing is great but limited, because it’s still just consist of “smooching stuff” (not a great difference between the principle of a glue gun and 3D printing). And he’s sorry that people are focused on it while he think that the next step is “object=code”, where object-code could assemble themselves like the ribosome in our DNA (and they already have made some interesting proof of concept at the MIT). By the way, this idea of a “codeable” matters to make objects that we can easily transform, reminded me this video of a “living kitchen“.

On the Fab Lab side, he compared them as a new Internet, changing how we work/learn/play and contributing to an empowerment of the people (empowerment ->education->problem solving->jobs creation->innovation/invention). Of course this bottom-up approach is disruptive, producing innovative peoples, distributed learning, and creating, new networks.
But we have faced similar moment of old-new method… look at what we finally have today in the music industry: a whole ecology of various actors. He said that we need this ecology in fabrication.
And Fab Labs, with their educative mission, can be like libraries: sustainable by community.

Finally I noticed a greater emphasis on organization than on fabrication (example of child in Africa educating themselves through the Fab Lab because they don’t fit in the school, but after that can’t integrate the classic system): we need to invent a new system.

(you can now see his talk here)

Bror Salmelin

As a Policy Advisor to the Director of the European Commission, it was very interesting to see that (representing the institutions for me) they seems to be quite aware (more than I thought) of the coming changes:

Policy is crucial, and open-design is a major issue of change, creating solutions for the industry/organization/society.
For 2020 the Europe have some goals for a smart-growth and many action areas, among them: making legislatives propositions, investing in a faster infrastructure (fiber Internet), increasing the amount invested in Research & Innovation (from a small amount that I don’t know to 3% of the global GNB).
While presenting this digital agenda of the Europe, everything seems cool but I noticed it include also a “stronger Intellectual Propriety” (curious, after talking about openness).

Linear innovation is dead, long live experimental mentality, and we must adapt our education and everything to that. About this coming Knowledge Economy he mentioned the “National Intellectual Capital” report, comparing 40 country (nic40.org)
Fab Lab and all are essential for this evolution from a closed to an open and then a networked innovation system, we have the infrastructure but we need to connect all that together.
And for how to design the EU innovation system he pointed us to the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission: europa.eu/fp7/ict.

(you can now see his talk here)

//Question time//

A question from the public mixed the idea of reciprocity, and the users-designers relation.
Bror first compared it as “want/need” versus “something-from-someone-who-knows”, the top-down approach will seem unbearable if the diy/sharing culture continue to arise, let people try by themselves.
For Marleen it’s a question of transparency : we must open the black box of the design process, show how to make sustainable product without IP, opening knowledge for more understanding, and maybe that will lead us to an open-society.

The afternoon it was the launching of the book OpenDesignNow, with a little workshop/discussion.

During the talk they reminded us an interesting fact about copyright: we tend to forget that its quite recent in our history… while before the relation between copy and inspiration was not as criticized as today.

And I noted an interesting example about the changes that implied: it seems that Giuseppe Verdi has been less productive after the introduction of copyrights. The goal was to protect the authors to allow them to pursue their creation, but doesn’t it looks counter-productive?

I thought it’s as if you have the choice between “living from what you have done” (selling the same thing again and again) versus  “living by doing what you like”… both are understandable but the later seem less boring and more prone to improve things and life, because unlike our resources, creativity (or how we use them) is infinite.

It was a great week and I think if things keep going like that, we’re on a nice track of changes !

04. Technocraft: An exhibition about Product Hacking

Yves Béhar (founder of the fuseproject design agency) and famous for being the designer of the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO laptop, curated his first exhibition last year: TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers, and Design in the Age of Individuality ( July 10, 2010 – October 3, 2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, USA).

