Almost two years ago, in May 2010 I blogged that openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community.

A brief recap: the openp2pdesign.org project started in March 2005 with my Master Degree Thesis in the Faculty of Design of the Milan Polytechnic. Therefore, for the first year (March 2005 – April 2006) openp2pdesign.org was just a work in progress while I was producing the first source code. As since back then the concepts of Open Design and Open P2P Design were in their early days and there were very few opportunities to develop them further, I started openp2pdesign.org in order to provide a space for collective discussion and further research. It took then form of a website towards the end of 2006, opening the 2007 as a multilanguage blog, “Open Peer-to-Peer Design. Design for Complexity” in English, Italian and Spanish. During the following years, the project has become quite successful, with workshops, lectures or panels in many countries, including Italy, Spain, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico. Meanwhile, I also moved to Helsinki to further investigate Open Design and Open P2P Design in the Media Lab of the Aalto University – School of Art and Design.

But now, the most important thing I want to share with you in this post is this: if you remember, in the old post I mentioned, I wrote this:

During the next months, we will design the collaborative activity of the open source community of openp2pdesign.org; and yes, we are going to use the Open P2P Design methodology for this task. You can track this process in the meta.openp2pdesign.org page. Once this collaborative activity is stable, we will open it to the participation and everybody will be able to join us and be part of it.
We hope it will be ready by the end of 2010, meanwhile the blog will work, and you can follow our projects in it or subscribing to our newsletter on the Contact page or here below:

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FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

There’s one more reason for going to Barcelona these months: Full Print3d. Printing Objects, an exhibition about 3D Printing in the Disseny Hub Barcelona. Unfortunately I had no time to blog it before, but the exhibition is from 16.06.2010 to 29.05.2011, so there’s still time to visit it.
All of the objects presented at Full Print3d were created using different additive manufacturing processes and are organize into six thematic areas: freeform, variation, customization, complexity, materiality, and finally, applications and research. Some examples are products from Fluid Forms, Freedom of Creation and Nervous System.

The exhibition was curated by Marta Malé–Alemany, architect and co-director of the Masters Program at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) (where I gave a lecture one year ago).
I collaborated with Marta for the exhibition (that’s why I’m in the credits), and my little help was mainly about researching the strategic applications of 3D printing with a broader perspective: I’m not interested in the technology details so much, but more in how these technologies can be used for developing Open Design projects and in general, Open and Complex projects.

Marta Malé-Alemany talking about the exhibition (in Catalan):

Full Print3d. Imprimint objectes from DHUB on Vimeo.

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Here’s a nice and well designed and documented infographic poster about User-Centred Design by Pascal Raabe. And since he published it under a CC BY-NC-SA license, I’m redistributing here it as a pdf file.

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In May 2010, openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community. It took a lot of work to change the website, but now we are ready to start (even if some functions and contents will be added in the following weeks).

01. openp2pdesign.org, so far

As you may remember, the openp2pdesign.org project started in March 2005 with my Master Degree Thesis in the Faculty of Design of the Milan Polytechnic. Therefore, for the first year (March 2005 – April 2006) openp2pdesign.org was just a work in progress and it did not really exist yet, I was producing the first source code.

As since back then the concepts of Open Design and Open P2P Design were in their early days and there were very few opportunities to develop them further, I started openp2pdesign.org in order to provide a space for collective discussion and further research. It took then form of a website towards the end of 2006, opening the 2007 as a multilanguage blog, “Open Peer-to-Peer Design. Design for Complexity” in English, Italian and Spanish.

Since then openp2pdesign.org has been a blog, but while the multilanguage option proved to be very useful for international recognition, it slowed down posting and other projects: writing the same content three times takes a lot of time. With the number of projects and collaborations growing, the publishing of contents slowly shifted from the blog to Twitter and Facebook. In 2005 it made sense to write a thesis, in 2006/07 it made sense to start a blog, in 2008/09 it made sense to move the discussion into other social networks.

It makes sense now, in 2010, to get back to the blog and to redesign it as an open source community. During the past 5 years, the ideas behind Open P2P Design and openp2pdesign.org proved to be really interesting with growing international success, from Italy to Europe and Asia. Further researches on Open P2P Design can take different directions and subjects, so there’s enough room for other people to come in and have an active role in these researches. It is time now to open it to other people, as a way to make the project bigger, to help great people show their knowledge and experience, and as a way to facilitate the emergence of a social system dedicated to Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems.

