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.

Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available here in English, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License; it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. Just note that the two versions may slightly differ (it happens when you work on two different versions of the same document); the idea is to transform it in a collaborative book in the future, here on openp2pdesign.org.
After the part about Open Hardware, here’s now the second part, about business models for Fab Labs.

Fab Labs and other places for designing and making collaboratively

As we have seen in the previous post, Open Hardware and similar Open projects can grow as communities inside specific places like hackerspaces. Such places are interesting because they are, at the same time, enablers of open and collaborative projects, and business models for them. In this post I will cover Fab Labs, as the most evolved and potentially big places (they could in fact also host hackerspaces) for collaborative projects, and their business models.
Lead by Neil Gershenfeld, the Fab Lab program is part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and it broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation and can be embodied in or abstracted from: the intersection between information theory and industrial design. A Fab Lab (digital fabrication (fabbing laboratory) is a small-scale workshop with an array of computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, democratizing manufacturing technologies previously available only for expensive mass production.
So far Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, various European countries, Afghanistan, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute. The official list of FabLabs is hosted here, while other lists can be found here:

View Fab Labs on Earth in a larger map

There is no formal procedure on how to become a Fab Lab and the process is monitored by the MIT. All the labs around the world are in contact with each other through a common video conferencing system hosted at the MIT which is used for ad-hoc meetings, scheduled conferences and the delivery of the Fab Academy training programme.

Funding a Fab Lab: how much does it cost?

CNN reported that the Center for Bits and Atoms was funded with $14 million by the National Science Foundation in 2001. Anyway, starting a Fab Lab should be much cheaper: Fab Lab Afghanistan (in its wiki) and allbusiness.com reported that a full Fab Lab currently costs about $50,000-$55,000 in equipment and materials without MIT’s involvement. Other sources like ideasexist.com and aps.org reported that a Fab Lab should costs only about $20,000.
In 2009, the Center for a Stateless Society proposed to organize a Fab Lab using open-source tools such as the Fab@Home 3D printer, with resulting costs between $2,000 and $5,000 total. Bart Bakker of Utrecht, Netherlands built one for under € 3000. Another initiative called Replab.org proposed the construction of an open source Fab Lab that costs $12,500.
Tools lists are available on the Center for Bits and Atoms website here and here; there is even a task list for managing a Fab Lab as well.

Running a Fab Lab: Business Models

Even the official Fab Lab Charter (drafted in 2007) recognize that Fab Labs could adopt a business model for commercial activities and roughly defines some guidelines for such models:

Business: commercial activities can be incubated in fab labs but they must not conflict with open access, they should grow beyond rather than within the lab, and they are expected to benefit the inventors, labs, and networks that contribute to their success.

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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.

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After some months of waiting, the documentary about Arduino (the most famous and successful Open Hardware project) is now finally ready and online at http://arduinothedocumentary.org/.
The documentary was made by Rodrigo Calvo Eguren y Raúl Díez Alaejos and it was commissioned by Laboral Centro de Arte, an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain. Moreover, Laboral just opened a Fab Lab last November.

Other interesting resources about Arduino are:

• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?, an article written by Clive Thompson on Wired;
• New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool, a thesis written by Alicia Gibb.

Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Here’s a good video interview to Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi), a computational designer merging code, design, art & craft skills. He is famous for his toxiclibs project, an open source library collection for computational design tasks with Processing.
In this interesting interview Karsten Schmidt talks about the current state of design (graphic design and computational design) and its relationship with open source tools: software and coding are increasingly becoming important tools for designers (and they are changing the design discipline at the same time).

