Genomineerde Rotterdam designprijs 2011: Waag Society – Open Design from Premsela, The Netherlands Inst. on Vimeo.

Continuing the serie of interviews about Open Design, DIY, Fabbing and related issues, I have now the pleasure to interview Bas van Abel. Bas works as a Creative Director at Waag Society, where he co-founded of Waag Society’s FabLab, directs the Open Design Lab and edited the Open Design Now book. By the way, don’t forget to vote for Bas’ and Waag’s work about Open Design here on the Rotterdam Design Prize website.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society works in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where Fab Labs and Open Design have encountered a great interest. Has the city influenced this in some way? And which is the impact Waag Society and its Fab Lab has on the city?

Bas van Abel: Amsterdam probably has the largest creative industry in The Netherlands with a big focus on innovation, which is a great context for open design and Fablabs. Waag Society has always been an influential organization in this Dutch – and Amsterdam creative industry on the policy and institutional level. With the Fablab we’ve created a making and meeting place for everyone to get involved from both a top level (municipality, education) and grass roots level (designers, artist, individuals, SME’s).

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Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society promotes the idea of open source and related issues like Open Data, Open Design, Open Content and O pen Hardware. How can they interact and mix in common projects?

Bas van Abel: All of these issues share common principles, though the infrastructure needed (licensing, tools, methods) are very specific. There are also big differences in the maturity of the domains. For open source software there is a clear definition, it has it’s own cultural background, the tools are ready available and there are successful business models. Open design and open wetware for example are far from clearly defined. Therefore I think it is important to specifically experiment on different domains and get a clear image of the needs and implications before creating cross-over projects. That doesn’t mean off-course that you shouldn’t use open source software for creating open design platforms. It is just about where you put the focus of your research.

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Massimo Menichinelli: While hackerspaces usually start independently, it seems that Fab Labs always start within an existing institution: a foundation, a school, a museum.. Why do you think this happens? How could we use this strategy to start a new Fab Lab?

Bas van Abel: The idea of the Fablab is easy to comprehend and to adopt. The potential is clear and it functions as a huge global innovation hub, based on collaboration and sharing with a clear distributed organization model. It creates economic benefits and it prepares us for a future industrial model. This makes it very attractive for institutions to host such a lab. It connects easily to existing programs and structures, opposed to a more “chaotic” hackerspace.
Furthermore, the whole context makes it fairly easy for institutions to get funding to start a lab.

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Meet My Maker from Waag Society on Vimeo.

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society is collaborating with Droog Design for the open design project “Design for Download”. What are the possible business models for Open Design, and could the collaboration with Droog Design make it less controversial and more popular?

Bas van Abel: I’d like to make something clear first. For me, being able to download design based on a new industrial model doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s Open Design. Shapeways and Ponoko are doing this as well and I wouldn’t call them Open Design platforms. They are however part of the context of open design. Droog approached it from this industrial perspective, while our perspective was from a more social disruptive one. I think they are very much related (a new industrial model will change social, economic and political modes), but the approach is different. That was also the exciting part about this collaboration.

The technical framework we have been developing within the collaboration is very similar to what Ponoko is doing with it’s maker system. Though the “design for download” business models are much more consumer oriented. We’ve been looking at the added value for consumers if you have on demand production and DIY production. With on demand production the business models are based on distributed production (could be a Fablab) and the consumer experience is in using the tools to design part their own product. With DIY production the focus of the business models are much more on services from DIY facilities. Making becomes part of the consumer product experience.

And about making Open Design less controversial with the collaboration with Droog Design, I think this definitely contributed to the acceptance within “design culture”, but we have been working on several projects, which have helped making open design more popular. We are very excited by our Open Design Lab nomination for the Rotterdam Design Prize, which is a great acknowledgment on the importance of Open Design.

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Massimo Menichinelli: What do you think Open Design will be: users fabbing professional designers’ projects or designers and users collaborating in the design process? Or will there be a division between bottom-up user-driven design and elite professional designers’ and companies’ projects?