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Few months ago I prepared a presentation in English about Open P2P Design and openp2pdesign.org that was not used; I remade it now and I decided to publish it as the shortest and easiest introduction to Open P2P Design methodology and the openp2pdesign.org project. You can find it in Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/what-is-open-p2p-design

You can download the pdf file and share it, it’s under a Creative Commons license:
Massimo.Menichinelli_what.is.openp2pdesign

Beside Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Manufacturing, there is another path the Open Everything phenomenon is taking: Open Money. Although the Open Money projects are in their early steps, they represent a very important strategic and metadesign move in order to enable the spreading of community-based open and p2p organizational forms.

The open money project aims to create the global infrastructure, tools, governance mechanisms and platforms that will give communities the capacity to create their own currencies with just a few clicks and thereby liberate their wealth potential.¹

We should note that these examples of Open Money can be understood as metacurrencies (and here comes the Metacurrency project), because Open Money projects are the design of the rules and artifacts needed for the design of a community’s own currency. Open Money projects will be for sure an important part of any platform for Open P2P Design projects (that are metadesign projects of open collaborative systems).

Here is a great video (with subtitles available) from the Wall Street Journal that clearly explains the Open Money concept and other similar projects:

Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms. Every community (associations, companies, cities, regions, states, professions, interest groups, etc) will be able to create their own currencies for their own marketplace.²

And here is another video (with subtitles) about the Metacurrency project:

Notes:

1. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]
2. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]

After FluidForms (read this old post), here is another innovative Swiss company based on mass-customization and user co-created content, mShape.
And they use too multi-layered wood and computer controlled milling machines, but here complexity comes from the behaviour of the users, from their co-creation that generates “a population of tables”.

It’s not an open p2p marketplace, it’s not a peer production example, but it is a very good example of user co-created design. You can’t buy other users’ tables, so it’s not a marketplace and relationships between users are not fostered (nor they are interested in them). Therefore, it’s not a community but a co-creation business/service.
Actually, you can buy an mShape table in two showrooms in Zurich, where:

Our partners can provide you with a Nokia mobile phone for the time of your design

So the most important thing of mShape is that it works using mobile techologies i.e. easy of use tecnologies that have a wide reach. Just note that every project that is strongly based on user participation needs an enabler designer rather than a conventional one, a designer capable of developing a meta-design project where the user will be the conventional designer.
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One of the key point of Open P2P Design is that the designer/s should become an enabler of the creativity that lays in a community/system. I will write something more about this theme in the future (a very long post is under construction), but for the moment I’d like to suggest you a brief example of a design studio that decided to act as an enabler of the customer’s creativity: Fluid Forms. Individual Design from Graz, Austria. This time I’d like to talk about their latest project, Fluid Earth.

Fluid Earth consist in an easy to use Online-Design-Tool, with which the user can design herself/himself unique objects (bowl or lamp) for the home, at home. The user can select a desired locality using GoogleMaps and see it represented as a lamp or a bowl. The selection can also be enlarged, decreased and shifted; at the same time the finished product is displayed as a 3D-Model.

Complexity here is not recreated artificially (as it happens in the generative design projects); instead it is gathered from an already existing database (localities and their geography and orography). The user is an agent that discover this complexity and transform it into a design project (in this case, however, complexity and localities are not addressed directly but only superficially, just at the aesthetic level).

Note that this is not a collaborative or collective project, it’s just a web-based mass-customization project; anyway, its importance lays in the idea that a design studio can work enabling not its creativity but someone else’s one (they call it meta-design).

Personal tastes are as different as people themselves.

For this reason Fluidforms offers everyone an individual Design. Our website enables you to design according to your own preferences with but a few clicks of the mouse. Create your own unique forms, and bring to life your own individual Design.

Individual Design involves designing not a single product, as in traditional design, but what we call a Meta-Design. A Meta-Design is a framework in which the consumer may modify his or her product. The designers job is to make sure that the consumer is supported in their design process and can not specify a product that does not reach functional or aesthetic requirements.