Just after my participation in the Maker Lab at the DMY Berlin 2011, I finally had the chance to meet and interview Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant from Open Design City, a co-working and community-based space for making hosted in the Betahaus (Berlin, Germany). The following interview is the result of a reconstruction of a great half a day of sharing of ideas and talking in Berlin.
(By the way: I’m going to be again in Berlin next week for the Open Knowledge Conference: I’ll be part of a panel and workshop on creating a standard for Open Hardware and Design, more details on the website of the event.)

Massimo Menichinelli: Could you please tell us the story of Open Design City, how it started and what is planned for the near future?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Open Design City happened by accident, starting from an existing community, with an event in Betahaus in February 2010.
Various makers from Berlin and other places met for an Open Design Event, which resulted in a dinner party, numerous products, experiments and the documentary “delivered in beta”. The design festival DMY Berlin then was interested in having a Maker space, 200 square meters of space, with a budget of 3000 € for materials and transportation provided by Etsy (Editor’s note: Etsy has an office in Berlin, here). Then Betahaus wanted to start a Fab Lab, and before the MakerLab, we opened the space in Betahaus, catalysed by the community formed in creating the MakerLab. We confronted business models, asked the community about how to organize (and then create) the space. People brought tools, resources and ideas in the space, that was not defined in the beginning. We left it up to the community to share tools, skills, machines and organize events and workshops to launch the space.
Everything in the place has been built or donated by the members, except for a series of tools donated by the marketing department at Bosch. Then CNC machines and a Makerbot arrived later.

We are now in a transition process, recruiting more members in order to cope with the rental costs, and trying to establish a long-term business plan (because everything happened by accident). Since we don’t have a legal status yet, we are not receiving any subsidies from government or companies, the space is offered by Betahuas but all the money comes from members, so there’s need to find more money.
We are trying to establish connections with companies that may benefit from the space, but in any case the community comes first for us. It is a space by the community for the community, and we are trying to create opportunities for the community to make money through workshops and more services.

Massimo Menichinelli: What is the current situation in Berlin for Fab Labs and Open Design? What kind of impact a Fab Lab like yours could have in Berlin?
(more…)

Even if you already know (almost) everything about Complex Systems, don’t miss the opportunity to watch online The Secret Life of Chaos, an excellent BBC documentary.
The documentary starts from Alan Turing and his research on morphogenesis, it then explains chaos (“one of the most unwelcome discovery in science”), feedback loops, fractals, flocks, evolution, self-organization. The documentary ends with evolutionary and genetic algorithms for solving problems and designing, showing how simplicity evolves into complexity, starting from simple rules repeated over and over. After watching this documentary, it should be very clear why design could (and should) learn how to deal with complex systems, even though we should update our idea of designer:

One of the things that makes people so uncomfortable, about this idea of, if you will, spontaneous pattern formation is that somehow or other you don’t need a creator. But perhaps a really clever designer, what he would do, is to kind of treat the universe like a giant simulation where you set some initial condition and just let the whole thing spontaneously happen, in all of it’s wonder, and all of it’s beauty.

And then if you go on and read Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos by Ko Kuwabara (and this article as well), you will understand why I think that open source is a great strategy for dealing with complex problem and systems.

(Just a note about complexity and pop culture: after watching this, I bet it is easier for you now to understand that Tron:Legacy is about the dualism chaos vs. order, and why the movie prefers the former).

via | Network Weaving

Back from Toshare.it, where I saw some interesting projects and met very interesting persons…

From there, I’d like to suggest you a project that shows how design could get inspiration from complexity. This is maybe the first step a designer could take confronting complexity, and therefore projects like this are not only fascinating but also promising for a new culture of complexity.

It is a simple adaptation of flocking algorithms for a site-specific video projection on an architecture (design-complexity-locality linked altogether?), designed by Turin-based Todo Design design studio.

Here is the project:

ARTIFICIAL.DUMMIES from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

And here is the design process…

Artificial Dummies, the process from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

These flocking algorithms come from the work of Craig Reynolds (where you can find a lot of links about flocking and swarm algorithms).

You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary.

via | reddit

A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal and/or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest and/or most easilly navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire lines were used in early transportation planning, prior to the advent of computerized models.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g. as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tred a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail ‘of least resistance’ for followers.

Similarly they may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface. The paths take on a rather organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest route between two points and may later be surfaced.

