After the video of Neil Gershenfeld at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, here’s now the video of Massimo Banzi about the state of Arduino and of its community from the same event. One of the interesting things to note in his speech is the fact that Arduino is not evolving too quickly, its speed is slow enough for the community to adapt to its evolution.
And don’t forget that the first ArduinoCamp is going to be held on 18th-19th June in Milan (see you there!).

In two previous posts (here and here), I started explaining that Open Design is now getting out of the underground, since many important design companies, institutions and other actors are now actively working on it. This does not mean that all the problems that we must solve in order to have a real collaborative Open Design are gone; it’s just easier now to talk about Open Design, since we have famous examples to show.
With this last post I will show some important exhibitions and design festivals where Open Design has a relevant place.

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.

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Openwear is the new open source concept and community in course of developing by EDUfashion, a two-year project for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. It is born out of the collaboration of Poper - a social communication studio based in Ljubljana – Ethical Economy – the company based in London providing web tools to build ethically significant relations, and 3 universities from Italy (Faculty of Political Science in Milano), Slovenia (Faculty of Natural Sciences in Ljubljana) and Denmark (Copenhagen Business School).
In Openwear’s online space, small fashion producers, designers, stylists, students, interns,tailors, photographers, models, crafters, sewing cafes, silk-screen printers, fashion schools and others will all be able to open their own web space and personal profile, have access to the service and tools made available by the community, network, learn but also take part to the first collaborative, peer-produced, open-source fashion brand and its collections.
For the first time, the result of the innovative process of crowdsourcing will not be owned by a particular firm or company because the owners will be the community itself.

In this post I’m going to interview two of Openwear’s members, Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen.

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Massimo Menichinelli: The phenomena of Open Hardware, DIY and Makers have reached a remarkable level of development, fame and reputation. Perhaps less famous but equally important is the phenomenon of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises that are often visible on platforms such as Etsy. What are the differences and similarities between these phenomena and how do they relate to each other?

Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen: All these new scenes have in common a desire to empower understanding what they have in their hands, how it was made and improved. This desire blurs the distinction between producers and consumers, not in the sense that everyone will make everything they need, but that everyone more and more often will able to produce or design something and make it available in a flux of exchange out of which everyone could benefit.

Both phenomena are related with crucial changes that are undergoing in our social and economical environment. The Peak Oil calls to 0 Km chains of production. The rise of 2.0 social networks, mixed with the spreading of p2p communities, encourages new forms of global/local communities of producers and consumers. New technologies in communication and material production foster distributed manufacturing.

The difference is that DIY crafters sometimes have the tendency to perceive themselves more far away from technology because of their handmade pledge. It’s more a problem of cultural background. But as long as they envision the possibilities of new on-demand machines, they realize how craftsmanship could be revolutionized without loosing its soul.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Right now, which are the most common business models among the cases of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises?
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Back in March 2010, I was invited at a seminar organized by Ricerca Urbana Milano, in order to explain openp2pdesign.org with other interesting projects from Italy. The seminar took place at the Universitá Statale di Milano, Faculty of Political Science. A nice overview of the event can be read in Italian here.

Il mondo sta cambiando sotto i nostri occhi. Dopo il web 2.0 e il free software, vediamo svilupparsi l’Open Design, l’ Open Hardware e persino l’Open Biotech. Possiamo intravedere nuove relazioni di produzione, nuovi modelli business, nuove forme di organizzazione economica e sociale. Le grandi imprese si adattano e stanno nascendo nuove forme ibride, fra impresa sociale e Open Business. Questo evento intende cominciare ad esaminare la portata di questo fenomeno. Quali sono le tendenze in atto? Cosa succede in Italia? Quali sono i nuovi modelli organizzativi? Cosa bisogna fare per cambiare il mondo?

01.Openwear.org

The event started with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen showing the EDUfashion / openwear.org european project.

EDUfashion is a two-year project financed with the support of the European Commission for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. EDUfashion developed Openwear.org, an online community created for sharing values, accessing to knowledge and practice of collaborative and distributed work. Openwear.org is where makers, fashion producers, small local enterprises, educational institutions can network to participating in the production of a new vision of fashion based on micro-communities and sustainability. They even created their own license for the brand and a brand manual.

