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.

(more…)

In February 2010 I was invited to give a lecture about Open P2P Design and to be part of the jury for the students’ projects in the Open Source Design class (one of the few first classes ever organized):

This course this oriented to the design, generation and production of an open source and shared platform to promote the online exchange of knowledge, this will permit to prompt the customization and personalization of elements as furniture. The goal is to create an Internet based interface (web 3.0) that will allow to interchange, share, download and upload designs all over the world.

I was invited by Marta Malé-Alemany, and the other members of the jury were Lucas Cappelli, José Pérez de Lama (from hackitectura.net and Universidad de Sevilla), Areti Nikolopoulou (from The commons factory together with José Pérez de Lama), Mara Balestrini.

While I was in Cáceres for the Creative Cities in Imagination Society: 5th Congress of Creativity and Innovation I had the chance to met some friends, including Olivier Olivier Schulbaum from Platoniq and Domenico di Siena from Ecosistema Urbano.
Domenico was very kind to record me for a video interview in Spanish about the relationships between Design and Public Space.
He had already asked me for a larger written interview in Spanish (we’ll see some publication from him on this interesting subject soon), and here it is after the video.

Interview: the text below is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

00 – Presentación

Soy Massimo Menichinelli, diseñador/investigador. Desde el marzo 2005, me intereso a las relaciones entre el Diseño y el Territorio, las Comunidades y la Complejidad y a como utilizar estrategias, procesos y herramientas Open Source / P2P en estas relaciones. Estas líneas de investigación nacieron con mi tesis, desarrollada cuando el fenómeno de las formas de organización Open Source y P2P empezaba a pasar del software y de las TIC a un número mucho más amplio de campos.
Mi propuesta es la adaptar el diseño estrategico y de servicios para co-diseñar con/para una comunidad una actividad colaborativa basada en formas de organización parecidas a las del Software Libre, Open Source, Peer-to-Peer y de la Web 2.0. La web y el proyecto openp2pdesign.org nacieron con el fin de publicar, difundir y desarrollar estos temas, y ahora también para construir una red de diseñadores/investigadores, publicar libros, facilitar talleres, desarrollar proyectos complejos, abiertos o para comunidades y localidades.

01 – ¿Qué entiendes por espacio público? (definición)

Como diseñador, tengo que decir que el mundo del diseño no ha tenido muchas relaciones con el concepto de espacio publico hasta hace unos años; mientras antes el enfoque industrial era muy sencillo (el espacio urbano es un espacio vacio que tiene que ser rellenado con mobiliario urbano de diseño), ahora el mundo del diseño se està interesando al espacio publico también con una vision más estratégica y compleja (diseño estratégico, diseño de servicios, diseño para localidades y ciudades…).
En los últimos años (desde el 2000), el mundo del diseño ha empezado a interesarse de la dimensión local, entendida como el conjunto de las características del territorio a que se dirige el proyecto y donde nace el proyecto. El territorio de los usuarios y de los diseñadores: más en general, el territorio de todos los stakeholder. (more…)

One week after being in Helsinki, I went to Cáceres, for the Creative Cities in Imagination Society: 5th Congress of Creativity and Innovation where I gave a workshop about using the Open P2P Design methodology in cities in order to experiment with social and economic innovation starting with citizenship creativity. I have to say that I was struck by the perfect organization of such a big event, in region that I’ve been told is the poorest of Spain!

You can find my presentation, in Spanish, here.

As I had very little time for the workshop, I decided to use it to explain the Open P2P Design methodology to the participants instead of trying to do something. I had also prepared a short guide/toolkit, written in Spanish, for developing Open P2P Design projects that I published online on Issuu and Scribd and that I gave to the participants.
You can also download it from the Source section: Open P2P Design, co-diseñar una actividad colaborativa abierta con/para una comunidad y su localidad (223)
(more…)

After the first post about UrbanLabs, and the second one with the slideshow I presented there, I’m going to talk now about the methodology we adopted within the groups, and how they self-organized.

01. Methodology: Open Space Technology

We adopted the Open Space Technology:

Open Space Technology (OST) offers a method to run meetings of groups of any size. (“Technology” in this case means tool — a process; a method.) OST represents a self-organising process; participants construct the agenda and schedule during the meeting itself.
[...]
OST meetings have a single facilitator who initiates and concludes the meeting and explains the general method. The facilitator has no other role in the meeting and does not control the actual gathering in any way.

Here you can find more resources about Open Space Technology:

• http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm
• http://www.openingspace.net/openSpaceTechnology_method.shtml
• http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/does-open-facilitation-favour-groupthink/2008/10/06

It is therefore a design methodology based on self-organizing groups, and we can consider it as a real participative design methodology. And as I was the facilitator (or enabler) of the Group A about Collaborative Activities and Open Innovation, I hade the chance to test it and learn a lot about such participative dynamics.

I’ve already said that the event was a collective experimentation that goes on in the future, a collective learning process about designing collaborative projects. It was an event where really everyone learnt so much: organizers, facilitators, participants. Maybe because it was its first edition, or perhaps because social systems always generate new networks and situations every time. In fact, with this methodology UrbanLabs became a self-organizing Community with open and peer-to-peer processes: an Open P2P Community with a marketplace participation. What we tried to do was facilitate the participants self-organize in groups in order to start designing projects and building new networks.

I’ve already explained the methodology within the slideshow I presented, here I suggest you some videos in order to understand it more easily.
What’s important about Open Space Technology and its roles and laws, is that it is a tool to make the most of the workshop groups’ scarce resources (time and participants) in order to let all the participants find their own way to participate and enjoy the event.

Here’s a video of an Open Space unconference described in three minutes:

(more…)

After my first impressions, here is my slideshow I used on the first day of UrbanLabs. I was given the possibility to held a brief presentation before the participants in the group proposed some projects and then started to gather in order to talk about those projects.
We all were not sure about presentations, because we had so little time for the groups, but I tried to give this presentation (and it was my first presentation about Open P2P Design in Spanish) in order to give the group a starting point and a direction for the projects.

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.

(more…)

And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.

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!

A complexity culture, especially in the design field, has to pass through the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity too.
Therefore, projects that derive from concepts of complexity, even if just superficially (and so are not complex nor systemic projects) are important for their ability to spread in society an aesthetics of complexity.

Such a project can be complexcity, designed by Lee Jang Sub and hand-made produced by the Spanish enterprise Granada Design.

This project is an exploration to find a concealed aesthetic by using the pattern formed by the roads of the city which have been growing and evolving randomly through time, thus composing the complex configuration we experience today.

I perceive the city’s patterns as living creatures that I recompose to form an urban image.

This project which started from Seoul where I was born and have grown in, is expanding to other cities all over the world.

Lee Jang Sub

In this project, the complexity is a mere decorative expedient: the shape is Euclidean and two-dimensional, the function limited to pure decoration and the production-distribution-consumption system is extremely conventional. Therefore, it is not a real complex project, but the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity (and in this case, the complexity of a territory), passes necessarily through such initiatives.

via | mocoloco

Cobo Romaní, Cristóbal; Pardo Kuklinski, Hugo. 2007. Planeta Web 2.0. Inteligencia colectiva o medios fast food. Grup de Recerca d’Interaccions Digitals, Universitat de Vic. Flacso México. Barcelona / México DF.
Versión 0.1
http://www.planetaweb2.net/

The first book about Web 2.0 I suggested to you was composed of three different perspectives, while this one is more organic and linear. And very interesting!

Now it’s just a matter of time, to read it carefully and waiting for the next versions!