01. A novel: Makers

The first sign is clearly the publishing of Cory Doctorow‘s novel Makers: a science-fiction novel about the Maker subculture and the rise (and fall and rise again) of Open Designers through 3D Printing, User-generated Exhibitions and financial fights with big corporations like Walt Disney. And it is an important book also because it tries to show how Open Design could develop with possible business models and scenarios (trying to learn from the dot-com bubble of the ’90s).
You can download it in different formats here, or read it here below (and you can also read a great review by our friend Adam Arvidsson here).

02. IDEO and FrogDesign

02.01 OpenIDEO.com

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

OpenIDEO is a project launched in August 2010 by IDEO, one of the most famous design and innovation consultancies. OpenIDEO can be regarded as an hybrid between Crowdsourcing and Open Design, since they launch challenges to the online crowd, but later the process is collaborative. We must note however that the paradigm here is more Web 2.0 than Open Source: collaboration on OpenIDEO is only about voting, commenting and talking about the projects, in order to refine them and discard the less interesting, so that one winner will be chosen in the end. There is no actual collaborative design with an Open Source process.
All concepts generated are shareable, remix-able, and reusable in a similar way to Creative Commons (though this means they’re not using Creative Commons), since participants own the concepts but grant a non-exclusive license to the Challenge Host for possible publication. Beyond that, organizations that partner with OpenIDEO on challenges may choose to implement the top ideas.

All challenges posted will be for social good, meaning that they won’t be used for commercial projects. In time, IDEO may use the same platform as part of their client work for closed challenges (that won’t appear on OpenIDEO). It seems therefore that it is for social and non-commercial goals now, but at the same time it’s a research about using the same approach (that is, more Open Innovation that real Open Design) to the commercial side of IDEO.

Beside this, IDEO is already planning the launching of its design for social innovation division IDEO.org for the fall of 2011 (here’s an interesting interview about it).
IDEO.org is seeking individuals for the 2012 fellowship class: residents will join senior designers from IDEO to form IDEO.org’s interdisciplinary design team for an 11-month period. In order to chose these residents, candidates are asked to fill an online application and also to participate in an OpenIDEO Challenge.

Even if the concept is not completely Open Design (there is no real collaboration like in Open Source and the licenses used are not completely clear or Open), it is a very important project that IDEO designed carefully. They especially paid attention to the problem of metrics: how do we measure collaboration, the work of every participant and the state of the community?
I will return on this issue in the future, since it’s critical for the development of Open Design and any open projects (and therefore of Open P2P Design, that enables them). For the moment, the approach of OpenIDEO is an interesting case:

The Design Quotient (DQ) is a measure of your contributions to OpenIDEO. It corresponds to how active you are in the inspiration, concepting, and evaluation phases of a challenge. It also measures your collaboration, increasing every time you comment or build on other people’s inspirations and concepts. When you take part in a challenge, you build up your DQ by accruing points.

A DQ can help to publicly identify your design expertise and strengths. Maybe you’re excellent at providing inspiration that shapes the conversation, or you’re great at building off of others’ ideas. Share it with your friends, colleagues, teachers, and even potential employers to give them some insight into what you’re best at.

02.02 frogMob

Another renowned design and innovation consultancy, Frog Design, has started being interested in bringing mass collaboration inside the design process developing frogMob, “an experimental method of guerilla research”. This is clearly not a case of Open Design, but of Crowdsourcing: there is no real collaboration, but only challenges offered to any internet surfer (i.e. the crowd) that can then help Frog Design in developing design research of existing solutions worldwide.

frogMob is an open, crowdsourced approach to research [...] frogMob gives us the opportunity to rapidly identify patterns across markets and geographies, and ultimately glean inspiration from unexpected sources.

frogMob is not about real etnographic research, but it looks just for “small adaptations invented by real people”: it began as an internal experiment, and now it is publicly open to participants. It seems like a business version of a Wikipedia of product hacking done by users: they’re not yet co-designers, but this is one of the first steps in that direction.

