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:

What has happened since then? Well, everybody has been very busy, and the participation of the new members has been really low (4 posts in 1 year and half). Meanwhile, other people joined the project but unfortunately still 99,9% of the work was done by me. Information has been scattered among this website, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and other external websites. This project needs then to rearrange all the resources that it has been mapping during these years, and to do it in a really collaborative way (so far, there were some technical limitations that prevented many people from entering).
Even if busy with many projects (some of them still have to appear on this web!), I’ve been researching and testing how to improve this website and make it really an open source project. After many tests, finally the moment has arrived! If you go to meta.openp2pdesign.org, you will find that the redesign process has already started, and if you want, you can join it. We will use Trac and Subversion software (as in the development of many open source projects) and the Open P2P Design methodology for designing how openp2pdesign.org project will work as a community dedicated to a set of collaborative activities. There is also a mailing list for discussion about the redesign of the project here:

http://lists.meta.openp2pdesign.org/listinfo.cgi/discussion-meta.openp2pdesign.org

If you want to understand better the tools and process that will be used, have a look at this recent presentation:

Here are few things to keep in mind about the openp2pdesign.org project and its redesign:

• as in many open source projects, with this project I need to “scratch an itch” i.e. map and studying resources about designing collaborative, open and complex projects; we can further discuss about this, but this is the starting point;
• ideally, the redesign process will never be completed: it will always be possible to modify and improve the project;
• content published on the website will be released as open content or open data; however, this does not mean that absolutely everything will be open: we will discuss together what shall be more or less open and which licenses to use (for example, the work I’m doing in the Aalto University can be open only to some extent because I have to follow existing rules and dynamics);
• it doesn’t need to become a big project or to develop very quickly: it needs to be a good and useful project for understanding better open, complex and collaborative design (quality is preferred over quantity);
• you can join the redesign process, or wait until the new website will be up and running to join it; in any case, the best thing is to follow openp2pdesign.org and learn a bit about Open P2P Design;
• the redesign process is also a way for further testing and refining the Open P2P Design methodology itself, I hope you can help me in finding bugs or in proposing suggestions.

One more thing: but what it is supposed to be openp2pdesign.org? It is not a start-up (at least not yet): the idea is to have a common space for studying how to design open, collaborative and complex projects, and to do this in an open source way. It is a place for anybody interested in find resources, tools, knowledge about design for open, collaborative and complex projects. But of course, if you join the project and help with the redesign process, you can help us in redefining also the project.
You should be interested in openp2pdesign.org if you usually ask yourself these questions:

• What does it mean to develop an Open Design project, or to develop a collaborative design project for a community or complex system?
• Where can I find the closest place for developing Open Design projects
• Where can I find tools and resources for developing projects for complex social systems?
• Where can I find a place for discussion about designing for communities and about co-design?
• Where can I find the closest place for fabbing an Open Design project?
• (and many other questions… you can leave a comment suggesting related needs!)

As a conclusion, blogging now will be less important until a new platform will be developed. If you want to participate in the process, go to meta.openp2pdesign.org or send an e-mail to meta [at] openp2pdesign.org asking for a Subversion (SVN) and Trac account. If you don’t want to participate in the process but want to see / use the new website / community when it will be available, just subscribe to the newsletter and we will keep you updated. In this project, open doesn’t just mean something that you can download for free, but that we welcome any participant in further improving this collaborative effort, so we will be happy if you join and help us!

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.

Beside the main exhibition there’s another interesting one (now over), (FAB)BOTS. The exhibition presents a collection of 10 student projects from the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), developed in two design studios tutored by Marta Malé-Alemany, in collaboration with Jeroen van Ameijde (in London) and Victor Viña (in Barcelona). The goal of the design studios is to enable the students to design their own digital fabrication tools, mainly using recycled materials and DIY Arduino-Based boards. This is a very important step: designers are now learning how to design their own tools and processes, in order to develop more proper projects related to their specific context. These are maybe the first courses about Metadesign for digital fabrication, and their importance will grow in the future, setting a milestone for architectural and product designers.

Here’s a video about the FAB BOTS temporary exhibition (in Catalan):

FAB(Bots) from DHUB on Vimeo.

Furthermore, the exhibition also contains its own Fab Lab, DHUB Fab Lab, that has been hosting an impressive list of short workhops. These workshops focus on specific issues such as; CNC cutting and milling, 3D scanning and printing, and making electronic circuits and customized machines.

The DHUB Fab from dhubfab on Vimeo.

Here’s a spanish article from the city of Barcelona website:

And if you want to read more about the exhibition, our friend Zoe Romano from Openwear.org visited the exhibition and wrote a nice review with many pictures.

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.

Even though User-Centred Design is a much more complicated issue, this infographic poster makes a good introduction to it. It is a clear example of how visualization design can be a metadesign tool for design processes: in this way we can facilitate the understanding of the design process by all the actors involved in it.
Please note that this example is not a metadesign project but a communication / infographic / marketing (let’s say) project; anyway it shows the potential of such tools even for metadesign projects.

