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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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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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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01. Open P2P Design workshops

The last part of the November 2009 tour took place very far, in South Korea (in Seoul) and in Singapore where I facilitated two workshops together with Roger Pitiot. Both workshops share the same structure and contents, even if the Singapore one had to be one day shorter (3 days instead of 4).
Let’s start reporting these workshops with the structure and the contents, something we had been working for months and we can easily replicate in other contexts in the future.
With the next posts I will explain in details what has been done in both workshops.

02. Workshop Contents

Design 2.0: designers meet social networks and new technologies for distributed systems

What is Design 2.0, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect

• complex problems
• increasing importance of design
• open innovation
• opening design

• • with new technologies
  • Knowledge sharing
  • social networks
  • fabbing

Open P2P Design: how to organize open projects for distributed systems

What is Open P2P Design, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect enable distributed creativity

• collaborative activity for complex problem solving
• metadesign for open process
• co-design for open projects

The Workshop will answer the following questions:

What is Open Design and how can we develop it with a community in a collaborative way?
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I’d like to suggest you two events that are going to happen this week, even though I’m not involved in them and I won’t be able to attend them, unfortunately.

The first one is the Open Source 2010. Architecture as an open culture seminar that will take place in Porto (Portugal), on Saturday 12th of June from 14.30 to 20.00 at Casa da Música.

This is the complete list of the participants at the seminar:

• Cecil Balmond
• Hans-Ulrich Obrist
• Tomás Saraceno
• Sanford Kwinter
• Ron Eglash
• António Adão da Fonseca
• Rubedo
• Overworld

You can still win two tickets on the Arkinet.com website, leaving your comment about what open source for architecture means for you.
And if you are going to attend this seminar, please don’t forget to go to Coimbra on June 14th for the Arquibio 2010 conference and workshops.

The second one will be in Berlin, at the International Design Festival DMY Berlin from 9-13 June 2010: the DMY Maker Lab for Open Design, supported by Berlin Beta Collective, Open Design City, Betahaus, Palomar 5, Premsela, Waag Society, and DMY, it is kindly sponsored by Etsy, DutchDFA, and Becks.
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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!

I finally have time for writing about the November 2009 tour for openp2pdesign.org: let’s start with the Media Ecologies and Post-Industrial Production Workshop in Manchester.

Unfortunately I could not be present there because of the many travels to do in November, so we arranged a skype presentation. There were some problems and therefore I recorded my voice over the presentation. Here it is, and forgive me for the bad audio recording, I was sick with flu that day!