Incentives are very basic: you participate because you’d like to play an active role in Frog Design’s design process, engaging in a dialogue with Frog Design’s research teams, and then you can get your submission featured on the online and print magazine design mind. Submissions are voluntary and unpaid, and participants own the rights to their content (see the term of use).

02.03 Thomas Sutton (Frog Design) talking about Open Innovation (and Design)

Frog Design Creative Director Thomas Sutton spoke on Open Innovation on the main stage at the Lift11 conference in Geneva, Switzerland (2011) with his talk Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation.
While Open Innovation is already a well known and accepted concept in many business sectors, it still needs to find a place in the Design field. In this talk Sutton explains how Design should become more about building connections with the whole network (because it’s not the best product that wins, but the product with the best system dynamics) and for creating a space for Open Innovation with the users.
Here again, it is interesting to note that the Creative Director at Frog Design talks about using Design for Open Innovation (and Open Design as well). Let’s hope that designers, as Sutton suggested, will leave behind their traditional idea of a role that:

Impose meaningful order on the world

and that instead uncover the meaning and order that already exist, facilitating the emergence of networks of distributed and collaborative creativity.

(To be continued in the second and third parts)

Maybe it was too long, maybe it was too rich of inputs, but a lot of people gathered to watch it and participate in the group (it was one of the biggest groups of UrbanLabs): this means that people are very interested in Open Innovation now, and especially in methodologies for enabling Open Innovations such Open P2P Design is.

It has two sections: the first is about understanding Open P2P Communities (analysis is the first step in a design process) and how to approach them, and the second part is about the methodology adopted in UrbanLabs, but I’d like to talk about it a little more in another post…

UrbanLabs08_Grupo_A_presentacion_Massimo_Menichinelli.pdf (1.7 Mb in Spanish)

Do you have any suggestion about it?

(…to be continued)

A week after UrbanLabs 08, I can finally write a post (the first of 3 posts) with my general impressions about it while I caught the flu!
It was an event that I’ve been waiting for since several months, and that by its nature it was very quickly between so many changes in language between Castilian Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian!

I would have liked very much to participate to such an event even if only as simple participant, and I was invited as a facilitator! For this reason I’d like to thank Ramon Sangüesa, Enric Senabre and Josep Vives for the opportunity they gave me, for the hospitality and for helping me in the role of facilitator.

One of the best things about these events is always the opportunity to know a person who is behind a blog or an initiative known for some time only in the web. It’s very hard to write about all the people I met there, in addition to the organizers reported above, but I try to point out some of them here.
First of all the other facilitators (albeit with some of them we met very briefly because everyone was so involved with the event): Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, Boris Mir, Juan Freire, Carlos Guadián, Roc Fages.

One of the many features of this event is the fact that every participant really has interesting and useful experiences and knowledge, and this richness and diversity is one of the key elements now and for the future of the UrbanLabs ecosystem. It was very difficult to know everyone with so much commitment and so little free time, but with this event we are laying the foundations for building new social networks. Among the participants I met I’m especially pleased to know better Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation, who I’ve been admiring for years for the commitment and ability to analyze the P2P emerging dynamics and with which we are beginning to collaborate; Olivier Schulbaum of Platoniq, who I met in 2003 while attending the MEDIA_SPACE_INVADERS_1 workshop organized by them but that I could know better only now, Alberto Ortiz de Zárate of the Administraciones en Red blog and Domenico di Siena, one of the people behind the meipi.org project.

In a few words, this event tried to build networks between people and resources to share knowledge and to develop projects based on new technologies and social innovations for the cities. It was an event unique in itself for several reasons:

1. on one side, for the issue addressed: new technologies and social innovations for the cities, which I’ve been considering very promising since long time and which I am addressing in my research;
2. secondly, for attempting to offer more different forms of event for sharing knowledge and networking people (traditional conference, unconference and working groups) each one with different characteristics and therefore with greater richness;
3. finally, the attempt to lay the groundwork for the generation of collaborative projects for the cities, through a participatory methodology.

An event which I believe would have been possible only in Barcelona, a city that has always shown an intense interest in reflecting on city management practices and urban transformation, and that for some years now is developing as one of the main centers for the study of the Knowledge Society and the development of related initiatives.

