Recently, a strange kind of cultural conflict is emerging in the world of design: on one side, there are designers that use to operate inside traditional production systems; on the other, there are new hybrid actors that try to redistribute the manufacture out of the institutionalized industrial process, thanks to techniques like 3d printing and laser cutting. Is not just a matter of techniques and tools; at the contrary, it deals with the necessity to find bridges among approaches, world-views, glossaries and methodologies.

A very interesting conference discussed this topic last summer; it took place in Portland on August 2010, and it was organized by the Industrial Designers Society of America. One of its main question was: does DIY design mean Crappy Design? In order to answer, they invited a long list of speakers from the mainstream (Nike, Autodesk, etc) and from the underground (Blurb, Dorkbot, Ponoko) of the industrial production. Here you can find very well documented reports about what emerged in Portland.

Freedom Of Creation is an interesting example of project that is going beyond this cultural dichotomy. FOC is a Finland-based small company that deals with some of the major mainstream corporation such as Hyundai, Asics, Autodesk, Havana Club, Nivea, NIKE, Rabobank, Philips and L’Oreal. At the same time, they use methodologies and techniques that are extremely near to the ones used by the small pioneers of mass-customized distributed production. Probably, this is going to be a crucial cultural bridge between “official” design and DIY design in the next years.

On the November 2010 issue of Digicult there is a very well done article about FOC by Luigi Ghezzi. It should be of great interest for the members of this community.