Open design comes of age (3), third of a series by Massimo Menichinelli

Massimo Menichinelli (original source):

In two previous posts (here and here), I started explaining that Open Design is now getting out of the underground, since many important design companies, institutions and other actors are now actively working on it. This does not mean that all the problems that we must solve in order to have a real collaborative Open Design are gone; it’s just easier now to talk about Open Design, since we have famous examples to show.
With this last post I will show some important exhibitions and design festivals where Open Design has a relevant place.

04. Technocraft: An exhibition about Product Hacking

Yves Béhar (founder of the fuseproject design agency) and famous for being the designer of the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO laptop, curated his first exhibition last year: TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers, and Design in the Age of Individuality ( July 10, 2010 – October 3, 2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, USA).

TechnoCRAFT looked at the different ways that consumers are personalizing design products with their own creativity and individuality in an age of mass-production: the exhibition included six subthemes:

crowdsourcing
platforms
blueprints
hacks
incompletes
modules

Beside being curated by a famous designer, this exhibition is important since it tracked the history of hacking in the design history and pointed to its future development. Some of the designers / products included in the exhibition were:

Eames Hack
5.5 designers
Studio Proxy for Ikea Hacks
Cyclecide
Greg Lynn with the Recycled Toy Furniture
Enzo Mari with Autoprogettazione (originally designed in 1974, now in production for Artek)
Marijn van der Poll with the Do hit chair for Droog Design

For further insights, you can read this interview of Yves Béhar for the Domus magazine:

technology is in many ways opening new horizons in the world of craft by allowing new ways for designers and crafters to: a) learn and share techniques b) to find a new marketplace for their wares.

For me, the designer is always in charge of creating great experiences around the products they design… But who are these experiences created for? A consumer or buyer. […] many of the ways in which consumers intervene on products by making them more unique to individuals simply means that the ergonomics, the function and the aesthetic is adapted to one’s specific needs… This is a traditional view of design’s purpose.

For some pictures about the products showed in the exhibition, have a look at the DesignBoom article.

05. An event and a book, from Styria (Austria)

Another (and quite important) sign that Open Design is becoming mainstream comes from Styria (one of the federal states of Austria). In February 2011, Creative Industries Styria organized the fourth Creative Industries Convention in Graz and it was devoted to the topic of Open Design hosting a speech by Ronen Kadushin (most probably the first real Open Designer).
After the event, they produced a free documentation about Open Design that is now available. It is an important step because the document clearly shows there is an official interest in Open Design by public institutions in Styria.
Just to give you an idea of the document, the best quote comes from Paul Atkinson that wrote:

In order to maintain a significant role in the design and production of goods, professional designers will have to lose their egos and change their role from the design of finished products to the creation of systems that will give people the freedom to create high quality designs of their own; systems which free the user from requiring specialist skills in design, yet which produce results retaining the designer’s original intention. The better a particular designer’s system works, the more successful that designer will be. Designers unwilling to change risk becoming ghosts of the profession.

There are many authors, including Cory Doctorow (the author of Makers, the first novel about Open Designers), Lev Manovich (author of Software Takes Command), Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of the Networks), Hannes Walter and Fluid Forms (one of the first designers to use digital fabrication tools to manufacture and sell our own generative design products independently), Bre Pettis (one of the creator of the Makerbot, the open hardware 3D printer), Ponoko (the first worldwide laser cutting service for anybody) and Peter Troxler (the most important researcher about Fab Labs).

You can dowload it here (and since they released it under a Creative Commons license, I uploaded it to Issuu and Scribd as well, so you can read it and embed it, it’s here below).

Open publication – Free publishing – More open source

06. Open Design in Design Festivals: Berlin, and Milan

06.01 DMY Maker Lab 2010 (and 2011), in Berlin

DMY Maker Lab Trailer from KS12 on Vimeo.

Most probably the first Design Festival to have a place for Open Design is DMY in Berlin, where in 2010 they had the Maker Lab space for many workshops. I already covered it one year ago in this post. This year there will be another Maker Lab, so wait for announcements about its program soon!

06.02 Maker Lab, in Milan (2011)

The same people behind the Maker Lab at DMY Berlin (i.e. the Open Design City Fab Lab and coworking space in Berlin) are bringing part of that experience to Milan this year, for the Salone del Mobile 2011 (the famous furniture fair).

At the MakerLab Milan, we will provide a focal point for the community to take actions to positively hack their urban environment. Bringing tools, resources and expertise from Berlin, the MakerLab Milan will collaborate directly with different elements of the Milan Maker, Hacker and Public Culture to share skills, ideas and tools with which the community of Milan can engage in a physical dialogue with their public space.

In tune with the Salone del Mobile and the Public Design Festival we will run a Public Hacking workshop. We will Invite people to bring their own chairs, and locally found materials, then hack, modify and up-cycle them.

06.03 WeFab, in Milan (2011)

Beside MakerLab, and the presentation of Droog’s Design for Download project, this year there will be another important event: WeFab.
WeFab is a three-day event hosted by our friends OpenWear (the collaborative clothing platform) and Vectorealism (a digital fabrication facility based in Milan).
WeFab will feature objects, workshops, installations, performances, live music shows, dj set, a temporary shop selling handmade productions and a conference session hosted by the University of Milan (see also the article on Domus Magazine).

Getting Ready for WeFab – 1 from Openwear on Vimeo.

The event will explore the cross-fertilization of new production technologies and collaborative ways to design and make products; it will also feature the Design Smash contest, where designers from all across Europe will go from idea input to output of real object/accessory by the end of the evening with different fabbing machines available. And there will be the first working Makerbot in Milan! 🙂
This means that you will be able to design and fab a fashion and product design project during the event!

Getting Ready for WeFab – 2 from Openwear on Vimeo.

06.04 The Milan Breakfasts: talking about Open Design

Premsela and the Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) host The Milan Breakfasts at Studio Zeta Milano in Milan, and on April 15th morning there will be a discussion about Open Design with Paul Atkinson, Gijs Bakker, Joost Grootens, Yves Behar, Marti Guixé.
Also Domus will host a talk called Open Source City: Collective Design, but it is unclear yet what it will be about.

06.05 Freedom of Creation: live 3D printing

Even Freedom of Creation will have a live 3D-printing performance in which they will co-create with the public (it seems that you can bring your own 3D files to print them), Together with Wallpaper magazine.