TechnoCRAFT looked at the different ways that consumers are personalizing design products with their own creativity and individuality in an age of mass-production: the exhibition included six subthemes:

• crowdsourcing
• platforms
• blueprints
• hacks
• incompletes
• modules

Beside being curated by a famous designer, this exhibition is important since it tracked the history of hacking in the design history and pointed to its future development. Some of the designers / products included in the exhibition were:

• Eames Hack
• 5.5 designers
• Studio Proxy for Ikea Hacks
• Cyclecide
• Greg Lynn with the Recycled Toy Furniture
• Enzo Mari with Autoprogettazione (originally designed in 1974, now in production for Artek)
• Marijn van der Poll with the Do hit chair for Droog Design

For further insights, you can read this interview of Yves Béhar for the Domus magazine:

technology is in many ways opening new horizons in the world of craft by allowing new ways for designers and crafters to: a) learn and share techniques b) to find a new marketplace for their wares.

For me, the designer is always in charge of creating great experiences around the products they design… But who are these experiences created for? A consumer or buyer. [...] many of the ways in which consumers intervene on products by making them more unique to individuals simply means that the ergonomics, the function and the aesthetic is adapted to one’s specific needs… This is a traditional view of design’s purpose.

For some pictures about the products showed in the exhibition, have a look at the DesignBoom article.

05. An event and a book, from Styria (Austria)

Another (and quite important) sign that Open Design is becoming mainstream comes from Styria (one of the federal states of Austria). In February 2011, Creative Industries Styria organized the fourth Creative Industries Convention in Graz and it was devoted to the topic of Open Design hosting a speech by Ronen Kadushin (most probably the first real Open Designer).
After the event, they produced a free documentation about Open Design that is now available. It is an important step because the document clearly shows there is an official interest in Open Design by public institutions in Styria.
Just to give you an idea of the document, the best quote comes from Paul Atkinson that wrote:

In order to maintain a significant role in the design and production of goods, professional designers will have to lose their egos and change their role from the design of finished products to the creation of systems that will give people the freedom to create high quality designs of their own; systems which free the user from requiring specialist skills in design, yet which produce results retaining the designer’s original intention. The better a particular designer’s system works, the more successful that designer will be. Designers unwilling to change risk becoming ghosts of the profession.

There are many authors, including Cory Doctorow (the author of Makers, the first novel about Open Designers), Lev Manovich (author of Software Takes Command), Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of the Networks), Hannes Walter and Fluid Forms (one of the first designers to use digital fabrication tools to manufacture and sell our own generative design products independently), Bre Pettis (one of the creator of the Makerbot, the open hardware 3D printer), Ponoko (the first worldwide laser cutting service for anybody) and Peter Troxler (the most important researcher about Fab Labs).

You can dowload it here (and since they released it under a Creative Commons license, I uploaded it to Issuu and Scribd as well, so you can read it and embed it, it’s here below).

06. Open Design in Design Festivals: Berlin, and Milan

06.01 DMY Maker Lab 2010 (and 2011), in Berlin

DMY Maker Lab Trailer from KS12 on Vimeo.

Most probably the first Design Festival to have a place for Open Design is DMY in Berlin, where in 2010 they had the Maker Lab space for many workshops. I already covered it one year ago in this post. This year there will be another Maker Lab, so wait for announcements about its program soon!

06.02 Maker Lab, in Milan (2011)

The same people behind the Maker Lab at DMY Berlin (i.e. the Open Design City Fab Lab and coworking space in Berlin) are bringing part of that experience to Milan this year, for the Salone del Mobile 2011 (the famous furniture fair).

At the MakerLab Milan, we will provide a focal point for the community to take actions to positively hack their urban environment. Bringing tools, resources and expertise from Berlin, the MakerLab Milan will collaborate directly with different elements of the Milan Maker, Hacker and Public Culture to share skills, ideas and tools with which the community of Milan can engage in a physical dialogue with their public space.

In tune with the Salone del Mobile and the Public Design Festival we will run a Public Hacking workshop. We will Invite people to bring their own chairs, and locally found materials, then hack, modify and up-cycle them.

