Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M  become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises?

OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.

Through inspiring international mobilities, dedicated events, project-based trainings and innovative systems of learning outcomes certification, the OD&M community is committed to create a valuable environment of capacity-building for students, university staff, enterprises and highly creative and passionate people.

The P2P Foundation and its sister organization, the P2P Lab, are part of Open Design and Manufacturing platform, which has recently released an report. The report can be downloaded in it’s integral and reduced versions. Below you will find the report’s introduction, (written by Laura Martelloni, from LAMA agency) followed by its Executive Summary.

Introduction

Often, new professions and jobs emerge from transformations in the market.

They tend to remain in a grey zone where they mostly take shape through progressive adaptation and training on-the-job, until institutional education and training systems are able to recognize, codify, embed and scale them up into coherent learning journeys and learning outcomes, understandable by the labour market and the wider society.

Manufacturing in Europe is going through a major, almost unprecedented transformation. While it is suffering heavily from the effects of the global crisis and ongoing globalization, we are witnessing the emergence of a social technology-based movement, the Maker movement, spreading fast across the globe. Supported by ICT networks and by the establishment of physical spaces such as Fablabs, this movement is expanding its outreach across the globe, involving people with different backgrounds and mindsets that converge around common values such as ‘sharing’ and ‘openness’, generating a multi-faceted and complex knowledge.

The maker movement has opened the way for a new paradigm of production, called from time to time open manufacturing, p2p production, social manufacturing, maker manufacturing; although the plurality of definitions hints at the lack of maturity of the sector, its keywords – open hardware, open software, distributed networks, collaboration, transparency, among others – all point to the movement’s vocabulary and narrative.

These new forms of production are enabled by open source ICT and rooted in social innovation principles, they adopt open-ended business models and act at the level of ecosystem, they harness distributed networks and ubiquitous communities to unlock the inventive of peer to peer collaboration, and are able to imprint production processes, products and organizational forms with social purposes and outcomes. Considered in its potential to infuse production processes with social innovation principles and values, open manufacturing opens room to cultivate radical changes in the economy and society, able to preserve and grow the public good while steering disruptive paths of innovation (Johar et al., 2015). Open manufacturing has already reached a stage that offers the prospect of new jobs and businesses, but education and training systems across Europe are still stuck in the grey zone of unaware and fragmented intervention.

Within this framework, the OD&M project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe)[1] works to create a trust-based and collaborative Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, traditional manufacturers, and innovation communities of digital-savvy makers and open manufacturing businesses across Europe and beyond. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to build a European enabling ecosystem that fully embeds the key approaches, values and principles underlying the open manufacturing paradigm, and turns them into drivers for a more competitive, sustainable and socially innovative manufacturing in Europe.

Focussing on the co-creation of new teaching and learning processes, as well as on new methods and models of knowledge exchange and capacity-building between the nodes of the Alliance, OD&M works to unleash a new generation of highly skilled and entrepreneurship-oriented designers and manufacturers, able to boost open design and manufacturing towards meaningful impacts.

The present report contains the results of an action-research carried out by OD&M between March and August 2017. The core objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole. The overall goal of the action-research was ultimately to identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening connections and collaborations within the OD&M Knowledge Triangle, enabling in particular Higher Education Institutions with new capacities and assets to play a valuable role in this field.

The action-research has been coordinated by LAMA Agency and has actively involved teams of researchers from: University of Florence – DIDA (Italy), University of the Arts London (UK), University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering (Spain), University of Dabrowa-Gornicza (Poland), University of Tongji (China), P2P Foundation (Netherlands), Furniture and Furnishing Centre (Italy). The other partners of the project (i.e. Fablab London, Fablab Lodz and Tecnalia) have contributed as key informants and hubs of connection with relevant stakeholders in the targeted countries.

As the report will highlight, the action-research confirmed that the maker movement is a complex phenomenon that is nurtured by a continuous serendipitous melting-pot among cultures, skills, knowledge, learning styles, languages and attitudes. If this richness represents a fertile ground for innovations across manufacturing sectors – and probably beyond them -, it also represents a challenge for the codes through which Higher Education Institutions embed new topics and shape new mindsets on the one hand, and through which companies demand and search for new, innovation-oriented skills and competences on the other hand.