Bas van Abel: Yes, yes and yes. To me open design is about ownership and responsibility. Openness is a way of creating transparency. We need more transparency in general to be more emphatic with the things created around us. Open design is just part of this change towards more transparency. What this does to the role of the designer is just a small aspect of this change. More transparency will have an impact on society as a whole.

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Massimo Menichinelli: The digital fabrication ecosystem at the moment consists of onlice services (like Shapeways), Fab Labs, hackerspaces, commercial high-end tools and cheap open hardware tools. Chris Anderson even suggested to manufacture DIY and Open products in China. How will these interact among each other?

Bas van Abel: You only have to look at the current shanzhai developments in Shenzhen to see where this is going in China. There hackerspaces are popping up working on all kinds of open design/hardware projects based on micro-manufacturing. It’s where the economic benefits of open and community based small-scale manufacturing are taking shape. Shanzhai has for a while been seen as piracy, but it is far past that and turning into a true open grassroots manufacturing model.

A very interesting conversation on the future impact of Shanzhai can be found here: http://www.iftf.org/ShanzhaiFutures

Will Open Design have a place within traditional manufacturing companies or will it work only with individual or community-based fabbing?

Digital production, online platforms for knowledge sharing, information access, exchange systems and social networks radically change the structure of society.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we have been building in mass production, a non-transparent, centralized and closed system. There is still a big gap between the principles and drivers in our “digital world” and our “physical world”. Open design, hackerspaces, shanzhai, Fablabs, DIY… they are all moving towards closing this gap.

Looking at the future, I believe we are heading for a world where our societal, industrial and economical models will be based on the same principles we use in our current communication systems. It’s distributed, social and transparent.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design and Fab Labs need tools (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) but also supply chains, partnerships, services, … How can we design a system that enables people to develop Open Design projects?

Bas van Abel: When you’re talking about the open source part of open design, we need to know what is the source of design. This is a far more complicated question than with software, though I think it is possible to start creating systems for this. I always see the analogy with cooking. You have a very culturally embedded local production with local ingredients, but you also have an international exchange system in the form of recipes. On top of that the production facilities (the kitchen) and the tools are pretty standardized. If you take this to open design, a common design language for exchange could be layered the same way. Our kitchen is for example the Fablab and the local materials, the recipes are the instructions and finely the secret ingredient is your designer signature.

Off-course we also need to create collaboration systems etc., but I think a common language is where we have to start. Only this way we can truly work in an open and distributed way.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design now seems to be based on small individual projects instead of large, collaborative and community-based projects. What I’m trying to do with Open P2P Design is to start the design process from communities (or at least include them in it) helping them to self-organize a collaborative design process. What do you think about this issue?

Bas van Abel: Good luck ;-) !
It sounds a bit corny, but I think the biggest open design project we are working on is society itself. Design is more and more being used as a mechanism to solve societal issues. Within this context, design processes need to be open, transparent and reciprocal. We need systems that are able to organize this ongoing and ever changing design process. Open P2P Design is a great initiative, which I think reflects one of our current societal challenges.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree with this idea? How could we further explore it?

Bas van Abel: Like I said, I believe Open design creates transparency, which creates more ownership, which creates more responsibility. Open design is therefore a driver for a more responsible, emphatic society, where efficiency is not based on purely on costs, but also on conditions, energy and relevance.

Also, if we want to drive towards a next industrial revolution we also have to develop new energy sources. A great vision on industrial revolutions has been defined by Jeremy Rifkin, who stresses the critical combination of new energy and communication systems to drive industrial revolutions. We have a distributed communication system, but we still work with central energy systems. Fablabs and open design can be great platforms for developing distributed renewable energy systems.

Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
After the part about Open Hardware and the part about Fab Labs, here’s now the third part, about business models for DIY Craft.

DIY Craft and Microproductions: “traditional” makers

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

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

Piracy as a common business model for Fashion Design

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

Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
After the part about Open Hardware, here’s now the second part, about business models for Fab Labs.

