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:

The event was very nice and insightful and it was great to finally have time to do something together with Openwear.org. Furthermore, it confirms that Open Design has a really great place in the fashion industry (something I must confess I was’t aware before meeting the people from Openwear.org 2 years ago). Among the many interesting speakers, I’d like to outline the presentation of Jen Ballie, a PhD student at the Textile Futures Research Group and Consultancy whose research is about the intersection of co-design, web 2.0 and sustainability for the fashion industry.

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.

All challenges posted will be for social good, meaning that they won’t be used for commercial projects. In time, IDEO may use the same platform as part of their client work for closed challenges (that won’t appear on OpenIDEO). It seems therefore that it is for social and non-commercial goals now, but at the same time it’s a research about using the same approach (that is, more Open Innovation that real Open Design) to the commercial side of IDEO.

Beside this, IDEO is already planning the launching of its design for social innovation division IDEO.org for the fall of 2011 (here’s an interesting interview about it).
IDEO.org is seeking individuals for the 2012 fellowship class: residents will join senior designers from IDEO to form IDEO.org’s interdisciplinary design team for an 11-month period. In order to chose these residents, candidates are asked to fill an online application and also to participate in an OpenIDEO Challenge.

Even if the concept is not completely Open Design (there is no real collaboration like in Open Source and the licenses used are not completely clear or Open), it is a very important project that IDEO designed carefully. They especially paid attention to the problem of metrics: how do we measure collaboration, the work of every participant and the state of the community?
I will return on this issue in the future, since it’s critical for the development of Open Design and any open projects (and therefore of Open P2P Design, that enables them). For the moment, the approach of OpenIDEO is an interesting case:

The Design Quotient (DQ) is a measure of your contributions to OpenIDEO. It corresponds to how active you are in the inspiration, concepting, and evaluation phases of a challenge. It also measures your collaboration, increasing every time you comment or build on other people’s inspirations and concepts. When you take part in a challenge, you build up your DQ by accruing points.

A DQ can help to publicly identify your design expertise and strengths. Maybe you’re excellent at providing inspiration that shapes the conversation, or you’re great at building off of others’ ideas. Share it with your friends, colleagues, teachers, and even potential employers to give them some insight into what you’re best at.

02.02 frogMob

Another renowned design and innovation consultancy, Frog Design, has started being interested in bringing mass collaboration inside the design process developing frogMob, “an experimental method of guerilla research”. This is clearly not a case of Open Design, but of Crowdsourcing: there is no real collaboration, but only challenges offered to any internet surfer (i.e. the crowd) that can then help Frog Design in developing design research of existing solutions worldwide.

frogMob is an open, crowdsourced approach to research [...] frogMob gives us the opportunity to rapidly identify patterns across markets and geographies, and ultimately glean inspiration from unexpected sources.

frogMob is not about real etnographic research, but it looks just for “small adaptations invented by real people”: it began as an internal experiment, and now it is publicly open to participants. It seems like a business version of a Wikipedia of product hacking done by users: they’re not yet co-designers, but this is one of the first steps in that direction.

Incentives are very basic: you participate because you’d like to play an active role in Frog Design’s design process, engaging in a dialogue with Frog Design’s research teams, and then you can get your submission featured on the online and print magazine design mind. Submissions are voluntary and unpaid, and participants own the rights to their content (see the term of use).

02.03 Thomas Sutton (Frog Design) talking about Open Innovation (and Design)

Frog Design Creative Director Thomas Sutton spoke on Open Innovation on the main stage at the Lift11 conference in Geneva, Switzerland (2011) with his talk Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation.
While Open Innovation is already a well known and accepted concept in many business sectors, it still needs to find a place in the Design field. In this talk Sutton explains how Design should become more about building connections with the whole network (because it’s not the best product that wins, but the product with the best system dynamics) and for creating a space for Open Innovation with the users.
Here again, it is interesting to note that the Creative Director at Frog Design talks about using Design for Open Innovation (and Open Design as well). Let’s hope that designers, as Sutton suggested, will leave behind their traditional idea of a role that:

Impose meaningful order on the world

and that instead uncover the meaning and order that already exist, facilitating the emergence of networks of distributed and collaborative creativity.