More research is needed to further encompass and systematize the wide geography of knowledge, competences and skills underlying the maker movement, as well as to better understand how and to what extent they can be encoded in a framework that is portable across life’s domains, and recognizable by different actors. However, the OD&M research represents an important step in this direction, providing insights and identifying a possible scenario of education, training and business innovation built upon an unedited Alliance between Higher Education, manufacturing businesses and maker communities, able not only to prepare the next generation of designers and manufacturers, but to spur innovation – and, in particular, social innovation – across the whole open design and manufacturing value chain.

[1] The OD&M project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand. The project started in 2017 and will run over three years. It actively involves the following organizations: University of Florence – DIDA, University of Dabrowa-Gornicza, University of the Arts London, University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering, University of Tongji, Furniture and Furnishing Centre, Tecnalia, Fablab Lodz, Fablab London, P2P Foundation, LAMA Agency. The project also involves a number of Universities, SMEs, Foundations, local innovation communities and networks across Europe as associate partners.

Executive Summary

The present Report contains the results of an action-research developed in the context of the OD&M Project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe), funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand.

The main objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole.

Indeed, the different levels of maturity of the maker movement – and, more generally, of the open design and manufacturing paradigm – in the different countries, poses clear challenges in the implementation of this type of research; on the other hand, it reflects the reality of an emerging phenomenon and points to both the challenges of a common path, and the opportunities of building common experimentations at European level.

Read the full version of the report here

Read the reduced version

The post Universities, Enterprises and Maker Communities in Open Design & Manufacturing across Europe: an exploratory study appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AbilityMate is a Sydney (Australia) based social enterprise whose mission is to help people with disabilities access the equipment they need. Their vision starts by making custom-made 3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs) available to Australian children! The enterprise’s approach is to use 3D scanning & printing technology to fabricate customised designs for AFOs. They are developing 3D scanning equipment and are making it widely accessible on the World Wide Web in 2018. The enterprise was founded by Melissa Fuller and Johan du Plessis.

3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs)

AbilityMate initially started by running design jams and projects at community makerspaces. The aim was to help people with disabilities by developing custom made 3D printed devices. In this early phase the AbilityMate community would work directly with people with disabilities to assess their needs and 3D print the devices that made them more independent. This has been exploratory and the AbilityMate community has co-created a number of different designs for people in need of assistive devices. These designs have been made available online.

Hack-a-Home Project

A more recent collaborative research project which is still ongoing seeks to test “what happens when you put the means of production in the hands of those who need it”, whether the production of custom made assistive devices could be moved to the community requiring them. The project entailed conducting trainings at various residences where people with disabilities live. People with disabilities and their carers were trained to do various aspects of the design and production of assistive devices, from body scanning to 3d modelling and 3D printing. Overall, this project seems to have had a low general impact, as coordination has been challenging and production has only happened when AbilityMate makers have been present. However, the impact is large for individuals when they experience the power of being able to produce assistive devices to cover their own needs.

Open Source 3D scanner

The Magic Shoes project  

In mid 2016 AbilityMate started receiving many request form families in the Cerebral Palsy community who saw 3D printing as solution to the challenges they face. Members from this community requested that they have a go at 3D printing Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs). AFOs are customised leg braces worn to support posture and mobility of kids and are used for corrective therapy. Currently AFOs are prescribed and hand fabricated by a medical specialist called an Orthotist. After looking into how AFOs are currently made they realised that their approach of using 3D scanning and 3D printing could potentially create a more pleasant experience for children and reduce the turnaround times and wait times experienced by these families. Because of the large amount of work and investment required to make this a reality, AbilityMate was joined by 6 other impact driven organisations. The project includes regulatory affairs, a clinical study with 20-30 children, development of an open source 3D scanner, the establishment of 2 orthotics clinics to make 3D printed AFOs available and the release of an open source package including blueprints of the 3D scanner and findings from the clinical study. A considerable financial investment of $600,000 is required for a project of this size. With a strong collaboration in place and a successful proof of concept AbilityMate has raised $400,000 through crowdfunding and philanthropic donations and still needs to raise $200,00 to complete the project.

Magic Shoes project team

The AbilityMate model

Having explored the production of a number of assistive and medical devices, AbilityMate came to the realization that it needed to create a viable business model. Once it has done this, it will be able to apply the same model to other types of customised assistive and medical devices. The current focus of AbilityMate is therefore to establish this new enterprise model around the customisation and production of AFOs. They’ve started with  “The Magic Shoes Project” and now have now begun to set up a sustainable social business.