Its nature of an unique event make it a collective experiment that continues in the future as it was just the start of a wider process. The most important thing for me was therefore the opportunity to participate in a collective process of learning on the development of collaborative projects. I hope I will be able to translate what I’ve learned with my role as facilitator in the next posts, when I will speak about the methodology used in the working groups of UrbanLabs.

Also in these days also the UrbanLabs 08 main web page is transforming from a presentation of the event and the construction of the first working groups in a database of the contents produced during the event and in a design community of the projects proposed during the event.

Here are the pictures I took at the event, on Flickr (here the pictures of all the participants):

(…to be continued)

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) was a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which was to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability. To this end it seeks to shed more light on cases where subjects and communities use existing resources in an original way to bring about system innovation. From here, it intends to pinpoint the demand for products, services and solutions that such cases and communities express, and point to research lines that could lead to improved efficiency, accessibility and diffusion.

As we can see here, has been selected among the finalist projects for the Compasso d’Oro.

I wrote earlier (here and here) that Creative Communities (bottom-up communities that self-organize to solve local problems in a sustainable way) can be useful in order to spread sustainable behaviour throughout society, as they already show sustainable lifestyles, based on sustainable and fair use of resources.
Designers could support the emergence and diffusion of the Creative Communities, providing them products, communication tools, services and strategies that can help them doing their activities. And an Open P2P Design could manage Open P2P organizational forms and principles as a design tool and as a design goal to support such Creative Communities.

All these cases have been published in a book: “Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living”, Edited by Anna Meroni with essays by: Priya Bala, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Luisa Collina, Bas de Leeuw, François Jégou, Helma Luiten, Ezio Manzini, Isabella Marras, Anna Meroni, Eivind Stø, Pål Strandbakken, Edina Vadovics”

The book is about social innovation as a driver for sustainable technological and production innovation. Adopting a design perspective, it presents several case studies and their providers, the creative communities, where individuals and communities use existing resources in a creative, original way to bring about system innovation.
This book does not set out to give yet another theoretical definition of creativity. Instead it seeks to define creativity through a series of innovative responses to the various problems that crop up in everyday life. So it talks about on-the-field creativity (and therefore innovation) triggered by the real context of needs, resources, principles and capabilities.

Here you can download the book, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 licence:
http://www.sustainable-everyday.net/main/?page_id=19

The aim of the event is to think and propose new projects, practices and usages for cities and citizens, based on existing examples of appropriation of information technology and communication (ICT) and of innovation originating from social demands. The interaction between digital technology, digital culture and citizens’ space provides opportunities for citizen action affecting many different areas and open up potentially more creative and innovative participatory dynamics. These innovations can be translated into new opportunities for socio-economic development and local cultural as well as for strengthening civic networks and their mechanisms of participation in urban governance. The local objective, therefore, from a global perspective and tools.

The news that gives me great satisfaction is that Ramon Sanguesa invitated me to participate as a facilitator for Group A, Productive collaborative innovation: concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field. So this will be a very important opportunity to confront, share and experiment the themes of open innovation for communities and cities through the role of facilitator (enabler).

The intention of the six groups is to enable spaces for conversation, discussion and planning for specific projects related to each of the six subjects. The objectives of the Group A are:

• to work on collaborative innovation for civic-based and business-based projects;
• explore the concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field;
• explore the open and collaborative design; see how the concept of the culture changes after the collaborative and innovative “digital culture”.

Before the event, the pages of each working group the contextual framework and potential contents and projects that may arise, as well as initiatives, are developed in the pages of each working group. Each can be edited by its facilitator and other people interested in attending the working group, while broadening the discussion in the respective discussion page.

Other good reasons to follow this event are the presence of Michel Bauwens from P2P Foundation and of Juan Freire.

Registration is free for the first 100 seats, and then, for organisational reasons, there are still 50 seats reserved with a registration fee of 50 euros. And during those days it will be possible to follow the conference through videostreaming on the website.

I hope you will participate in the website and in the Citilab!