(To be continued in the second and third parts)

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):

03. Blomming.com

Finally, Alberto D’Ottavi (from infoservi.it) presented a demo of Blomming, a new Social Commerce service that allows you to sell whatever you want, wherever you want, just embedding a code (like you will do with a YouTube video, for example). Here is how it works (in English). This service could enable many more DIY Crafters / Open Designers / Makers to sell their own projects online, on their own website, without the need of installing e-commerce software. It will just lower the barriers for selling your products online, making it easier to run your own small business. The project is still in the development phase but you can ask for an invitation in order to use it. Here ¡s an example of a Blomming seller using his own blog to sell his book: Alberto Cottica and his book “Wikicrazia” about Open Government.

After the sign-in, just upload the photos of the products you want to sell and set price, quantity and tags for them. Then copy your personalized “embed” code and paste it wherever you want, like you’re used to do with YouTube’s video (or similar). Or, send your products directly to Facebook, etc.
You’re up and running. Now you have an e-commerce system with cart, checkout, payments and tools for keeping track and manage orders and contacts. So simple.

Here Alberto explains (in Italian) how Blomming was developed:

And here Nicola J. Vitto explains (in Italian) the project:

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!

I solved also some technical problems that made the older pdf very large and complicated, I have uploaded these new screen versions on Scribd, replacing the old ones, and now you can find them also in Issuu (here is the complete version, the English version, the Italian version, the Spanish version). If you want to redistribute it, please download the new pdf version from Scribd, Issuu or here on the Texts section of openp2pdesign.org.

I have been quite busy lately with the Lulu.com store and other future projects, and meanwhile I’ve found very useful to use Twitter to share knowledge about Open P2P Design, Open Design, Complexity, and so on…

While waiting for the next post, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/openp2pdesign!

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

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

RedesignMe was the first Web 2.0 initiative focusing on co-creation between companies and their customers. Users of the site do not only comment on their experience with everyday products, but are actively proposing better designs.

The website has two sections: Design Critique and RDM Challenges.

With Design Critique, RedesignMe collects the best product improvements based on the users input and communicates that back to the original product designers & producers. RedesignMe contacts the companies behind the products in question to show them the feedback and encourages them to reply directly to the users and eventually fix the problems. RedesignMe also encourages the companies to work more closely with their end-users by setting up RDM Challenges.

RDM Challenges are conceptual or design-driven challenges initiated by companies that want to involve their customers more closely into their product development process. In this way companies pay a fee to RedesignMe, which is the main source of income. RDM Challenges clearly describe a (design) problem and the users, the Redesigners, are rewarded for their feedback through the service’s RDM system. There is no reputation system in the service that moves the users; they redesign products in order to improve them and then to collect points (RDMs) which they can later convert into prizes in the RDM Shop.
The users’ feedback can be in form of a comment, sketch, set of pictures, mood-board, movie, prototype or total redesign. Here’s an example of the tools with which the user can redesign the products:

RDM Challenges enable the companies to receive feedback from their customers while they are preparing for or are in the middle of the development process of a new product or service. Through RedesignMe’s system and network a company can easily encourage its customers to share information about their wishes, preferences, thoughts and ideas, in order to create products that closely match the expectations of the end-users. RDM Challenges can be set to have restrictive access, be on invitation only or completely open, all depending on the level of open-innovation desired.
Through the “RedesignMe Extensible Platform” RedesignMe.com can deliver the functionality of its website also to companies’ websites or intra/extranet, where they conserve their own brand-identity while making use of RedesignMe’s user base, idea and product database and core functionality.

Every user can participate in a RDM Challenges in this way:

1. carefully reading the RDM Challenge Description;
2. creating and uploading his/her Redesign;
3. his/her Redesign is rated by the Company & the Community (or Crowd);
4. top rated Redesigns make RDMs;

This is the case of an Open P2P Community that shows a marketplace participation: a marketplace where different companies and their users meet in order to redesign products and services. Note that its platform has been designed in order to being deployed even to the companies’ websites: in this way the marketplace can be divided and distributed.

via | Ponoko

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):

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!