AbilityMate are a For Purpose technology start-up that’s incorporated as a Proprietary Limited Company. They have modified their constitution in line with a Social Benefit Company. It permits and requires Directors to act to deliver the purpose and to consider wider impacts of their decisions. AbilityMate will be engaged in the customisation and digital manufacture of custom-made assistive devices. AbilityMate’s products help orthotists achieve the clinical results they expect and deliver effective, cutting-edge options and better experienced to their patients.

In their experience the interaction with orthotists is critical to the safe delivery of 3D printed AFOs because these devices are corrective by nature not augmented like a prosthetic hand for example. AFOs are traditionally prescribed and made by Orthotists, after careful evaluation of biomechanical needs.

Moreover, many devices that are normally prescribed by health care providers have been subjected to clinical trials. Simply having a repository of open source templates for assistive and medical devices does not really suit a large percentage of the market. AbilityMate has learned that it has needed to create a model which incorporates the medical profession and clinicians that prescribe the devices. The new model has three basic aspects:

1. Open source body scanning devices;
2. A customisation and fabrication service (CFS);
3. A network of localised 3D printing facilities

Customization of AFO

The first barrier to overcome is the way in which orthotists develop AFOs in the first place. For things like AFOs, orthotists have traditionally used plaster casting which children tend to dislike. The first problem to solve is to find a way in which orthotists can digitize the production process. There are many types of body scanners, but they have not been widley adopted by the profession. Good scanners can cost between $20,000 to $30,000, and may not be made for scanning the legs of wriggly children. AbilityMate is therefore working on an open source scanner that will be available to anyone to make at a much lower cost.

Secondly, orthotists are not digital designers, they work with their hands, and do not normally have knowledge and experience with CAD and 3D printing. AbilityMate believe it is not realistic to expect orthotists to become experts at these. AbilityMate’s strategy is therefore to set up a customisation and fabrication service (CFS). This is currently the model used for orthodontics and other medical devices that require a high degree of customisation. The CFS would be an online platform set up and run by AbilityMate. AbilityMate would receive orders from orthotists based on digitised body scans and their prescriptions. AbilityMate will make arrangements to have the leg brace printed at a 3D printing facility located closest to the orthotist who placed the order. Before onboarding a 3D printing facility to join the platform, AbilityMate will ensure the facility has all the required quality control and regulation requirements in place.

Thirdly, to fund and protect users this model requires there are elements of open source IP and closed IP. By opening the IP of the 3D scanner they reduce barriers to 3D printing. It will also enable AbilityMate to reach kids in remote communities. They will also have to keep some IP closed. AbilityMate has received genuine concern from the medical profession about open sourcing templates and 3D designs for AFOs. Because AFOs are corrective devices there is a major risk in having an unqualified person designing and printing AFOs for already vulnerable members of the community. AbilityMate is also in the process of raising seed investment from impact investors. For them it doesn’t make sense to open the IP surrounding how to customise an AFO in CAD modelling. These barriers have really challenged their thinking about open design and cosmo localisation because their vision started out with ambitions to keep everything open! In reality this approach could have negative consequences on children and on AbilityMates’ ability to raise capital. As the business model evolves, they hope that the tensions between the vision for cosmo-localization and the practical considerations of AFOs and seed investors can be resolved and integrated.

Based on this three-part model their plan is to support the development of AbilityMate “Pods”. Pods would be localized operations that can support a number of territories in instantiating the model (a little bit like a franchise but using open source principles). AbilityMate would package as a service how to set up a full-fledged operation, which would include how to conduct 3D printing as a CFS, how to produce and use the scanners and upgrade orthotics clinics to digital workflows, and how to draw on an open design commons. AbilityMate would help people set up their own operations in different parts of the world to service their local areas.

Open clinical trials and university collaboration

AbilityMate have also learned that the production of medical devices based on open designs needs to be coupled with clinical trials and the validation of models and technologies of medical devices. In Australia, for example, clinicians/orthotists will not normally prescribe an medical devices that has not been validated through clinical trial. This means that from a medical profession point of view, there is no real value in having hundreds of innovative open source designs for medical devices if none of them have been trialled and validated. In addition to this, medical trials are very hard to do, they cost a lot of money because of the research costs involved. In their opinion, they believe that certain contexts warrant a more liberal approach to this. For AFOs, for example, it is better that kids have them than not. For other types of devices where there is higher risk, they feel clinical trials need to be strictly applied.