06.03 WeFab, in Milan (2011)

Beside MakerLab, and the presentation of Droog’s Design for Download project, this year there will be another important event: WeFab.
WeFab is a three-day event hosted by our friends OpenWear (the collaborative clothing platform) and Vectorealism (a digital fabrication facility based in Milan).
WeFab will feature objects, workshops, installations, performances, live music shows, dj set, a temporary shop selling handmade productions and a conference session hosted by the University of Milan (see also the article on Domus Magazine).

Getting Ready for WeFab – 1 from Openwear on Vimeo.

The event will explore the cross-fertilization of new production technologies and collaborative ways to design and make products; it will also feature the Design Smash contest, where designers from all across Europe will go from idea input to output of real object/accessory by the end of the evening with different fabbing machines available. And there will be the first working Makerbot in Milan! :)
This means that you will be able to design and fab a fashion and product design project during the event!

Getting Ready for WeFab – 2 from Openwear on Vimeo.

06.04 The Milan Breakfasts: talking about Open Design

Premsela and the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) host The Milan Breakfasts at Studio Zeta Milano in Milan, and on April 15th morning there will be a discussion about Open Design with Paul Atkinson, Gijs Bakker, Joost Grootens, Yves Behar, Marti Guixé.
Also Domus will host a talk called Open Source City: Collective Design, but it is unclear yet what it will be about.

06.05 Freedom of Creation: live 3D printing

Even Freedom of Creation will have a live 3D-printing performance in which they will co-create with the public (it seems that you can bring your own 3D files to print them), Together with Wallpaper magazine.

03. A competition, Droog Design and a book, from the Netherlands

03. 01 (Un)limited Design contest

The first Open Design competition, (Un)limited Design Contest, was held in 2009 and 2010, in first instance in The Netherlands, in the second year also in Germany and Belgium. During the first year about 80 designs/products were submitted to form the first (Un)limited Design collection.
The competition has been organized by Premsela (who runs an interesting program about Open Design called People’s Republic of Design), Waag Society, Etsy, FabLab Netherlands and Creative Commons Netherlands.

To enter the competition, anyone could either submit a new design or make a derivative of an existing design submitted by others by using the machines in a Fab Lab or any other prototyping facility. For this reason, apart from the designs themselves, the blueprints and instructions relating to the submissions are also published on the competition website under a Creative Commons license.

As part of the festival Future en Seine 2011, Fablab Squared and Mag/Lab will host a French edition of the (Un)limited Design Contest (from 25th March until 29th May).
The contest received a lot of international attention currently, with requests for an edition in Austria and Brazil.

03. 02 Droog Design: Design for download

We can certainly say that Open Design is now mainstream if the most famous conceptual design company starts a business around it. This is the case of Droog Design, that with Mediagilde started the Design for Download initiative (previously called downloadable-design).

This initiative will be presented during the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2011, but the launch of the platform, featuring various brands and institutions alongside Droog, will occur later this year. The platform will not only include products, but also architecture, home accessories, fashion, food, wearables, and more.
For the moment Droog will present furniture and accessories designed for download by EventArchitectuur and Minale-Maeda, including CNC cut tables, cupboards, desks, side tables, shelves, couches and 3D printed electrical outlets, flowers and charms. Furthermore:

Droog will also present digital design tools that allow ordinary computer users to easily make functional design decisions, automatically generating blueprints for local execution in various materials. The tools also enable communication between designer and customer, streamlining and lowering the cost of a custom design process. The presented products have been customized by Droog for its collection.

According to an interview to Droog director Renny Ramakers, this is not the first time that Droog considers Open Design as an option. In 2004, Mario Minale designed Red blue Lego chair, a Lego version of the iconic Red blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld. Mario Minale, originally wanted people to make the Lego chair by themselves, releasing the project as open source. Droog wanted to make it accessible for everybody, but since it was not possible to mass produce it due to copyright reasons, they produced it in a copy of 5 and it became an art project.

Renny Ramakers explains then that with Open Design:

With the opening up of the design industry to consumers now empowered with easy-to-access and low-cost design and production tools, the role of curation becomes ever more important.

