Back in March 2010, I was invited at a seminar organized by Ricerca Urbana Milano, in order to explain openp2pdesign.org with other interesting projects from Italy. The seminar took place at the Universitá Statale di Milano, Faculty of Political Science. A nice overview of the event can be read in Italian here.

Il mondo sta cambiando sotto i nostri occhi. Dopo il web 2.0 e il free software, vediamo svilupparsi l’Open Design, l’ Open Hardware e persino l’Open Biotech. Possiamo intravedere nuove relazioni di produzione, nuovi modelli business, nuove forme di organizzazione economica e sociale. Le grandi imprese si adattano e stanno nascendo nuove forme ibride, fra impresa sociale e Open Business. Questo evento intende cominciare ad esaminare la portata di questo fenomeno. Quali sono le tendenze in atto? Cosa succede in Italia? Quali sono i nuovi modelli organizzativi? Cosa bisogna fare per cambiare il mondo?

01.Openwear.org

The event started with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen showing the EDUfashion / openwear.org european project.

EDUfashion is a two-year project financed with the support of the European Commission for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. EDUfashion developed Openwear.org, an online community created for sharing values, accessing to knowledge and practice of collaborative and distributed work. Openwear.org is where makers, fashion producers, small local enterprises, educational institutions can network to participating in the production of a new vision of fashion based on micro-communities and sustainability. They even created their own license for the brand and a brand manual.

We are experiencing a twin trend diffusing across the fashion sector. On the one hand consumer demand is being increasingly oriented toward “ethical” fashion items, meaning no sweatshop, ecologically sustainable, locally produced, and fairly traded apparel. On the other side, we’re witnessing the emergence of self-organized employment focusing on independent, socially engaged, critical and multitasking creative production driven more by communal needs than market imperatives or consumer fads. We think that here lies a new perspective on fashion that can be translated into reality by exploring the forces that are behind these consumer and producer trends.
[...]
EDUfashion project’s main objective is to foster community, collaboration and innovation to provide a new vision and practice for fashion. Our main goal is to support the dissemination of knowledge, skills and practices so to empower a self-managed workforce, in order to create an alternative learning environment for sustainable garment crafting and selling. Itʼll connect various individuals and groups, to enable them to act as small, sustainable enterprises, which will gather under a single open-source participatory brand whose benefits will be shared.

Forward to Basics – Openwear Collaborative Collection Workshop from Openwear on Vimeo.

Openwear Brand Tutorial from Openwear on Vimeo.

02. openp2pdesign.org

I then presented openp2pdesign.org with this presentation (in Italian): (more…)

01. Another Open P2P Design workshop, in Singapore

After the Seoul workshop, I flew to Singapore for another Open P2P Design workshop with Roger Pitiot at the School of Art, Design & Media of the Nanyang Technological University. The Singapore workshop took place as one of the event of the Singapore Design Festival 2009 and was organized with the help of professor Fabrizio Galli, who organized there a workshop that is already almost a FabLab.

I could stay there only few days (just for the workshop), and I could only feel that while Seoul is like a 24-hour fabbing and piracy shop, Singapore is design, business and marketing hub but with no manufacturing inside (just like big companies like Nike, for example). One of the main avenues is not full of design piracy shops like in Seoul but of multiple high-end brands and consumption. And at the same time, in Singapore the coexistence of the four main ethnic groups (Chinese, Malays, Indians, Europeans) is based not on integration but on the tolerance of their diversity, in the the most globalised country in the world.

The workshop was one day shorter than the Seoul one (and the last day was an Islamic Holiday), we started with around 19 students and ended with around 10 students. Luckily, there were no cultural problems like in Seoul (Singapore was a British colony, after all), and even if the students were younger than in Seoul they were really smart and able to understand how Open Systems (and the Open P2P Design methodology) work in just three days. Moreover, we had the opportunity to learn from the Seoul workshop and change few details.

02. Pictures of the workshop

03. Presentations of the lectures

Here are the presentations of the lectures I gave during the workshops:
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Just a quick post: here are my presentations for the first day (What is Open Design?), the second day (What is Open P2P Design) and the fourth day (What Is The Distributed Manufacturing Scenario?). In the next post I will write about what happened in the workshop and the outcome we got.

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Two months ago, I was interviewed by Bertram Niessen for the Digicult magazine, Digimag; that interview was published on the May 2010 issue, n. 54.

DIGICULT is an online/offline Italian platform, created to spread digital art and culture worldwide. It focuses on the impact of new technologies and modern sciences on art, design, culture and contemporary society. DIGICULT is based on participation of more than 40 professionals, representing a wide Italian Network of critics, curators and journalists in the field. DIGICULT is the editor of the magazine DIGIMAG, which focuses on some cultural and artistic issues like internet art, hacktivism, electronica, video art, audiovideo, art & science, design, new media, software art, performing art.

Here is the Italian interview, and here’s their English translation (both are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license). Here it is, without the images (go to the original magazine for them and for Bertram’s introduction), but with more links I’ve added and a little bit of editing:

Bertram Niessen: Reading through your website, the subjects of posts range from social service design to car design. How would you then define open p2p design field of application/action?

Massimo Menichinelli: Open P2P Design is the proposal of a new design methodology for the co-designing of open and peer-to-peer collaborative activities with/for communities, through an indeed open and shared process aimed to co-design such active collaborations. A community-centered design, in short. I began developing this method in reaction to a lack: albeit the presence of an interest in replicating open and p2p organizational patterns, this issue has been researched uniquely through implementing the use of dedicated software and technologies so far, without a proper social planning (with sometimes ineffective results).