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.

As many of you have seen it in my recent presentations, the name of the website is officially openp2pdesign.org, stressing the difference from the Open P2P Design methodology (and as a reference to the inspiring neubauten.org project).

02. openp2pdesign.org, a strategic project for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems

While Open P2P Design is a methodology, openp2pdesign.org is a strategic design project for enabling research and projects for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems. The tagline has changed too and now it is:
Metadesign for Open Systems, Processes, Projects.
Studying and enabling Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems since 2005.

What is a strategic project? A brief definition of strategic design is:

the integrated body of products, services and communication strategies that business and social actors conceive and develop to obtain a set of specific strategic results.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, just think about Make Magazine; it’s more than a magazine, it is a complete strategic project that offers:

• Make Magazine
• Maker Faire
• Books
• Make: television
• Make Controller Kit
• Craft Magazine

This means that Make, as a strategic project, offers all the Tools, Knowledge and Systems you need for developing DIY / Craft projects. We have therefore Metadesign projects offered within a whole Strategic Design project. openp2pdesign.org is going to about Metadesign projects for enabling Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems offered within a whole Strategic Design project.

03. openp2pdesign.org, the core group and the collaborative activity

Right now, openp2pdesign.org is made of a core group, some of the great people I’ve found during these years and that have experience and knowledge about Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems and at the same time they know how to collaborate and share. They are Miae Kim (South Korea), Federico Weber (Italy), Mauro Costa (Portugal / Spain), Roger Pitiot (France / South Korea).
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:

03. openp2pdesign.org, the new website

The whole website has been redesigned and restructured; even though we kept the multilanguage posts, now English is the main language. Everything is more or less ready by now, just expect contents and functionalities to be improved or added. Heres’ the new structure:

1. About
   A page about openp2pdesign.org and how it works.
2. People
   The profiles of all the people involved in openp2pdesign.org.
3. Project
   Past and current openp2pdesign.org projects.
4. Blog
   The blog, with the old posts as well.
5. Wiki
   The wiki, for collaborative writing, future books and projects.
6. System
   Links to other people, projects, companies, institutions part of the Open P2P Design ecosystem
7. Source
   The source code of openp2pdesign.org, here you can find all the files you can freely download: Press files, Texts (Books, Papers, Guides), Tools, Maps, Presentations.
8. SVN
   The WebSVN interface to the openp2pdesign.org subversion repositories. Here you can browse the repositories used in our projects and workshops.
9. Twitter
   The stream of our Tweets, as with Twitter we can publish more informations than with blogging.
10. Contact
    The contact and newsletter page, where you can send an e-mail to us or subscribe to openp2pdesign.org newsletter in order to be informed about our projects and updates.

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

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.

mShape is a parametric design project which empowers people to affect the shape of a design object.

mTable is the first mShape product. it enables people to create their own table using a mobile phone. the mTable is designed by sculpting a surface, choosing dimensions, materials and colours. these parameters are directly transmitted to the computer controlled production facility for the manufacturing of the custom designed mtable.

How to create an mtable:

1. download: get the mtable application and install it on a Nokia Series 60 compatible mobile phone (7650 or later).
2. design: the mtable is designed with the following simple actions: pressure: sculpt a smooth landscape by placing one of seven deformers. depending on the distribution of the forces you can even create holes in your mtable. dimension: choose any table size between 0.6m x 0.6m and 1.2m x 2.4m. the height can be set between 0.2m and 0.9m. material: choose between swiss walnut wood and high gloss lacquer in numerous colours. submit your design to mshape.com.
3. control / order: once submitted, your design is rendered and can be viewed in high resolution on this website. the details of your mtable can be checked using a 3d viewer. browse through other designs to get inspired and view pictures of already built mtables. order your mtable through a local dealer.
4. production: the design data is transmitted to the manufacturer where the surface of the mtable is shaped with a computer controlled mill. the final assembly and quality control is taken care of by a professional carpenter.
5. delivery: your mtable will be shipped after 8-12 weeks. every mtable produced receives a unique number.

NOTE: mTABLE is not an industrial product. Although the design and part of the manufacturing process are based on advanced technology, the final assembly and surface treatment is handcrafted. Because wood is a living material every wooden mTABLE is unique in its pattern.

And as every project is a collective one, here is the design community of mShape:

DESIGN: Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler.
PRODUCTION: Superform (producer, carpentry), CNC Dynamix (milling) and SwissHolz (wood).
COMMUNICATION: Viola Zimmermann & Thomas Killer.
WEB PROGRAMMING Patrick Sibenaler & PVC Hyperdesign.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Roman Keller.
SPECIAL THANKS: AGF (material tests) and Beat Ferrario.

via | core77

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.