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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With this post (and two following ones) I’m going to explain why I think that Open Design is going mainstream now (here I’m talking about Open Design on broad terms). With these posts I don’t want to say that it is now considered popular and no more controversial, but that it is not underground anymore: it is now finding its place inside the collective imagination.
Since I started researching Open and Collaborative Design practices in 2005, things have changed a lot: there are no more isolated projects but a whole ecosystem is emerging through the weaving of collaborative networks. And since the past year, few signs have been showing clearly that more and more institutional or famous organizations and people are interested in Open Design (or at least in bringing collaboration and crowdsourcing in the design process). If it’s not really mainstream yet, it’s not underground anymore for sure.

01. A novel: Makers

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

02. IDEO and FrogDesign

02.01 OpenIDEO.com

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

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

After some months of designing and prototyping, I am so happy to annouce you that the openp2pdesign.org store page on Lulu.com is now finally open at http://lulu.com/openp2pdesign.
You will find there all the print version of the books published within the openp2pdesign.org project.

The first book you can already find there is the print version of openp2pdesign.org_1.1, which I already published online in September 2008. Three versions are available: one in English, one in Italian and one in Spanish. I had to work further on it in order to print it correctly using Lulu.com’s print service experimenting both with Scribus (I used Scribus 1.3.4 unstable but more advanced version, and it was really unstable and with some bugs) and Lulu.com (I encountered some problems with bleeding and after some prototypes I decided to avoid any elements close to the page margins, due to strange cutting problems with Lulu.com). And after all this experimentation, I decided to publish it only in black and white (but with CMYK cover) because otherwise it would cost too much.
And after this period of experimentation, my knowledge of book designing, printing and publishing has grown very much, and from this moment it will be easier for me to publish a book in the openp2pdesign.org project: expect more books coming in the future!

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Max Barret,
Social Circles

Everyone

A Venn diagram, drawn with light, showing
the 5 different sets of social databases I use:
Hotmail.com contacts, Facebook.com friends,
Myspace.com friends, MSN messenger
contacts and those in my mobile phonebook.
A total of 259 people.

via | manystuff.org

While reading some of my favourite blogs, I stumbled upon two examples of Web 2.0 services that enable people to redesign products or, way better, that crowdsource the redesign process. The first one is RedesignMe.com: Open Innovation in Product Creation

RedesignMe aims to improve the products and services around us by collectively rethinking bad products into better products and good ideas into great ideas

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A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.

First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very different personalities (researchers, bloggers, designers, creatives, psychologists, journalists, programmers)… such knowledge I hope I can put it into practice when I will be the facilitator of one of the working groups of UrbanLabs.

The event was held in the Model Lab of the Scuola Politecnica di Design, and although I had not studied there but at the Politecnico di Milano, I rediscovered the university atmosphere and especially the climate of activation and of laying the foundations for collective projects that only a Model Lab (with all its tools and work desks) could exemplify so well.

Here are the event pictures taken by me and the other participants, on Flickr:

For those who could not attend, the videos were published on the website; you can find the final text of the brainstorming here (and here the related videos). Finally, I recommend you to read the Bonaria Biancu’s post that summarize very well all the interventions placing them within a coherent overall speech.
All the videos and posts regarding individual authors can be consulted on the official website of Sci(bzaar)net, which will remain as a platform for collective discussion about the relationships between Internet, Scientific Research, Dissemination Scientific and Open Culture.

It was certainly a success and an important event: the specific organizational form (halfway between a BarCamp and more traditional conference) and the heterogeneity of the components have shown that they can give an added value to the meeting and the discussion. Rarely we can attend such meetings on these issues and it’s always a pleasure to know other bloggers or persons behind new experiments in person.

I’d like now to summarize my contribution and some brief reflections resulting from the brainstorming. As you can imagine, I have participated as an “Open Culture expert” and not about scientific research/publication. The main idea that I wanted to share with the participants is that we should think about Open Culture not as a simple set of publication practices ( “to publish a specific content with a specific license”) but as a real philosophy based on enabling complex systems. Open Culture is not just use a Creative Commons license: it means to facilitate a system that shares and reuses the information self-organizing independently. Thinking about Open initiatives in a reductionist way, just like the use of a specific license, can only lead to failure.

We can then study how to enable complex systems that follow Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics and imagine what activities of scientific research and dissemination (definition of hypothesis, definition of research, data collection, data analysis, compilation of results, publication, etc.. ) can be opened to these systems.

One of the concerns expressed most frequently during Sci(bzaar)net regards the opportunity to share the research results (under Open Access): why we should do that, when other people could take all the economic benefits and increase problems for those who carry out researches? Certainly it is true, if we consider scientific research and dissemination using pre-Open Culture parameters, that is as activities based on copyright as a means of appropriation of benefits from their information within a market economy. But now we know how Open Peer-to-Peer organisational forms range between market economies and gift economies, protection of intellectual property and information sharing. We can therefore imagine new forms of organisation capable of ensuring economic resources necessary to who performs scientific research.

In this direction, we can find countless opportunities and diversity of organizational forms: the first suggestion comes from Andrea Gaggioli who proposes a crowdfunding service for scientific research.
I hope that this direction will be studied further on the Sci(bzaar)net website.

Finally, here are my presentation and video (which are also available on the official website here):

To design for/with a community means participation, and Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics represent a very strong form of participation, an active one, where the people produces and shares knowledge in order to solve a problem. An Open Peer-to-Peer kind of participation is a recent phenomenon, so it could be very interesting to take a look at how participation has been considered through the years.

And here I’m going to talk about a specific way to analyse and classify participation, regarding it as a ladder.

The first ladder of participation came fron an article written by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 (Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224).

Why use a ladder? Because the most important thing to notice, is that there are different levels of participation, ranging from full participation to fake participation, from being in-control to being under control.

After this one, other ladders of participation have been described: for example the
Ladder of Children’s Participation (also called the Ladder of Youth Participation), from (1997) Roger Hart, Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care, UNICEF:

…that has been adapted as a Ladder of Volunteer Participation too.

(Here and here in Spanish )

…and, guess what, a participation scale has been adapted also for Web 2.0! This image comes from the work of Charlene Li at Forrester (via Steve Rubel). The most striking things is that 52% (the majority) is inactive, but this is not a surprise.

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!