For this project Droog Design have collaborated with consultants Cathal McKee (CMK1), Catherine Jasserand (Ivir), Hans Lensvelt, Institute of Relevant Studies, Joris Laarman and Michiel Frackers. The project has been initiated by Droog and was made possible by Agentschap NL.
Moreover, according to Waag Society, within their program called Open Design:

The Open Design Lab aims to make design innovation an open, collective and shared effort, as in open-source, open content and ultimately open design.

they are collaborating with Droog Design for this project:

The Open Design Lab also intends to build a database of open designs with Droog design under the title ‘downloadable design’.

You can read this related document from Waag Society also:

03. 03 The Open Design Now book

Related to the (Un)limited Design Contest, the Droog Design project and the collaboration with Waag Society, there’s another great example of the rising of Open Design: the forthcoming publication of the Open Design Now. Why design cannot remain exclusive book, edited by Bas van Abel, Lucas Evers, Roel Klaassen and Peter Troxler. It will be available from June 2nd 2001 and it will be published by BIS Publishers (further information can be found here). The book will be presented at the DMY International Design Festival Berlin this June.

The contents of the book will be:

• Overview of Open Design: practices, tools, licensing systems
  As Open Design is a way of designing everyone can participate in, what are emerging practices that facilitate it? what are the tools, existing and needed, to make it happen (physical tools, digital tools, legal tools)?
• Underlying principles of Open Design:
  Networked tools for distributed physical production, the understanding of the commons as an elementary resource for cultural production, etc.
• Implications of Open Design:
  What effect does Open Design have on designing, artistic expression and creative processes? on the relationship of producer and consumer? on design business? on society at large?

(To be continued in a third and last post)

First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very different personalities (researchers, bloggers, designers, creatives, psychologists, journalists, programmers)… such knowledge I hope I can put it into practice when I will be the facilitator of one of the working groups of UrbanLabs.

The event was held in the Model Lab of the Scuola Politecnica di Design, and although I had not studied there but at the Politecnico di Milano, I rediscovered the university atmosphere and especially the climate of activation and of laying the foundations for collective projects that only a Model Lab (with all its tools and work desks) could exemplify so well.

Here are the event pictures taken by me and the other participants, on Flickr:

For those who could not attend, the videos were published on the website; you can find the final text of the brainstorming here (and here the related videos). Finally, I recommend you to read the Bonaria Biancu’s post that summarize very well all the interventions placing them within a coherent overall speech.
All the videos and posts regarding individual authors can be consulted on the official website of Sci(bzaar)net, which will remain as a platform for collective discussion about the relationships between Internet, Scientific Research, Dissemination Scientific and Open Culture.

It was certainly a success and an important event: the specific organizational form (halfway between a BarCamp and more traditional conference) and the heterogeneity of the components have shown that they can give an added value to the meeting and the discussion. Rarely we can attend such meetings on these issues and it’s always a pleasure to know other bloggers or persons behind new experiments in person.

I’d like now to summarize my contribution and some brief reflections resulting from the brainstorming. As you can imagine, I have participated as an “Open Culture expert” and not about scientific research/publication. The main idea that I wanted to share with the participants is that we should think about Open Culture not as a simple set of publication practices ( “to publish a specific content with a specific license”) but as a real philosophy based on enabling complex systems. Open Culture is not just use a Creative Commons license: it means to facilitate a system that shares and reuses the information self-organizing independently. Thinking about Open initiatives in a reductionist way, just like the use of a specific license, can only lead to failure.

We can then study how to enable complex systems that follow Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics and imagine what activities of scientific research and dissemination (definition of hypothesis, definition of research, data collection, data analysis, compilation of results, publication, etc.. ) can be opened to these systems.

