Genomineerde Rotterdam designprijs 2011: Waag Society – Open Design from Premsela, The Netherlands Inst. on Vimeo.

Continuing the serie of interviews about Open Design, DIY, Fabbing and related issues, I have now the pleasure to interview Bas van Abel. Bas works as a Creative Director at Waag Society, where he co-founded of Waag Society’s FabLab, directs the Open Design Lab and edited the Open Design Now book. By the way, don’t forget to vote for Bas’ and Waag’s work about Open Design here on the Rotterdam Design Prize website.

Bas van Abel: Amsterdam probably has the largest creative industry in The Netherlands with a big focus on innovation, which is a great context for open design and Fablabs. Waag Society has always been an influential organization in this Dutch – and Amsterdam creative industry on the policy and institutional level. With the Fablab we’ve created a making and meeting place for everyone to get involved from both a top level (municipality, education) and grass roots level (designers, artist, individuals, SME’s).

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society promotes the idea of open source and related issues like Open Data, Open Design, Open Content and O pen Hardware. How can they interact and mix in common projects?

Bas van Abel: All of these issues share common principles, though the infrastructure needed (licensing, tools, methods) are very specific. There are also big differences in the maturity of the domains. For open source software there is a clear definition, it has it’s own cultural background, the tools are ready available and there are successful business models. Open design and open wetware for example are far from clearly defined. Therefore I think it is important to specifically experiment on different domains and get a clear image of the needs and implications before creating cross-over projects. That doesn’t mean off-course that you shouldn’t use open source software for creating open design platforms. It is just about where you put the focus of your research.

Massimo Menichinelli: While hackerspaces usually start independently, it seems that Fab Labs always start within an existing institution: a foundation, a school, a museum.. Why do you think this happens? How could we use this strategy to start a new Fab Lab?

Bas van Abel: The idea of the Fablab is easy to comprehend and to adopt. The potential is clear and it functions as a huge global innovation hub, based on collaboration and sharing with a clear distributed organization model. It creates economic benefits and it prepares us for a future industrial model. This makes it very attractive for institutions to host such a lab. It connects easily to existing programs and structures, opposed to a more “chaotic” hackerspace.
Furthermore, the whole context makes it fairly easy for institutions to get funding to start a lab.

Meet My Maker from Waag Society on Vimeo.

Massimo Menichinelli: Waag Society is collaborating with Droog Design for the open design project “Design for Download”. What are the possible business models for Open Design, and could the collaboration with Droog Design make it less controversial and more popular?

Bas van Abel: I’d like to make something clear first. For me, being able to download design based on a new industrial model doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s Open Design. Shapeways and Ponoko are doing this as well and I wouldn’t call them Open Design platforms. They are however part of the context of open design. Droog approached it from this industrial perspective, while our perspective was from a more social disruptive one. I think they are very much related (a new industrial model will change social, economic and political modes), but the approach is different. That was also the exciting part about this collaboration.

The technical framework we have been developing within the collaboration is very similar to what Ponoko is doing with it’s maker system. Though the “design for download” business models are much more consumer oriented. We’ve been looking at the added value for consumers if you have on demand production and DIY production. With on demand production the business models are based on distributed production (could be a Fablab) and the consumer experience is in using the tools to design part their own product. With DIY production the focus of the business models are much more on services from DIY facilities. Making becomes part of the consumer product experience.

And about making Open Design less controversial with the collaboration with Droog Design, I think this definitely contributed to the acceptance within “design culture”, but we have been working on several projects, which have helped making open design more popular. We are very excited by our Open Design Lab nomination for the Rotterdam Design Prize, which is a great acknowledgment on the importance of Open Design.

Massimo Menichinelli: What do you think Open Design will be: users fabbing professional designers’ projects or designers and users collaborating in the design process? Or will there be a division between bottom-up user-driven design and elite professional designers’ and companies’ projects?

Bas van Abel: Yes, yes and yes. To me open design is about ownership and responsibility. Openness is a way of creating transparency. We need more transparency in general to be more emphatic with the things created around us. Open design is just part of this change towards more transparency. What this does to the role of the designer is just a small aspect of this change. More transparency will have an impact on society as a whole.

