Editorial: Open & Distributed + Design & Production: Design Strategies for Enabling Indie Designers and Makers (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 2019
The democratisation of technologies, knowledge and activities have been changing the world of designers, blurring the boundaries between amateur and professional designers, especially within the connected phenomena of the Maker Movement and Indie Designers. Within this context, how can be collaborative design processes documented, analysed, managed, shared? This article investigates the role of meta-design digital tools for the facilitation of distributed systems of creative agents, formally trained and informal amateurs that collaboratively design and produce artefacts. It documents a research study organised for testing a digital meta-design platform with users and the researcher as meta-designer: the results provide insights for improving the platform but also for building a comprehensive research through design framework that connects meta-design research and practice for exploring the role and nature of meta-design and meta-designers in facilitating collaborative design process...
Open Design: Contributions, Solutions, Processes and Projects
The Design Journal, 2014
Open design is a catchall term for various on-and offline design and making activities. It can be used to describe a type of design process that allows for (is open to) the participation of anybody (novice or professional) in the collaborative development of something. As well as this, it can mean the distribution and unrestricted use of design blueprints and documentation for the use by others. In this paper, the authors highlight various aspects of open and collaborative design and argue for the use of new terms that address what is open and when. A range The Design Journal 539 Open Design: Contributions, Solutions, Processes and Projects of design projects and online platforms that have open attributes are then explored, whereby these terms are applied. In terms of design, the focus is specifically on the design of physical things rather than graphical, software or system design.
Building Open Design as a Commons
The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology, 2019
The concept of Open Design has been embraced by numerous initiatives in design, from furniture to textiles, from product design to social design since its introduction in the ear- ly 2000s.1 Open Design has also brought a revival to openness and sharing in technical domains such as hardware and electronics. Sharing design and production files and instruc- tions has become an almost compulsory ingredient for projects and initiatives that aim to convey a critical dialogue on making, producing, and manufacturing the things that dominate the lives of 21st century city dwellers in the global North. Open design has been proposed as the key ingredient to make and discuss circular products in events such as the 'Open Source Circular Economy Days'2 and the 'POC21 Innovation Camp'.3 Open design has become the preferred modus operandi for social design. Increas- ingly, open design inspires the design and manufacturing sectors and their related institu- tions. Premsela, (at the time) the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion,4 was a key partner in publishing the volume Open Design Now.5 In 2018, the Danish Design Centre ran a program for designers and manufacturers to grow their business 'by going open source'.6 Open design, and research about open design, have predominantly been obsessed with the characteristics of open, legal frameworks that would facilitate the openness of design, the control that designers would need to relinquish, and the open access to design resources that everyone would receive.7 However, less attention has been paid to how communities of multiple actors might self-organize in order to create, build, share, and preserve those open design resources. In this article, we trace open design back to its roots and – by building on experiences from a recent open design initiative as well as research into open design practices – we relate the 'how to organize' question of open design to earlier theories of common, shared resources.
Since the turn of the century, the discipline of design has increasingly focused its attention on its ap- plication to projects and groups of users at a larger scale. Researchers and practitioners have tried to understand how design could shift its focus from single users to local and online communities, from isolated projects to whole complex systems. These new perspectives consequently brought the inter- est of designers to the tools and strategies that can enable their interactions with larger groups of people distributed in several localities. More specifically, designers and researchers started adopting many approaches coming from software development and web-based technologies, like open source, P2P, diffuse, distributed and decentralized systems. This article proposes a preliminary framework for understanding and working with the integration of design with open, P2P, diffuse, distributed and de- centralized systems. In one direction, such open, P2P, DDD systems can be applied into design practice: this first intersection has many applications, from digital projects to P2P-based initiatives to physi- cal projects designed and manufactured on global networks of distributed laboratories like Fab Labs and Makerspaces. In another direction, design practice can also have a role in enabling such systems through the analysis, visualization, and design of their collaborative tools, platforms, processes, and organizations. Design, therefore, could learn from such systems and also improve them. This second in- tersection falls into the meta-design domain, where designers can have a role in building environments for the collaborative design of open processes and their resulting organizations. The article therefore addresses this phenomenon by providing both an analysis of the concepts and the history of both directions and, in order to understand the phenomena with a broader overview, it proposes a preliminary framework for understanding the possible intersections of design with open, P2P, diffuse, distributed and decentralized systems through both literature and case studies. As the framework is still preliminary, the article provides as a conclusion some possible strategies for validat- ing or improving the framework.