Therefore, the challenge is not just to cultivate an open design commons for assistive devices and medical devices, but to build an approach to prototyping, testing and trialling assistive devices and medical devices in conjunction with this design commons. This requires open data on clinical trials that others can build on, which allows for people to build on and create subsequent design optimizations. In essence there is a need to create a commons around clinical trial data and the validation of devices. AbilityMate have only just begun to have conversations with universities about this.

Values and principles and the role of the maker movement

AbilityMate is an expression of deep personal connections with the experience and challenges for people who are disadvantaged by disabilities. Johan’s grandfather, for example, had polio, which left him with an impaired limb. The social stigma of being cripple haunted his grandfather’s entire life, impacting his work opportunities, and had an impact on three generations of his family. Melissa has a cousin who was struck by a car and acquired a spine and brain injury, losing the ability to walk and speak. The state insurance, which was meant to last his whole life was quickly exhausted by medical costs for equipment, and she saw how her cousin’s family constantly improvised to figure out how to solve basic problems.

The maker movement has also had a big impact on the values and thinking of AbilityMate. Before starting on this journey, Melissa did a tour of 40 makerspaces / tech shops / Fab labs across the United States. Realizing the massive impact of producing material things, and the possibility this new model could have has been a motivation as well. The way in which the maker movement merges the idea of the user with the designer and the consumer has been significant. In 2014 Melissa started a community makerspace in Sydney which is where she and Johan met.

Fairness is also a key concept. AbilityMate do not want to do charity, but rather create a more fair and equitable system. They feel that the emergence of a global design commons levels the playing field and creates fairer opportunities for people to have access to assistive devices and equipment. Fairness also means the price of assistive devices. The current high costs of assistive devices adds yet another burden to people with disabilities. The global design localized production model provides a way to lessen that cost burden.

Overall, they feel four words help to express their values and principles:

1. authentic-ness;
2. transparency / openness;
3. courage;
4. fairness.

Team, skills and decision making

Melissa comes from a design and manufacturing background, and Johan comes from a computer science and startup background. There are 4-5 other people they work with. Their backgrounds include industrial engineering, marketing and product management, CAD modelling and UX design. There are also volunteers that are connected with local maker spaces, and some interns with a biomedical background. Overall engineering with a scientific approach is valued, the ability to test hypotheses and conduct rapid prototyping, engage in user centric design, entrepreneurial skills and fund-raising. Areas where they may need future support include legal, fund-raising and finance. But the intangibles are critical in their opinion. They feel that people must have a personal connection with the area, and they are always looking for people who understand the “why” behind why they want to be involved. Often there is a personal story or connection with the disability area.

In terms of work style they prefer to cultivate a culture of co-learning rather than hierarchy. Decisions are made in different ways depending on the context. Most the time there is a team conversation which is open. Meetings are weekly. If there are more urgent decisions to make then less people may be involved in a decision. They use Loomio’s method of working groups and ensure decision-making is transparent, documented and as open as possible. Overall they try to be as organic, open and inclusive in their decision making as they can. While Melissa and Johan are the driving force, they try and distribute this as much as possible, for example by trying to rotate pitching for money or when applying for competitions.

Strengths and weaknesses of open design logic and the future

One of the biggest challenges that they face is in articulating the benefits of an open design business model. There has been lots of scepticism on the part of potential impact investors and it has been hard for people to understand why they would want to give away their “IP”, a constant need to explain and educate people on the benefits of equity fundraising. Alternatively, the benefits of working within the open design business model is the clear resonance it has with many people, associated with its altruistic dimension and potential for social impact. People have been very attracted to the model and have wanted to help, which has made it easier to establish strong partnerships. This has also helped attract talent which has become part of the team.

They feel the open design business model is a critical strategy in addressing the many challenges that we have. They do not feel approaches that rely on patents and tight intellectual property will make enough of a difference. They feel the future of open source hardware is bright if people take the open design pathway. They are optimistic and feel the changes will come from the bottom up.

They see the outlines of a virtuous cycle developing across the open design distributed manufacturing development space. There needs to be ways to circulate value from users and clinicians back through designers and platform developers. As well, learning from other open design enterprises is critical, as the verification of such models helps to create knowledge and legitimacy. They feel it is a bit like social bootstrapping. When there are not a lot of cases it is hard to articulate the benefits of such a model and harder to get resources and people behind it.