Massimo Menichinelli: The digital fabrication ecosystem at the moment consists of onlice services (like Shapeways), Fab Labs, hackerspaces, commercial high-end tools and cheap open hardware tools. Chris Anderson even suggested to manufacture DIY and Open products in China. How will these interact among each other?

Bas van Abel: You only have to look at the current shanzhai developments in Shenzhen to see where this is going in China. There hackerspaces are popping up working on all kinds of open design/hardware projects based on micro-manufacturing. It’s where the economic benefits of open and community based small-scale manufacturing are taking shape. Shanzhai has for a while been seen as piracy, but it is far past that and turning into a true open grassroots manufacturing model.

A very interesting conversation on the future impact of Shanzhai can be found here: http://www.iftf.org/ShanzhaiFutures

Will Open Design have a place within traditional manufacturing companies or will it work only with individual or community-based fabbing?

Digital production, online platforms for knowledge sharing, information access, exchange systems and social networks radically change the structure of society.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we have been building in mass production, a non-transparent, centralized and closed system. There is still a big gap between the principles and drivers in our “digital world” and our “physical world”. Open design, hackerspaces, shanzhai, Fablabs, DIY… they are all moving towards closing this gap.

Looking at the future, I believe we are heading for a world where our societal, industrial and economical models will be based on the same principles we use in our current communication systems. It’s distributed, social and transparent.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design and Fab Labs need tools (software, manufacturing machines, etc..) but also supply chains, partnerships, services, … How can we design a system that enables people to develop Open Design projects?

Bas van Abel: When you’re talking about the open source part of open design, we need to know what is the source of design. This is a far more complicated question than with software, though I think it is possible to start creating systems for this. I always see the analogy with cooking. You have a very culturally embedded local production with local ingredients, but you also have an international exchange system in the form of recipes. On top of that the production facilities (the kitchen) and the tools are pretty standardized. If you take this to open design, a common design language for exchange could be layered the same way. Our kitchen is for example the Fablab and the local materials, the recipes are the instructions and finely the secret ingredient is your designer signature.

Off-course we also need to create collaboration systems etc., but I think a common language is where we have to start. Only this way we can truly work in an open and distributed way.

Massimo Menichinelli: Open Design now seems to be based on small individual projects instead of large, collaborative and community-based projects. What I’m trying to do with Open P2P Design is to start the design process from communities (or at least include them in it) helping them to self-organize a collaborative design process. What do you think about this issue?

Bas van Abel: Good luck ;-) !
It sounds a bit corny, but I think the biggest open design project we are working on is society itself. Design is more and more being used as a mechanism to solve societal issues. Within this context, design processes need to be open, transparent and reciprocal. We need systems that are able to organize this ongoing and ever changing design process. Open P2P Design is a great initiative, which I think reflects one of our current societal challenges.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree with this idea? How could we further explore it?

Bas van Abel: Like I said, I believe Open design creates transparency, which creates more ownership, which creates more responsibility. Open design is therefore a driver for a more responsible, emphatic society, where efficiency is not based on purely on costs, but also on conditions, energy and relevance.

Also, if we want to drive towards a next industrial revolution we also have to develop new energy sources. A great vision on industrial revolutions has been defined by Jeremy Rifkin, who stresses the critical combination of new energy and communication systems to drive industrial revolutions. We have a distributed communication system, but we still work with central energy systems. Fablabs and open design can be great platforms for developing distributed renewable energy systems.

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?
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Following the previous post, let’s still talk about Open Design in the Fashion Design sector and about the EDUfashion project (and its openwear.org brand). Few weeks ago I was invited in their event: EDUfashion Conference – Refashioning fashion: new scenarios of clothing – 2nd June 2011.