Desire lines can usually be found as shortcuts in places where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

Many streets in old cities began as desire lines which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

via wikipedia

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04 « Intro.05 « Intro.06 « Intro.07 « Intro.08 « Intro.09

Unlike a traditional, linear, design process, Open Peer-to-Peer Design is non-linear and characterized by multiple parallell processes because of the large number of agents and their interactions. An Open Peer-to-Peer design process thus provides the basis for developing more parallel projects, an ecosystem of designer agents with a memetic evolution of the projects that are more “suitable” to the community, whose selection will lead to better results.

An Open Peer-to-Peer design process is characterized by openness and sharing of the project (the source code for software) of the platform and of the activities that it allows once provided to the community by the designers. The community will test and modify it several times and in several directions (in the software, compiling the binary code), until a satisfactory version is reached (the stable version of the software) and self-organization is ensured.

The source code of the project (community source code) consists of tools from design services, with the introduction of a description of the reputation levels within the community, the license that governes cooperation and the access to the results, a social network map able to show weaknesses and strengths in the community. The source code is accessible to all participants, who are testing it with increasing level of reality (the platform is gradually built during this phase) reporting to the design community any errors (bugs in software) present. The higher the number of participants, the greater the chance that errors are detected and corrected.
During the design process and at its end, the community will self-organize modifying the project if necessary, as far as possible; it is this ability to self-organize and improve the local conditions that makes the communities alive and interesting.

Participation in this design process is open and equal, but is also governed by two principles: self-selection and reputation, which give place to different levels of participation in the various design phases, according to the possession of knowledge needed in each project phase. The different phases of the design process, therefore, require different levels of participation and therefore commitment and visibility of the participants. These different levels give place to different typical phases (similar to some phases of the community of practice) of the life of the communities: potential, coalescing, stable, self-organization and expansion, decline.

analysis

The project begins with an analysis of the participants, in order to understand the existing and therefore usable resources, limitations, critical points. Through the analysis, the designers begin to know the participants, prefiguring which features the community’s activity could have in the future. The objective of this phase is to define the objectives and the strategy on which the concept of the community’s activity will be build. The analysis, carried out through ethnographic investigation and social networks analysis, will cover the platform, the characteristics of the individual participants if possible, as well as existing activities.

concept

Once the analysis of the participants, of their activities and their social networks is done, a first concept of the community’s activity (and its platform) is developed. The designers then develop an initial version (we might say the 0.0.1 version) of the project of the activity/platform, formalized in the community source code.

parallel co-design / test / setting-up

Once developed, the concept is shown to the participants and collectively discussed. From now begins a phase of co-design of the activity/platform, characterized by steady growth of commitment, energy and visibility by the participants. At this stage, the concept of activity is developed collaboratively to get a functioning project, a “stable” source code (version 1.0).
The participants test the community source code of the community simulating the activity, in order to understand what are the weaknesses, errors (bugs in the community source code). The source code is subjected to a peer-review process, in which both the designers (who observe the simulation) and the participants report errors and the necessary changes. Once a bug is identified the source code is modified and again a testing begins with the new code.

In order to simulate the activity, participants must share the conditions necessary to carry out the activity, represented by the platform. Rules and roles should be developed and adopted, and the artifacts that are not already present will be built or acquired. This means that along with the continuation of the co-design / test process, the platform is implemented and when the project reaches the stable version, the participants can begin the regular activity, strengthening then the sense of community.
Once the co-design / test ends, the project will already be done, there are no phases of production nor execution. As in software, then the source code (the project) gives place to the binary code (the work done by the participants).

self-organization

After the first “stable version” (1.0.0) of the source code is reached, the community will be largely formed: during the simulation / activity new social relationships will have formed. A stable version of the source code means that it can be “compiled” (ie, done) and used by anyone without the possibility of critical errors. At this stage, therefore, the community is able to carry out the activity and self-organize without the contribution of the designer: if his role was that of a facilitator (enabler), now the community is able to act successfully alone.

At this point, ideally, the role of the designer is not needed anymore; however, the community will always need its contribution in the future: the designer has always knowledge and expertise useful to provide support to the community in response to changes in the outside world.
Also, if the community activity is a design one, the desinger’s capabilities make them important in the community, and they will continue to be part of also during the self-organization phase.

These observations represent therefore an initial proposal (1.1) for an Open Peer-to-Peer design guidelines, in a broader process of studying a comprehensive methodology.

Finally, what are the future opportunities and directions for the application and study of these design guidelines?

(to be continued)