Fab Labs and other places for designing and making collaboratively

As we have seen in the previous post, Open Hardware and similar Open projects can grow as communities inside specific places like hackerspaces. Such places are interesting because they are, at the same time, enablers of open and collaborative projects, and business models for them. In this post I will cover Fab Labs, as the most evolved and potentially big places (they could in fact also host hackerspaces) for collaborative projects, and their business models.
Lead by Neil Gershenfeld, the Fab Lab program is part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and it broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation and can be embodied in or abstracted from: the intersection between information theory and industrial design. A Fab Lab (digital fabrication (fabbing laboratory) is a small-scale workshop with an array of computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, democratizing manufacturing technologies previously available only for expensive mass production.
So far Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, various European countries, Afghanistan, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute. The official list of FabLabs is hosted here, while other lists can be found here:

View Fab Labs on Earth in a larger map

There is no formal procedure on how to become a Fab Lab and the process is monitored by the MIT. All the labs around the world are in contact with each other through a common video conferencing system hosted at the MIT which is used for ad-hoc meetings, scheduled conferences and the delivery of the Fab Academy training programme.

Funding a Fab Lab: how much does it cost?

CNN reported that the Center for Bits and Atoms was funded with $14 million by the National Science Foundation in 2001. Anyway, starting a Fab Lab should be much cheaper: Fab Lab Afghanistan (in its wiki) and allbusiness.com reported that a full Fab Lab currently costs about $50,000-$55,000 in equipment and materials without MIT’s involvement. Other sources like ideasexist.com and aps.org reported that a Fab Lab should costs only about $20,000.
In 2009, the Center for a Stateless Society proposed to organize a Fab Lab using open-source tools such as the Fab@Home 3D printer, with resulting costs between $2,000 and $5,000 total. Bart Bakker of Utrecht, Netherlands built one for under € 3000. Another initiative called Replab.org proposed the construction of an open source Fab Lab that costs $12,500.
Tools lists are available on the Center for Bits and Atoms website here and here; there is even a task list for managing a Fab Lab as well.

Running a Fab Lab: Business Models

Even the official Fab Lab Charter (drafted in 2007) recognize that Fab Labs could adopt a business model for commercial activities and roughly defines some guidelines for such models:

Business: commercial activities can be incubated in fab labs but they must not conflict with open access, they should grow beyond rather than within the lab, and they are expected to benefit the inventors, labs, and networks that contribute to their success.

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Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website, and here in English, under a Creative Commons license (see below). Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
Here’s the first part, about business models for Open Hardware.

Definitions of Open Hardware

The current Open Source Hardware Draft Definition is intended to help provide guidelines for the development and evaluation of licenses for Open Source Hardware and it says that Open Hardware is “a term for tangible artifacts — machines, devices, or other physical things — whose design has been released to the public in such a way that anyone can make, modify, distribute, and use those things“. The main difference with Open Source Software is that Open Source Software is collaborative, while Open Hardware is derivative: here a fork is the rule, not the exception.
Even if Open Hardware has become famous in the past 5 years, it has been around for years: The Apple I was built by hand by Steve Wozniak, and he and Jobs were members of the Home Brew Computer Club. The hardware hacking community has never gone away; it has just adapted to the changes in technology. Open Hardware is still in its first steps though, just like Open Source Software was in the 1980s, when the GNU project began, before all the infrastructure was created.
Interesting overviews of Open Hardware can be found on Make Magazine’s Blog, MIT Technology Review, Computerworld, O’Reilly Radar. Lists of existing Open Hardware projects can be found on the GOpen Hardware 2009 website, on the P2P Foundation website (here and here), on Make Magazine’s Blog, Open Innovation Projects and Open Knowledge Foundation. Open Hardware projects are not limited to gadget and interaction design projects, but they can also be about development aid projects.
Patrick McNamara defined 4 possible levels of Openness in Open Hardware projects, that can help us understand them better:

1. Closed: any hardware for which the creator of the hardware will not release any information.
2. Open Interface: all the documentation on how to make a piece of hardware perform the function for which it is designed is available (minimum level of openness).
3. Open Design: in which enough detailed documentation is provided that a functionally compatible device could be created by a third party.
4. Open Implementation: the complete bill of materials necessary to construct the device is available.