I didn’t talk about Open P2P Design and how to co-design open processes and systems; instead I talked about the business models behind the current Open and DIY projects. Running an Open business is part of the big theme “how to co-design open systems”, and it’s something I’m increasingly investigating more and more (and it seems there is a lot of interest in it).
Here’s my presentation; soon I will blog about a longer presentation about the same issues I gave in Berlin few days later:

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After the interview with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen from Openwear.org, I have now the pleasure to interview Peter Troxler, an independent researcher (see his personal website here) and one of the few researchers (if not the only one) that are investigating the business models of Fab Labs and Open Design.
Peter Troxler is also one of the editors of the forthcoming Open Design Now book and runs Square One, an independent research company at the intersection of business administration, society and technology. He has also been an instructor at Fab Academy and Business Developer at Fab Lab Luzern.

Peter Troxler: I am not entirely sure this assessment is actually correct. Let’s look at the two topics, Fab Labs and Open Design, seperately.

01. Fab Labs
It is obvious that the Netherlands has seen a quick growth in number of Fab Labs — from one in 2007/2008 to 6 labs (on the official list and 3 more (mobile, Maastricht, Enschede) that are not on the list now (2010/11). Also, with 9 Labs for 16 million inhabitants this is probably the highest density; the US has 19 Fab Labs for 311 million of people (at this density the Netherlands would only have 1 Fab Lab).

But we should not forget, that Fab Labs are only one player in the fabbing universe; there are Tech Shops, Hacker Spaces, “Offene Werkstätten” (in Germany) etc. that also provide a personal manufacturing infrastructure. According to hackerspaces.org, Germany has some 56 HS, about 40 “Offene Werkstätten” and a handful of Fab Lab initiatives.
And I am just starting to understand what’s going on in France …

So the apparent pole position of the Netherlands might need to be taken “cum grano salis”.

Probably another element helped spread the Fab Lab idea in the Netherlands: the fact that it is just such a small and relatively densely populated country. Ideas can spread really quickly, and that might be the reason why many things are adopted quickly over here.

2. Open Design

Open Design is somewhat vaguely defined. And open design in general is very much in its infancy. If you restrict it to open source type approaches in industrial/product design, you’ll find pockets of it in Berlin, the Dutch Randstad, and probably the Bay Area (US). If you look at fashion, open design has a longer history, and maybe Italy might figure more prominently on the map.

An interesting aside in this context is, that Asian artists/designers traditionally used to get more cudos by copying old masters while the Western culture (at least as of the 19th century romantic illusion of the lone creator as promoted by Diderot) seems more inclined to admire “original creation”.

But then there is the whole area of design where we talk about hardware and electronics — there the Netherlands figure probably not even as second runner up, but you would have to analyse open hardware project collections such as those of Make Magazine and Kerstin Balka’s http://open-innovation-projects.org/ to get some idea of national figure — I have not done that so far and actually don’t intend to do that.

It’s difficult to say, why the Netherlands would be the fore-runner of Fab Labs and Open Design.

What strikes me is that the Netherlands also have one of the least transparent and “greedy” ecosystem of private organisations collecting royalties for all sorts of intellectual property (there seem to be over 20 organisations in the Netherlands collecting (and allegedly re-distributing) such fees).

Having said that, one could think that actually this country is sort of obsessed with dealing with intellectual property. The Netherlands is — to my knowledge — the only country where the national Creative Commons chapter received substantial government funding over a prolonged period of time. It is certainly highly speculative to use that as an explanation for the apparent attention for Open Design in the Netherlands.

Similarly, one would also have to speculate about the role of design in general in the Dutch society — at least in the national self-perception Dutch Design is almost equalled to a (if not *the*) international benchmark of good design. This creates an environment where it is not unlikely that all sorts of off-mainstream projects do get to benefit from the critical mass interested in the overall topic.

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…)

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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I’m very happy to say that a Design Research Initiative that influenced me very much during the development of my thesis has been selected among the finalist projects for the most important Italian Design Award.

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.
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During the last six months I have been honoured to work as the administrator of the website, newsletter and blog of the Changing the Change conference, which will be held in Turin on 10th-11th-12th of July 2008:

http://www.changingthechange.org

This conference will be an international social event dedicated to study how design (and especially design research) could help society change its direction towards a sustainable one. During these months a newsletter has been preparing the path towards the conference, and it can be read now in the main website and commented on the blog.