The fields in which this can be applied are potentially vast and still being defined. Think about the various cases of open methods implementation: we go from biotechnologies to mineral processing, like Goldcorp Inc. used them for! In sum, these systems can be applied to any activity we are aiming to turn into an open and collaborative one, or on top of that wherever it is thought that a cooperative activity might solve a specific issue through the presence of active participants.

Open P2P Design is not the design of communicative artifacts neither commodities, but rather the design of a collaborative activity (for instance design of services and other activities), which would itself be dedicated to the issue to be tackled (maybe then through the collaborative design of a communicative artifact or some commodity). I chose not to bound Open P2P Design action field solely to design since it would be limiting and also because it can actually represent a further way to diffuse open and peer-to-peer principles and dynamics.

As a general principle, the Open P2P Design method can be applied wherever we desire to arise a collaborative activity, both in already existing communities and in ones to be created.

We can develop cooperative activities within firms businesses as well as collaborate with them to create community-based cooperative businesses. An example of this are Open Innovation initiatives, where instead of merely catching information or offering activities where users/communities don’t have an option to intervene, it is chosen to really co-create together with a community the development of open innovation. We can also initiate collaborations within a firm, in case the sole adoption of a software appears to be insufficient to generate the aimed collaboration (i.e. the current Enterprise 2.0 approach).

On top of that we might even develop community-based businesses, as it happened with the GiffGaff telephone company, in which some of the company tasks are performed by users (and examples might continue with mass customization). I also believe users and communities must be involved in ‘bottom of the pyramid‘ targeted businesses, in order to avert inadequate suggestions (see The Onion satirical article in this regard), establishing an equal debate instead.

Concerning public administration, it is interesting to examine the Open Government form: this definition presently refers to the publication of government owned data, put under open licenses in order to facilitate citizens and organizations to independently visualize and present them. This move aims to increase institutions’ transparency in order to allow citizens to be more aware of public management and hence making aware choices. A big step forward, nonetheless we could push ourselves further, for instance developing open p2p and collaborative public services, as the RED Unit of the Design Council did in Britain. A further step forward might be turning activities that are now governments’ and public administrations’ prerogative activities into open, collaborative ones, as the documentary “Us Now” thoroughly shows .

Finally, public administrations can adopt this method in case they might need/want to develop collaborative networks within a definite territory or city, concerning the field of social development enterprises willing to reinforce local social and economic networks.

Furthermore, this system can be applied in order to develop creative projects such as Open Hardware and Open Design conceived as Open Product Design as well as Open Web Design, Open Interaction Design, Open Font Design, Open Movie Design, Open Game Design, Open Architecture and Open Fashion Design, just to give some examples.
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A quick announcement: Michel Bauwens, Belgian philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist, founder of the P2P Foundation, is going to be in Milan in these days and he’s going to give two lectures.

Here’s the first one:

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Aula 12, Scienze Politiche, Università di Milano
Street: via Conservatorio 7
City/Town: Milano, Italy

And here is the second one:

Date: Friday, March 20, 2009
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Politecnico di Milano
Street: Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32. Ala Nord, Chiostro Edificio N.
City/Town: Milan, Italy

I’m going to attend the second one, I hope to see you there… And if you cannot be there, remember that you can watch the second lecture in streaming online here: http://live.laureaonline.it/intlessons/ where you can also ask questions and chat with Michel Bauwens.

And here’s the abstract of the lectures:

TITLE: Peer to Peer as an economic and ethical revolution

Abstract:
A long-standing historical problem with social alternatives has been that none have them have been more productive than the for-profit alternatives, or at least not, in the context of the existing balance of power. However, a combination of technical and social trends has produced a historically novel situation that challenges this state of affairs. Internet-based tecnical infrastructures have made it possible to scale small-group dynamics to the level of global coordination of highly complex social artefacts that produce common value for self-aggregating peer producers; deep changes in ways of being, knowing and feeling have produced a new set of open and free, participatory, and commons-oriented paradigms that are changing the structure of desire of emerging generations.
Remarkably, the new set of social practices, i.e. peer production, peer governance, and peer property, are both strengthening the current political economy, (much as emerging capitalism did for the flagging feudal system from the 16th century onwards), but also undermining it through a systemic crisis of value, while also pointing to post-capitalist alternatives that may want day supplant the core of the current system.
This lecture by the founder of the P2P Foundation will examine the impact of peer production as a challenge to the current political economy and present different scenarios for the future of social change, especially in the context of the current meltdown.

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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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Thanks to Stefano Mizzella, we have an interview with Gianandrea Giacoma about Sci(bzaar)net (in Italian) that summarizes the event’s main themes and conclusions. The interview can be found on the last number of 7thfloor magazine and here on Scribd:

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Here is the presentation for the lesson I gave yesterday at Politecnico di Milano, Laboratorio di Sintesi Finale Paesaggi in Corsa (P1 – I1).

presentazione_Menichinelli_24-10-2007_Polimi.pdf, (3.2 Mb, in Italian)

Next week, on 24th October 2007, I’m going to give a lesson at the Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà del Design, where I am a project expert (or assistant professor, if you prefere) in the Laboratorio di Sintesi Finale P1 course.

Right now I’m working on the presentation, and I think it’s going to be a synthesis of two lessons I gave (as a project expert) in the previous year Laboratorio di Sintesi Finale course Uomo<>Product Design<>Territorio, Academic Year 2006-2007.

Meanwhile, here there are the presentations for the previous two lessons on (in Italian, on slideshare.net).