Computational Design from Mark Webster on Vimeo.

via | open architecture open design

Here’s the old good story of LEGO Mindstorms and how they learned that active users can co-create important value with a company (hacking their product / services). But this time, instead of reading this story in a book, we can listen to Eric von Hippel telling it (and we can watch the videoclips too!).

via | digg

For my first post on openp2pdesign.org, I decided to announce you an event I’m organizing together with Dr. Teresa Baptista (Advisor of the Zoological Museum) and Prof. José Fernando Gonçalves (CEARQ Coordinator), the third edition of Arquibio (June 14-18, Coimbra, Portugal).
Arquibio is jointly organized by the Zoological Museum, University of Coimbra, Center for the Study of Architecture, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Coimbra (CEARQ) and collaborators linked to several European and American universities.
Even though it’s not a project born directly from openp2pdesign.org, we decided to put in our projects page as it fits with the Design for Complex Systems issue (and in this case, it’s about designing Complex Architectures learning from Complex Natural Systems).

Arquibio 2010 is a series of international lectures and workshops on topics connecting architecture and design with the “bio-logics”. It is intended that the lecturers and visiting scholars allow a consistent connection between current biological and architectural knowledge bringing light of recent technological advances.

The premise is that the fusion between biological and technological world is now a reality that cannot be ignored. Computers and robotics prove to be capable of releasing the architects and designers of a catalog architecture, based on still images, teaching us new fields of interaction in which complex processes similar to those that occur in nature, take center stage and allow a more consistent connection with the living environment.

The event consists of lectures and three workshops:

1. Bio-Modeling
   Introduction to develop biomorphic models using advance modeling software.
2. Bio-Parametrics
   Advance modeling and explicit programing of parametric and generative models. Production of design and architectonic genotypes.
3. Bio-Machining
   Processes of materialization with CNC machines, relating robotics with architecture and bionic design. Production of phenotypes or physical models.

The aim of its workshops is to study and practice how the complex scientific concepts provided by the observation of biological processes may be connected to architecture professional practice by the creative use of digital technologies. Rhino, Grasshopperand RhinoCAM will be the software used during the workshops.

You can still register for it and attend the workshops and the conference here.

See you there!

After the first movie, here is another one, that maybe you have already discovered while reading the Wikipedia page of Revolution OS. It’s “The Code”, a Finnish-made documentary about Linux from 2001, featuring some of the most influential people of the free software movement. It’s in English with Finnish subtitles (and some small parts are in Finnish).

Back from the November tour and a change of server, rigth now I’m working on opening new sections in openp2pdesign.org, on redesigning the theme and the structure of the whole website and on opening openp2pdesign.org to more participants. As you may understand with this post, I will post only in English now, because it takes too much time to write also in Italian and Spanish at the same time; maybe in the future I will write in those languages again.
Meanwhile, the Twitter page, @openp2pdesign, is still a great place to get news and resources at the same time. And there is also a Facebook Fan Page, for further informations and interactions:

openp2pdesign.org | Promote Your Page Too

So, while you wait for the new website and for new posts, I will post some videos, so you will not get too much bored.
Let’s start with “Revolution OS” a 2001 documentary film which traces the twenty-year history of GNU, Linux, open source, and the free software movement. You can watch it on Google Video or right here:

After FluidForms (read this old post), here is another innovative Swiss company based on mass-customization and user co-created content, mShape.
And they use too multi-layered wood and computer controlled milling machines, but here complexity comes from the behaviour of the users, from their co-creation that generates “a population of tables”.

It’s not an open p2p marketplace, it’s not a peer production example, but it is a very good example of user co-created design. You can’t buy other users’ tables, so it’s not a marketplace and relationships between users are not fostered (nor they are interested in them). Therefore, it’s not a community but a co-creation business/service.
Actually, you can buy an mShape table in two showrooms in Zurich, where:

Our partners can provide you with a Nokia mobile phone for the time of your design

So the most important thing of mShape is that it works using mobile techologies i.e. easy of use tecnologies that have a wide reach. Just note that every project that is strongly based on user participation needs an enabler designer rather than a conventional one, a designer capable of developing a meta-design project where the user will be the conventional designer.
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