At a social level they see an economic virtuous cycle emerging. When a valuable design is added to the global design commons and the benefits of that design begin flowing into the local community, then it frees up people and their time to do others things, and people can apply yet more open source strategies, in a virtuous cycle of economic benefits. As open design enterprises get on their feet and produce results, they capacitate communities to do more. This can include strategies for building circular economies into this model. Finally without a global design commons, local production is not possible, and without local design production then the global commons is not possible. Creating such virtuous cycles is key.

This report on AbilityMate was conducted by Jose Ramos in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

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“OpenROV started in 2001 as a project to make underwater exploration tools accessible to anyone, launched by Eric Stackpole and David Lang. The company shares much of its designs and cultivates a community of hobbyists that help test, modify and refine its products. Its main product so far has been a low cost kit that people order and assemble themselves, for an underwater drone that can explore to a depth of 100 meters. The company is now in the finishing stages of launching a pre-assembled and manufactured product called Trident.

Out of graduate school, Eric worked at NASA as an engineer, but was an active hobbyist. In part inspired by the maker movement, he felt a sense of possibility that he could create technology that could solve problems. After hearing a story about sunken treasure that was hidden in a cave area (the Hall City Cave in Hayfork, California), he discovered a reason and purpose to build such an underwater drone. This project helped him to find his cofounder David Lang, and also to get media attention. The co-founder David Lang was very astute about the need to build a community around the project, and a community building website. Once a prototype was built they attempted to retrieve the treasure they had heard of, however the project was beset by technical problems and no treasure was ultimately found. Yet in the process they had begun to build a community around the idea of DIY underwater exploration.

OpenROV evolved into an approach for prototyping underwater drones. OpenRov’s underwater drones have iterated through a number of phases. Throughout its development it has been involved in a number of maker faire’s and won a number of competitions. In 2012 OpenROV launched a kickstarter campaign raising over 100,000 dollars for a kit product. In 2015 OpenROV launched a new campaign that raised over $800,000 for its Trident drone. The company’s values center around the exploration of the unknown, creating technology which is revolutionary and having a big and positive impact on the world.

Business model and open source elements

OpenROV’s core business model is in selling kits and products that are highly engineered and relatively low cost compared to other products, based on many years of research and development. To do this the company eclectically uses a mix of open source hardware and conventional parts. The company maintains the majority of its designs as open source. However not all of its products are open-source, for reasons that will be explained.

As a general rule OpenROV shares what it can, much of the process in creating the drones and the parts / technology that make up. However it requires a huge amount of energy to document the engineering and development process. Documenting everything would not be possible, so it is important to make strategic decisions about where OpenROV decides to put its documentation energy. The filter that is used to make decisions about whether something will be open source or not is whether it will be beneficial to the community and to the company at the same time. The company cares more about the quality and performance of the product than in making it open source for open source’s sake.

An example of this is the use of the Qualcomm chip set. OpenROV decided to use this because it was the best and most appropriate part. The company has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Qualcomm, and as Eric explains “if we only allowed ourselves to use parts that are open source our hands would be tied.” In Eric’s opinion there is a subtle difference between community-based hardware and open source hardware. Non-open source hardware can still be low cost and have a large community of users and developers around it. For example their choice to use the BeagleBone Linux computer was not based on it being open source, but rather because it was low cost and because enough other people were developing with it that they could learn from. It is more important to have a healthy developer community where people can share and learn and build, which in Eric’s view is itself its own kind of open-source, whether based on proprietary hardware or not.

There is also the need to be careful about open sourcing elements of OpenROV that they have put huge investment in. If everything were open source, large-scale competitors / manufacturers, from China or elsewhere, could be easily able to replicate what they did, making OpenROV uncompetitive. OpenROV has put in well over $1 million into R&D costs and they need to make sure they get value back. For other elements of the design, where OpenROV does not feel over exposed, they do open source design elements and hope that people can tinker and build off the ideas.

Open-source for software has existed for a while, however for hardware it is still a new emerging space, and the need to translate research and development costs into future profits is still an issue in question that OpenROV grapples with. For this reason OpenROV straddles a fuzzy and shifting line between open source and proprietary elements. They see open source as a means to an end, and are more interested in democratizing DIY underwater exploration and building a bigger community and ecosystem of innovators.

