After the post about Design in the Age of Sharing and the post about the emerging Sharing Economy, here’s now an infographic about the same topic.

Collaborative Consumption Infographic By Promotional Codes

A brief update about the Sharing Economy (after the previous post about Design and Sharing).

Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research released “The New Sharing Economy” study that indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources as well.

The greatest areas of opportunity for new sharing businesses are those where a lot of services do not currently exist within a specific industry category and where a large number of people are currently either a) sharing casually (not through an organized community or service) or b) not sharing at all but would be interested to share. They include transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces.

Peer-to-peer sharing allows for potentially unbounded scalability, access to more resources and often at closer proximity to us. Because peer-to-peer companies aren’t subject to the overhead cost of purchasing and maintaining a “fleet” of assets all their own, the cost to renters is often lower; moreover, members have the opportunity to monetize their own possessions. These peer-based “marketplaces” help the environment by using the resources we already available more efficiently rather than manufacturing more new goods.

The New Sharing Economy

NOTE: this post was originally written for the P2P Foundation blog on September 22nd 2010, but since it’s a quite interesting issue and its contents fit within openp2pdesign.org, I republished it here. The original post is here: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/design-in-the-age-of-sharing/2010/09/22

01. Sharing by Design

A recent post on Shareable made me think about how the culture of Sharing has been changing the discipline of Design after the success of Open Source and the Web 2.0.
We are researching and discussing how we can bring collaboration into design processes and how we can use design processes to foster collaboration, but what about developing design projects for facilitating the sharing of physical goods?

Keara Schwartz wrote a post on Shareable, trying to start a conversation about this issue; however, that post is not really deep and inspiring since she finds that the only barrier to sharing products is the lack of trust in other people we have in sharing physical products. According to Keara Schwartz, we can share digital information easily, but not physical goods as well because we don’t believe other people will take care of them as we would do; she then suggest that products might be designed differently in order to facilitate their sharing.
I believe though that this is not the point: we don’t share products because our socio-economic system has developed in that direction, not because products are not designed for being shared. And designing for facilitating the sharing has wider (and older) implications.

Nonetheless, that post is a good starting point in order to think about the issue of Design for Sharing: we have to notice that Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that “tells the story of sharing, covering the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life”. And its tagline is Sharing by Design, implying that sharing can be enabled with design.

02. Access by Design

We could argue now that we are entering into the Age of Sharing, since after the success of Open Source and of Web 2.0 new terms, theories, technologies, products and services that are based on the concept of sharing (and collaboration) are increasingly introduced. But these trends started before, though a little bit different, as Jeremy Rifkin clearly explained in his book The Age of Access:

In the hypercapitalist economy, buying things in markets and owning property become outmoded ideas, while “just-in-time” access to nearly every kind of service, through vast commercial networks operating in cyberspace, becomes the norm. We increasingly pay for the experience of using things-in the form of subscriptions, memberships, leases, and retainers-rather than for the things themselves. [...]
Rifkin argues that the capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of human time and experience.

As Rifkin noted, the transition from owning products to accessing them through a service started long time before the rise of the Web 2.0; it is therefore a longer trend coming from the evolution of society and economy. Design for Access came before Design for Sharing. Design, and especially Product Design, in the Age of Access means above all Product Stewardship, a concept developed as a Design for Sustainability effort with the aim of involving all the stakeholders of the life cycle of a product. With this approach, we ask all the stakeholders to take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management of products. If we want to just access a product instead of owning it (and maybe the service is built upon its sharing it with other people), we need a lot of different players that actually manage it through its life cycle.

Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning for, and if necessary, paying for the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life. This may be achieved, in part, by redesigning products to use fewer harmful substances, to be more durable, reuseable and recyclable, and to make products from recycled materials. For retailers and consumers, this means taking an active role in ensuring the proper disposal or recycling of an end-of-life product.

Accessing a product, instead of owning it, means that the traditional life cycle of a product has to change and to be shared among all its stakeholders. Design for Access and for Sharing is more about new processes than new product typologies and technologies: it could be a way to design more proper and sustainable products (like the Universal Design / Design for All approaches). (more…)

I’m sorry I have not written very much in the past two months but I’ve been busy with a new job and moving to another city…meanwhile, I’m working for a new version of the site, 1.1, to launch when I will publish my new little book that will summarize my thesis and one year of blogging.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest you an event which will take place in Turin, 11-16 March: Toshare Festival.

The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit. The Piemonte Share Festival is an international cultural event that probes the vast panorama of new technologies and investigates their applications in art and design.

Because of recent advances in digital fabrication technology, manufacturing is becoming a digital art and culture enterprise. The exciting advent of 3d printing, rapid prototyping, and rapid manufacturing is of profound importance to SHARE, for it bring the power to create physical objects to the techno-artist’s lab-bench, studio and atelier. It means that digital artists, whose work was once mostly virtual, can create in the actual.

I’m going to be there on saturday March 15th, if you plan to go there and want to meet me just leave a comment here or write me at this e-mail address..

SATURDAY March 15th 2008
Accademia Albertina, Via Accademia 6 – Torino

11:00 a.m.
King Kong Microplex, via Po 21 – Torino
Aha-Pre Camp
The biggest Italian community regarding digital art (http://www.ecn.org/aha) created as a part of AHA networking project – Activism-Hacking-Artivism (http://barcamp.org/aha), that meet to organize a possible future Italian ahaCamp, concerning hacktivism and art activism. The pre/ahaCamp, at the Share Festival in Turin is the first collective meeting for the members of the mailing-list.

02:00 p.m.
A Manifesto for Networked Objects
Now objects are on-line too – blogjects , blogging objects. Once “things” are connected to the Internet, they immediately become part of the relational system, thus improving and boosting the connections in the social network, and they finally define a new relationship between presence and mobility in the physical world. With a pervading Internet network objects are now “citizens” of our space, with the possibility to communicate and interact with them.
- Julian Bleecker, university professor University of Southern California

03:00 p.m.
Manufacturing Digital Art
In the 90s digital art was referring to immateriality, now the society has a more natural relationship with technologies, thus letting what is immaterial to become real, and experimenting new interaction processes between man and machine, that has completely become part of everyday life in the meantime. Manufacturing is also referring to digital art, where such equipment as Arduino and the explosive advent of 3D printers and devices for digital manufacturing led to integrate what is digital into what is real.
- Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder
- Fabio Franchino and Giorgio Olivero, artists

04:30 p.m.
Manufacturing Future Designs
Donal Norman presents his latest book, “Design del futuro”, where objects, agents of an operating macrosystem, are inter-connected within a pervasive network where relation is more important than function. Relation must be focused on sustainability as well, since a harmful element can infect the whole system.
- Donald Norman, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science
- Bruce Sterling, writer
- Luca De Biase, publishing director of Nova24- Sole24Ore magazine
- Gino Bistagnino, university professor Politecnico di Torino

See you soon!

Yesterday was definitely a day about 3D and Knowledge Sharing…in the morning I gave a presentation about Blender during the LinuxDay 2007 organized in Milan by OpenLabs.
In the evening I watched the Life of Galileo play (by Bertolt Brecht) at the Piccolo Theatre: a play about Knowledge (its research and its sharing), and an experience that reminded me how theatre is 3D (unfortunately, except for concerts, I don’t go very often to theatres).
And then a very interesting discussion with Gianandrea Giacoma (ibridazioni.com): how to make 3D Knowledge Sharing, passing from a Blog to Reality.

Here’s my presentation about Blender (9,3 Mb, in Italian):
presentazione_blender_Menichinelli_linuxday_2007.pdf

And here on Slideshare.net.