We are experiencing a twin trend diffusing across the fashion sector. On the one hand consumer demand is being increasingly oriented toward “ethical” fashion items, meaning no sweatshop, ecologically sustainable, locally produced, and fairly traded apparel. On the other side, we’re witnessing the emergence of self-organized employment focusing on independent, socially engaged, critical and multitasking creative production driven more by communal needs than market imperatives or consumer fads. We think that here lies a new perspective on fashion that can be translated into reality by exploring the forces that are behind these consumer and producer trends.
[...]
EDUfashion project’s main objective is to foster community, collaboration and innovation to provide a new vision and practice for fashion. Our main goal is to support the dissemination of knowledge, skills and practices so to empower a self-managed workforce, in order to create an alternative learning environment for sustainable garment crafting and selling. Itʼll connect various individuals and groups, to enable them to act as small, sustainable enterprises, which will gather under a single open-source participatory brand whose benefits will be shared.

Forward to Basics – Openwear Collaborative Collection Workshop from Openwear on Vimeo.

Openwear Brand Tutorial from Openwear on Vimeo.

02. openp2pdesign.org

I then presented openp2pdesign.org with this presentation (in Italian): (more…)

After some months of waiting, the documentary about Arduino (the most famous and successful Open Hardware project) is now finally ready and online at http://arduinothedocumentary.org/.
The documentary was made by Rodrigo Calvo Eguren y Raúl Díez Alaejos and it was commissioned by Laboral Centro de Arte, an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain. Moreover, Laboral just opened a Fab Lab last November.

Other interesting resources about Arduino are:

• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?, an article written by Clive Thompson on Wired;
• New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool, a thesis written by Alicia Gibb.

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

I’m very happy to say that a Design Research Initiative that influenced me very much during the development of my thesis has been selected among the finalist projects for the most important Italian Design Award.

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) was a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which was to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability. To this end it seeks to shed more light on cases where subjects and communities use existing resources in an original way to bring about system innovation. From here, it intends to pinpoint the demand for products, services and solutions that such cases and communities express, and point to research lines that could lead to improved efficiency, accessibility and diffusion.

As we can see here, has been selected among the finalist projects for the Compasso d’Oro.
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During the last six months I have been honoured to work as the administrator of the website, newsletter and blog of the Changing the Change conference, which will be held in Turin on 10th-11th-12th of July 2008:

http://www.changingthechange.org

This conference will be an international social event dedicated to study how design (and especially design research) could help society change its direction towards a sustainable one. During these months a newsletter has been preparing the path towards the conference, and it can be read now in the main website and commented on the blog.

Here are the direct link to the newsletters:

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Thanks to Stefano Mizzella, we have an interview with Gianandrea Giacoma about Sci(bzaar)net (in Italian) that summarizes the event’s main themes and conclusions. The interview can be found on the last number of 7thfloor magazine and here on Scribd:

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A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.

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):

I’m very happy to give you two important announcements…I will participate in two important events that are a mix of a conference and a more informal event like BarCamps: one will be held in Italy, and the other one in Spain. In this post I will talk about the first one.

I have been invited to the sci(bzaar)net event on 17th May 2008, organized by Gianandrea Giacoma (who runs the excellent Ibridazioni blog) in the Scuola Politecnica di Design, Milan.

It will be a closed event, in order to preserve its discussion. But all the presentations will be recorded and uploaded in the website, which will eventually become more open after the event. Let’s say that the event will provide the first source code that later an open community could form around it on the sci(bzaar)net website. So, even if you cannot be there on that day, keep watching the website for its further development and participate in it!.

The main idea of this event is to study, confront and share knowledge about how science, research and scientific publishing can change if they will adapt themselves to the Web and Open Culture. I will give a presentation about how Open Culture can be seen as a culture of Open Systems, and how scientific research could be configured as an open and peer-to-peer community-based activity.

And, by the way, I designed and developed the website (except the logo, designed by Davide Casali)…in a very short time, so please don’t expect it to be a milestone! ;-)