ARChive, 2019
The evolution of electronics, sustainable energy, digital and the web in the productive and entrepreneurial structure generated, in the second half of the twentieth century, the third industrial revolution. Defined by some scholars like Chris Anderson and economic newspapers like the "Financial Times": "A revolution in which the planner in general and the designer in particular have truly new technical, economic and above all formal language opportunities for the design of new elements". A phenomenon still in full swing, yet we are already talking about Industry 4.0, as synonymous with a fourth industrial revolution that presents a new feature, a new bidirectional relationship that re-examines two key players: producers and consumers. This complete connection has led to the creation of new products and services, which improve the level of efficiency of life by making it more productive.Cyber-physics, in fact, the current technological science that integrates software and networking with new techniques of abstraction, modeling, design and analysis to the dynamics of physical processes, joins traditional design processes, generating a new stream of production process. Defined by Denis Santachiara, designer and Professor at NABA in Milan «[...] a virtual representation of a manufacturing process in a software environment [...]».This new context presupposes the inclusion within the Internet network, "the network of networks", increasingly configured as a "Network Society", where to grasp the growing complexity of the digital revolution, the integration of new instruments that lead to the digital manufacturing. This determines an innovation in the language of designers, towards a new culture of the project, thanks to the resources developed by the new digital technologies. A new reality that turns into opportunities for young designers, in which transversal and multidisciplinary figures with a heterogeneous design background are needed, able to interact with the various facets of these means.
Designing Design Education. An articulated programme of collective open design activities
Design Education is changing. Setting out from the awareness that “the profile of design professions need not – and should not – remain what it is today” (Findeli, 2001, p.17) and from insight suggesting that the “experimental approach will become the “normal” approach in our future” (Manzini, 2015, p.54), the authors worked on an articulated programme of collective open design activities reflecting these changes. The activities focus on concrete experimentation on the paradigm of distributed production, which modifies the articulation of known roles and the traditional design education approaches. Therefore, the initiative aims at involving important international design schools in a concrete design exploration of this key issue for society and the design discipline itself. Manzini (2015) urged to “look at the whole of society as a huge laboratory of sociotechnical experimentation”: this practice is a remarkable example which may be used as a model in the future on a larger scale.
Artifactual Agency In Open Design
2013
We readily use artifacts in theorizing and accounting for epistemic work. Yet the agency characteristics of artifacts and notably their relations to their creators (the subjects) are less understood as agency is more socially privileged than artifactually focused. Rather than understanding the ways artifacts are appropriated as utility objects, we examine the ebb and flow of agency to account for how the subjects implement, express, and document performativity through artifacts. Using an archival analytical approach, we examine design activities and artifacts on Thingiverse-an online platform for open design. Our findings suggest design derivation is driven by four types of artifactual agency manifested within the context of subject-artifact relationships. First, agency-in-situ concerns the creation of artifacts as instances resulting from a self-reflexive process in response to situational demands and contexts. Second, agency-in-use concerns the use of artifacts to signal a designer's specialism (ability, skill) and to induce further redesign and learning. Third, agency-in-practice concerns the use of artifacts as a collective effort which addresses the needs of a specific user group. Lastly, agency-influx concerns a co-integration of agencies that are harmoniously yet dynamically assembled in propagating and accumulating design knowledge across different contexts of use. The four types contribute to the assemblage of performativity in design. Each time when an artifactual agency is enacted, new design ideas, materials and techniques are created and added to the commons.
The Open Paradigm in Design Research
Design Issues, 2015
The shift from closed to open paradigms in new product development is seen as an emergence of new forms of production, innovation, and design.Innovation processes are shifting from open source software to open source hardware design. Emulating open source software, design information for open source hardware is shared publicly to enhance the development of physical products, machines, and systems. Similarly, the rise of the “maker culture” enhances product tinkering, while the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement embraces “the open” in design. Users participate in design via crowdsourcing and co-creation on platforms such as OpenIdeo and Quirky and by joining proliferating open innovation challenges. At the back end of the design process, customers are invited to participate in mass customization and personalization to personalize products. The open paradigm has received scholarly attention through studies of open source software and open source hardware. Moreover, user engagement in the design process has been studied as user-centric innovation, participatory design, and codesign, as well as customer co-creation and crowdsourcing. However, the “open” landscape in design lacks consensus regarding a unified definition for open design practices. This lack of agreement partially results from the gap in approaches to design. Studies of innovation and new product development are focused on user-centric approaches and customer engagement in several stages of the design process, whereas current definitions of open design are focused on openness of technical design information and largely exclude, in particular, the early stages of the design process. The open design definitions also lack the commercial aspects of openness. Thus, the existing definitions are too narrow to holistically represent the shift from a closed paradigm to an open paradigm in design. Moreover, the lack of clarity and consistency in definitions is hindering the development of open design as a design approach. To fully advance the research on methods and practices, a more comprehensive perception of openness in the design process is needed. This paper develops an overarching definition for open design and a three-layered framework for design practices. The definition covers the design process from initial problem definition in the beginning through to commercialization and licensing of the final design. Thus, the definition takes into account not just the openness of products, but even more so, the openness of processes. The conceptualization of open design enhances understanding of the design ecosystem, which is rapidly changing because of the digitalization of design tools and practices and the permeation of participatory culture. This culture alters design practices by raising funding as crowdfunding and the development of concepts in open design projects. The paper is structured as follows: First we give an overview of the existing literature and definitions of open design practices and related work in co-creation, participatory design, crowdsourcing, and open innovation. Then we introduce the new definition for open design. The paper concludes with a research agenda for open design.