Community dimensions of OpenROV

The more substantive dimension of open source for OpenROV is in the community dimensions. Eric believes that “everyone is smarter than anyone”, by which he means that more people working on the problem draws on more intelligence than simply a limited group. The community dimension of open-source allows for greater social momentum built around a project, something OpenROV has repeatedly experienced. Eric expressed that it is somewhat of a cliché that a community will produce lots of intellectual property to make something better. He feels that the “free IP” concept of open source is a myth. For him the bigger element that arises from openness is sharing something that he believes in with the community. This allows him to see what people value, pick up, and where the interest is. And he gets motivation and encouragement from the community as well. Communities are all about helping do the thing together that they mutually care about.

For OpenROV openness is closer to the idea of “user led innovation”, being able to see how a community engages with product. They have reaped the most benefits from understanding what the community’s interests are, what things they adopt, they try and build themselves. Cultivating a community is also a source of recruitment – finding people from the community and hiring them. For them those are bigger returns than any IP they have drawn from the community.

Building a global ecosystem?

One thing that they have noticed is that as they have open sourced the drone technology, other companies around the world have copied what they have done. Most of these competitors do not necessarily share back to the world their own unique additions. On the one hand the logic of this competition could be seen to be good. Competition can energize development of a market with a widening variety of niche areas. Like the iphone app community or Elon Musk’s decision to make Tesla designs open, the intent behind open sourcing is to create the conditions for social infrastructure to develop that supports all of the competitor’s in a system.

They also hope that ecosystem sharing emerges in this new niche area. Yet so far there have not been any companies that have done this. In OpenROV’s own community there are some examples where people are creating and sharing their own new designs, however is not the same as multiple enterprises driving the development of an industry sector globally.

Connections with research is one of those bright spots, there have been over 100 articles and essays written about OpenROV, including a number of theses. There are many relationships to universities, teams of researchers who have bought the products, corresponded with OpenROV, used of technology and adapted it. In many cases OpenROV have provided support on a pro bono basis. Therefore, in the area of research and development, there has been a space of open knowledge production which has emerged in the space of submersible robotics, which OpenROV has helped to spark.

Skills, competencies and decision making

Designing underwater drones requires a high degree of technical capability. Even those buying the kits need to have technical capabilities and feel comfortable with technology. Many of the users of the technology are small business owners involved in some form of underwater exploration.

The team itself has between 12 and 15 people working full time, and about half a dozen interns. The team itself is highly technical in orientation, what they do is hard-core engineering. The team does all of its own analysis and design work. Eric feels that this is the right way to spend resources in beginning – to make sure the product is excellent. He feels it is the hard-core engineering and research and development that has driven its success.

There is no formal problem-solving process or approach for the company. There is a lot of transparency between what everyone does and people can easily talk to each other. The environment is more like a group of friends rather than a boss with workers. There are not a lot of meetings in the company. If people are involved in the problem-solving process they will work with the people directly involved in this problem. Collaboration spills out organically from the need to solve technical challenges.

OpenROV also does not formally hire people. It attracts people who are passionate are then invites them to be part of the team. Team members feel a strong sense of alignment. People feel a sense of care for the projects that they are involved in and want to steer them in the right direction. It is not just a job where people feel they need to show up. If people don’t like the way things are going it bothers them and they’ll most likely say something. Ultimately the people who work as part of the team feel a sense of ownership for what we are doing.

Strengths or weakness of the open design approach

When assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the open design approach, a contrast is drawn between openness at an organizational level and openness at a social level. At an organizational level openness means that the work environment is such that people can and will debate various solutions and decisions. Not all will agree. It is harder to get decisions made, but the theory is that better decisions are ultimately made, and that those involved feel more alignment and ownership because they came to the decision themselves.

The same logic can be applied to openness at the social level. When OpenROV is open and describes the various steps that it takes in technology development, there are people who question what it is doing and point out other options. This ultimately takes more time and can create frustration, than if they just made decisions without openness to the user community. Being open to a community in the development process provides more options, more complexity, more decisions and raises the amount of work that needs to be done. However, it also means OpenROV can learn from the community and the community can help refine and support OpenROV. OpenROV does updates every month, and when there is a delay, OpenROV provides an explanation (e.g. if they decided to change a part etc.). OpenROV opens itself up to being second guessed, and providing answers in an open way takes energy. But it also means that there is the possibility of learning from a bigger system.