Here are the direct link to the newsletters:

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A very interesting post by Jamais Cascio, about four different possible future scenarios, with sustainability, technology and organizational forms in mind. We should note that, according to him, open source and distributed organizational forms can lead to two different scenarios, a positive one and a negative one.
Yes, open and peer-to-peer organizational forms promising, but aren’t just perfect! I already wrote some months ago, that we could use them for unsustainable projects too, therefore we should study them to understand how to apply them and where!

Drivers

The four boxes represent a variety of “response” scenarios, each embracing elements of the prevention, mitigation, and remediation approaches to solving the climate crisis. Certain approaches may receive greater emphasis in a given scenario, but all three types of responses can be seen in each world.

The first driver is Who Makes the Rules?, with end-points of Centralized and Distributed. This driver looks at the locus of authority regarding the subject (in this case, climate responses) — are outcomes dependent upon choices made by top-down, centralized leadership, or made by uncoordinated, distributed decision-making?
[...]
The second driver is How Do We Use Technology?, with end-points of Precautionary and Proactionary. This driver looks not at the pace of technological change (something of a canonical scenario driver), but at our political and social approaches to the deployment of new tools and systems.

Scenarios

The combination of these two drivers give us four distinct worlds.

“Power Green” — Centralized and Proactionary: a world where government and corporate entities tend to exert most authority, and where new technologies, systems and response models tend to be tried first and evaluated afterwards. This world is most conducive to geoengineering, but is also one in which we might see environmental militarization (i.e., the use of military power to enforce global environmental regulations) and aggressive government environmental controls. “Green Fascism” is one form of this scenario; “Geoengineering 101″ from my Earth Day Essay is another.

“Functional Green” — Centralized and Precautionary: a world in which top-down efforts emphasize regulation and mandates, while the deployment of new technologies emphasizes improving our capacities to limit disastrous results. Energy efficiency dominates here, along with economic and social innovations like tradable emissions quotas and re-imagined urban designs. The future as envisioned by Shellenberger and Nordhaus could be one form of this scenario; the future as envisioned by folks like Bill McDonough or Amory Lovins could be another. Arguably, this is the default scenario for Europe and Japan.

“We Green” — Distributed and Precautionary: a world in which collaboration and bottom-up efforts prove decisive, and technological deployments emphasize strengthening local communities, enhancing communication, and improving transparency. This is a world of micro-models and open source platforms, “Earth Witness” environmental sousveillance and locavorous diets. Rainwater capture, energy networks, and carbon labeling all show up here. This world (along with a few elements from the “Functional Green” scenario) is the baseline “bright green” future.

“Hyper Green” — Distributed and Proactionary: a world in which things get weird. Distributed decisions and ad-hoc collaboration dominate, largely in the development and deployment of potentially transformative technologies and models. This world embraces experimentation and iterated design, albeit not universally; this scenario is likely to include communities and nations that see themselves as disenfranchised and angry. Micro-models and open source platforms thrive here, too, but are as likely to be micro-ecosystem engineering and open source nanotechnology as micro-finance and open source architecture. States and large corporations aren’t gone, but find it increasingly hard to keep up. One form of this scenario would end with an open source guerilla movement getting its hands on a knowledge-enabled weapon of mass destruction; another form of this scenario is the “Teaching the World to Sing” story from my Earth Day Essay.

via | Beyond the Beyond

Seal Ecosystem: the Food Web (detail)

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04

Why Design should learn how to relate to Complexity to understand Sustainability?