One of the concerns expressed most frequently during Sci(bzaar)net regards the opportunity to share the research results (under Open Access): why we should do that, when other people could take all the economic benefits and increase problems for those who carry out researches? Certainly it is true, if we consider scientific research and dissemination using pre-Open Culture parameters, that is as activities based on copyright as a means of appropriation of benefits from their information within a market economy. But now we know how Open Peer-to-Peer organisational forms range between market economies and gift economies, protection of intellectual property and information sharing. We can therefore imagine new forms of organisation capable of ensuring economic resources necessary to who performs scientific research.

In this direction, we can find countless opportunities and diversity of organizational forms: the first suggestion comes from Andrea Gaggioli who proposes a crowdfunding service for scientific research.
I hope that this direction will be studied further on the Sci(bzaar)net website.

Finally, here are my presentation and video (which are also available on the official website here):

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!

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.

A very interesting post by Jamais Cascio, about four different possible future scenarios, with sustainability, technology and organizational forms in mind. We should note that, according to him, open source and distributed organizational forms can lead to two different scenarios, a positive one and a negative one.
Yes, open and peer-to-peer organizational forms promising, but aren’t just perfect! I already wrote some months ago, that we could use them for unsustainable projects too, therefore we should study them to understand how to apply them and where!

Drivers

The four boxes represent a variety of “response” scenarios, each embracing elements of the prevention, mitigation, and remediation approaches to solving the climate crisis. Certain approaches may receive greater emphasis in a given scenario, but all three types of responses can be seen in each world.

The first driver is Who Makes the Rules?, with end-points of Centralized and Distributed. This driver looks at the locus of authority regarding the subject (in this case, climate responses) — are outcomes dependent upon choices made by top-down, centralized leadership, or made by uncoordinated, distributed decision-making?
[...]
The second driver is How Do We Use Technology?, with end-points of Precautionary and Proactionary. This driver looks not at the pace of technological change (something of a canonical scenario driver), but at our political and social approaches to the deployment of new tools and systems.

Scenarios

The combination of these two drivers give us four distinct worlds.

“Power Green” — Centralized and Proactionary: a world where government and corporate entities tend to exert most authority, and where new technologies, systems and response models tend to be tried first and evaluated afterwards. This world is most conducive to geoengineering, but is also one in which we might see environmental militarization (i.e., the use of military power to enforce global environmental regulations) and aggressive government environmental controls. “Green Fascism” is one form of this scenario; “Geoengineering 101″ from my Earth Day Essay is another.

“Functional Green” — Centralized and Precautionary: a world in which top-down efforts emphasize regulation and mandates, while the deployment of new technologies emphasizes improving our capacities to limit disastrous results. Energy efficiency dominates here, along with economic and social innovations like tradable emissions quotas and re-imagined urban designs. The future as envisioned by Shellenberger and Nordhaus could be one form of this scenario; the future as envisioned by folks like Bill McDonough or Amory Lovins could be another. Arguably, this is the default scenario for Europe and Japan.

“We Green” — Distributed and Precautionary: a world in which collaboration and bottom-up efforts prove decisive, and technological deployments emphasize strengthening local communities, enhancing communication, and improving transparency. This is a world of micro-models and open source platforms, “Earth Witness” environmental sousveillance and locavorous diets. Rainwater capture, energy networks, and carbon labeling all show up here. This world (along with a few elements from the “Functional Green” scenario) is the baseline “bright green” future.

“Hyper Green” — Distributed and Proactionary: a world in which things get weird. Distributed decisions and ad-hoc collaboration dominate, largely in the development and deployment of potentially transformative technologies and models. This world embraces experimentation and iterated design, albeit not universally; this scenario is likely to include communities and nations that see themselves as disenfranchised and angry. Micro-models and open source platforms thrive here, too, but are as likely to be micro-ecosystem engineering and open source nanotechnology as micro-finance and open source architecture. States and large corporations aren’t gone, but find it increasingly hard to keep up. One form of this scenario would end with an open source guerilla movement getting its hands on a knowledge-enabled weapon of mass destruction; another form of this scenario is the “Teaching the World to Sing” story from my Earth Day Essay.

via | Beyond the Beyond

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