Arduino: a successful open hardware project

Arduino is arguably the most popular Open Hardware project: an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software; many versions of the Arduino hardware have been commercially produced to date. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. You can read a comprehensive introduction to Arduino on Wikipedia or on Alicia Gibbs’ thesis.
Most of Arduino official boards are manufactured by SmartProjects in Italy. The Arduino Pro, Pro Mini, and LilyPad are manufactured by SparkFun Electronics (USA). The Arduino Nano is manufactured by Gravitech (USA).
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01. An Open P2P Design workshop, in Seoul

And finally here we are to talk about what happened during the Seoul Workshop at IDAS, the penultimate date of the November 2009 tour.
First of all, I have to thank Roger Pitiot for this great opportunity, for the great time we had preparing this workshop and for the perfect organization he managed to set up with his team of students (Miae Kim was there too ;-) ).
Many thanks to Hyun Shin Jo from Kookmin University and Won Taik Kim from IDAS for their collaboration as co-conductors, and to Jay Yoon from Creative Commons Korea for explaining Creative Commons and Open Culture to the students in Korean, helping us thus communicating with them such a big issue.
Here’s a report on the Creative Commons Korea website, if you can read Korean of course!

I won’t talk too much about Seoul itself: on one side I had very little time to see it, and on the other side I prefer to focus on the workshop, here in the blog. But just let me say that being in a city which is the World Design Capital for 2010, with a completely different culture and so nice and very different people was very refreshing. Beside all the glittering lights of a never ending row of always open shops and street food stands, there is in Seoul an already working Distributed Manufacturing Systems that produces small series with low cost prices in 24-48 hours. Let’s see if they find a way to move from their consumerism and a whole avenue of design piracy shops towards a more sustainable, peer-to-peer and lighter distributed system of active citizens designers.

Back to our workshop: it was a very important one, not just for the setting, but because I had finally the opportunity to test the Open P2P Design methodology with other people and within a framework of time long enough (even if we would have liked it to last at least 5 days).
We had about 36 students the first day (Friday), but only half of them survived to the idea of working on Open Design during the whole weekend, and with such a culture shock. Because yes, it was a nice cultural clash on organizational terms (in Seoul everybody wakes up and go to bed very late; it’s very difficult to have students standing among the others asking questions and therefore a real collective interaction; and they do prefer to learn Open P2P Design starting from details and ending with the big picture rather than the other way around). But it was also a clash on cultural terms (it proved quite difficult to explain them the Activity Systems, since the words subject and object don’t have the same meaning their culture; the concepts of copy and copyright make a different sense, especially to the Chinese students). I have to thank Miae Kim for helping me explaining the Activity System to them in Korean!

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. The process and the outcomes of the workshop

Since we didn’t have enough time, we asked the students to organize themselves into groups, so that we could give each group an account to the main Subversion (SVN) repository. In this way, we could simulate how an Open Source community works, using the same software such communities use.
We divided them into 7 groups, each one with the name of a political leader (just for fun: think about opposite leaders collaborating in an Open Design project!):

• Barack Obama
• Ernesto Che Guevara
• George Bush
• Kim Jung Il
• Mao Zedong
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• Ronald Reagan

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C.STEM 2008 explores a scenario where the designer ability of writing custom software becomes the tool to connect the potential of digital fabrication to an ever growing demand of mass customized goods. Infinite variations, generated by open projects/processes, enquire the role and creative thinking of post-industrial designers.

The event featured an exhibition and two days of conferences presenting new forms, technologies and design processes.

Exhibition presented projects and works by:
Ammar Eloueini, Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz, Adrian Bowyer, Nervous System, Michael Meredith, Cait Reas, FLUID FORMS, Susanne Stauch, THEVERYMANY.