Because, according to me, the lack of understanding the unsustainability of society is also a problem of lack of understanding the complexity of the natural, social and economic (complex) systems in which we live. The attempt of reduction (or overappreciation) of Complexity has born with Modernity, that has applied it to the social, natural and territorial systems (leading us towards the unsustainability we face now).
For Rullani¹ Modernity (and in special way the great fordist company) generates artificial environments with reduced complexity, that let one control the behaviour of the agents. And a modernity that proceeds reducing the complexity of the human and social dimension has few points of contact with the territory, that is a layered and localized synthesis of history, culture and of relations between men and the ecosystem. In the theory and the practice of the modern economy, the territory has disappeared; artificial spaces with a a reduced complexity for the convenience of calculation have replaced it.
A territory without complexity is a territory without quality, one of the many places (or non-places²), accumulations produced by the economic algorithm. If Design is interested about the territory (to improve its quality), it must face this complexity.

This reductionist strategy has been proving, during the years, to be effective only in the short term, having increased instead problems and secondary effects in the long term, especially on the sustainability side. Nowadays, most of the people still to consider sustainability in a reductionist way, searching single practical and technological solutions to single problems, and not systemic solutions for the complexity of the social system.

However, there is an emerging awareness of the importance of facing complexity to attain sustainability, through the reevaluatiion of the local dimension as the specific place of action. The complexity of the society and of the ecosystems in which it resides demand the understanding of the hidden connections at the local and global scale. In order to understand where the economical practices (and therefore also the design practices) are leading us, we must understand the hidden connections between the economic, social and natural systems, and the feedback that they generate between each other. Sustainability, at the local and globl level, has an unavoidable complex dimension.

Our society, our economy, and the ecosystems in which we live (and from which we draw resources) are complex systems that interact between each other; the lack of understanding of their connections (and therefore of their complexity) leads to the lack of understanding of the initiatives that are really necessary for reaching sustainability. In a complex system, the connections between all the elements of the system represent the architecture that supports it and allows is survival. The elimination of a single element can provoke unpredictable effects, eventually leading to the collapse of the entire system (in an ecosystem, for example, all the living beings in it). And therefore the same thing happens also in the social system and the economic system: every action (also the design ones) must be thought without underestimating the complexity and the connections between the elements.

Seal Ecosystem: the Food Web (whole)

In these connections between social, economic and natural systems, the designer lives and therefore Design acts, and it can perhaps learn from the Open P2P Communities how to manage this variety of elements and directions. The diversity is the main characteristic of the nature and the foundation of the ecological stability, and the Open P2P Communities introduce some suitable practices to valorize the diversity of their own participants, succeeding in the construction of a collective intelligence based on an open and tolerant peer-to-peer learning.

Open P2P organizational forms and principles are very defined, but still loose in some way, that there is someone that believes they represent Anarchy, Communism, perfect free market and therefore Capitalism, or that they are not Communism (or something similar), or maybe a radically different phenomenon, that we should study better.

Therefore, it’s possible to study how to modify and apply these community-based organizational forms, as they can be adapted to many situations: their flexibility has made them so widespread. We could use Open P2P organizational forms in order to diffuse questionable activities like military activities, control activities, or activities that, with an increase of their scale, could lead to an increase pollution and the gap between rich and poor (representing an awful future). Or we could use them in order to diffuse sustainable activities from the social, economic and natural point of view.

We can see these organizational forms like a box: they have a shape (the values and practices), but it is the content that give them a sense and a direction. A content that it must be adapted to the shape of the box, but we have seen that it is flexible enough: it is necessary therefore to decide which contents we should use. As this organizational forms are so suitable to manage complexity, it is possible to choose them for complex entities such as the territory and its sustainability, and therefore for a Design directed to this issues.

Design, Locality, Open Source, P2P, Web 2.0… are therefore the center of my research (and of this website), but I’m going to analyze them from the complexity and sustainability point of view. And I’m going to analyze all the cases that are not explicitly related to sustainabilty, as they could be useful in order to understand how to spread sustainable activities.

Then we should know something more about Open P2P Communities and about how Design can be used for them…

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2002) Rullani E., Il distretto industriale come sistema adattativo complesso, in Quadrio Curzio A., Fortis M. (a cura di), complessità e distretti industriali: dinamiche, modelli, casi reali, Il Mulino, Bologna [↩]
2. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Verso, London & New York 1995 [↩]