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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In a previous post, I started explaining that Open Design is now getting out of the underground, since many important design companies, institutions and sci-fi writers 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 post I will show other important examples coming from the Netherlands (other examples will be shown in a third and last post).

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:
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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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01. Another Open P2P Design workshop, in Singapore

After the Seoul workshop, I flew to Singapore for another Open P2P Design workshop with Roger Pitiot at the School of Art, Design & Media of the Nanyang Technological University. The Singapore workshop took place as one of the event of the Singapore Design Festival 2009 and was organized with the help of professor Fabrizio Galli, who organized there a workshop that is already almost a FabLab.

I could stay there only few days (just for the workshop), and I could only feel that while Seoul is like a 24-hour fabbing and piracy shop, Singapore is design, business and marketing hub but with no manufacturing inside (just like big companies like Nike, for example). One of the main avenues is not full of design piracy shops like in Seoul but of multiple high-end brands and consumption. And at the same time, in Singapore the coexistence of the four main ethnic groups (Chinese, Malays, Indians, Europeans) is based not on integration but on the tolerance of their diversity, in the the most globalised country in the world.

The workshop was one day shorter than the Seoul one (and the last day was an Islamic Holiday), we started with around 19 students and ended with around 10 students. Luckily, there were no cultural problems like in Seoul (Singapore was a British colony, after all), and even if the students were younger than in Seoul they were really smart and able to understand how Open Systems (and the Open P2P Design methodology) work in just three days. Moreover, we had the opportunity to learn from the Seoul workshop and change few details.

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. Presentations of the lectures

Here are the presentations of the lectures I gave during the workshops:
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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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Just a quick post: here are my presentations for the first day (What is Open Design?), the second day (What is Open P2P Design) and the fourth day (What Is The Distributed Manufacturing Scenario?). In the next post I will write about what happened in the workshop and the outcome we got.

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In this post I’d like to suggest you a Creative Commons-licensed reading, to announce you an event I’m going to participate to and start an open discussion about their common subject: what will probably be the future of Industrial Design and Manufacturing, and how we can draw a map of it?

First, I suggest you reading this publication, Future of Making Map, published by Institute for the Future here: http://iftf.org/node/1766.

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences— the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

[...]

There is much to be learned from the maker mindset of collaboration, creativity, and open access. Yet the maker culture will not replace traditional industry. In the future, traditional manufacturers and maverick makers will be closely linked— sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but frequently blurring the boundaries that separate them. Success will occur when the two cultures are woven together in new and interesting ways.

via | core77

It’s a very interesting map that points out the

• Drivers
• Trends
• Signals
• Suggestions (Make the Future)

that could lead to a scenario of distributed design and manufacturing systems. It shows the social and technological phenomena driving (drivers) these trends (contrasting where we are in 2008 with where we will be in 2018), signals (a company, network, project, product, idea, or innovation) and suggestions for using the map for travelling or, better, going to where it’s heading to.

And then I’d like to announce you that I’m very honoured to participate at the I Realize 09 event in Turin on June 9-10, as a co-facilitator for the Post-Industrial Design Workshop with the Turin-based Design Studio ToDo (Thanks Giorgio for inviting me!).

And as you can see on the workshop page, we are going to study and draw a map about the future of Post-Industrial Design, starting from Generative Design, Open Processes and Projects, Fabbing, Open P2P Marketplaces…
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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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Zoybar is a an open design project from Israel founded and designed by the designer Ziv Bar Ilan, and it will be available from January 2009.
It’s the project of an open design guitar, and it is a very interesting one, because it shows interest in building an economic ecosystem (an Open P2P marketplace) and for sustainability and local business as well (and therefore for a sustainable local development).

Zoybar is a unique platform for developing innovative music instruments and effects.
The Zoybar components provide research and development tools as a sustainable, playable prototype platform. The same modular parts can be assembled as different instruments, can be change during the performance and also be mounted with numerous special effects, just by adding and changing their position across the profile grooves.

As an independent developer you can use the Zoybar hardware platform to integrate your application and become relevant to the whole Zoybar community.
You can submit your projects as a group administrator and interact with your own forum, members, and rich media content platform for free.

Find more videos like this on Zoybar
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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.