The weaknesses of working within the open source / open design approach is the increased time to explain internal decisions and answer questions, as well as competition that arises from openness. The other challenge are the expectations that people project onto OpenROV, the idealism associated with open source. The community may expect OpenROV to hold themselves to a higher bar than what is possible with respect to open source, but they may misunderstand the nature of the challenges OpenROV faces. It is challenging to manage these expectations, as a company that is pragmatically open source. For them, patent and open source are not mutually exclusive – and there may be blind spots in the discourse on open source that overlooks this.

Thoughts on the future

Into the future OpenROV will continue to be improvisational with open source, doing it where it can. It will continue to care about its community and building a community globally. What is most important for it is to nurture a community of makers, tinkerers, researchers and innovators, rather than simply open all innovation to manufacturers who will steal and compete on price basis. How OpenROV nurtures a community of such innovators through open source rather than opening up to non-innovating manufacturers with economies of scale is one of the biggest challenges to address.

This report was conducted in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

Photo by 0xF2

Photo by ellen forsyth

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Open source projects seem to lack the ability to scale, remaining hobbyist or academic. Successful products are “curated” and pounded with marketing, yet, a community focus on making a product intuitive and beautiful, while demoing the product as a lifestyle, because it is worth having, would be ideal?

As Cravens points out, open-source product design is still practically implemented, for the most part, within a capitalist paradigm of production for profit in corporate-owned facilities (the classic example is Elon Musk’s various manufacturing ventures).

Open-source organization is ideal for the design of industrial products, because digital design can be done stigmergically (the same modular, granular approach to leveraging small contributions that characterizes Wikipedia) by self-selected individuals designing components to plug into a larger platform ecology. Physical production, on the other hand, is a cooperative venture that requires at least some degree of administrative coordination by a number of people engaged in a common process. Members of an open-manufacturing ecology can’t just manufacture components and sub-assemblies when they feel like it, and let them lie around until other groups of people also feel like producing the remaining necessary parts and assembling the final product. In the meantime, the shelves at Sears and Walmart are being stocked with goods — of inferior design and higher price though they may be — that are made to order in a timely fashion.

So the question is, what’s the catalyst that will drive cooperative production of physical goods on a P2P model at the local level, so organized as to meet the real material needs of real human beings in a timely and efficient manner, and to provide an alternative preferable to going to Sears or Walmart?

In my opinion it’s the present-day approach to commons-based peer production as a lifestyle choice or ideal, which Cravens seems to set forth as an alternative to hobbyist production, that’s the problem. Societies undergo phase transitions to fundamentally new ways of organizing things only when the new technologies that were previously adopted as the lifestyle choice of those who could afford to secede from the existing system, as a matter of choice and privilege, are instead adopted as a means for survival by those who no longer have the choice of surviving in the existing system.

Technologists sometimes use the term “killer app” for a practical application that suddenly drives widespread adoption of a technology that had previously been sitting around for a considerable length of time, with nobody much paying any attention to it outside of hobbyist groups.

The “killer app” concept applies on the macro scale as well, to the adoption of new organizational and technological paradigms on a society-wide basis. Because of path dependency and culture lag, the technological feasibility of organizing society on a new basis tends to predate the phase transition to a society actually organized around the new technologies. That phase transition occurs only when the new technologies are widely perceived as offering the solution to real popular needs. And when it does occur, it is usually non-linear and is much faster than anyone anticipated when the tipping point is reached.

Ultimately material implementation of open source design projects will come from local network nodes composed of people colocated in physical space, who are driven by their own immediate material needs. In other words, our society and economy will shift to more liberatory, decentralized and abundant ways of organizing and producing things only when people see them as the obvious solution to real and immediate problems.

Resilient forms of organization are adopted in the face of turbulence and uncertainty. Large, centralized hierarchies of the kind that reached their peak in the 20th century — large oligopoly corporations and nation-states — function optimally only in environments that are controlled so as to artificially reduce complexity and render society predictable to managers and planners.

When complexity and uncertainty reach levels beyond the ability of hierarchical institutions to control, such institutions quickly begin to break down in the face of unmanageable turbulence. And societies — or rather, the people making them up — react to that turbulence by adopting new, more resilient organizational forms that are decentralized, networked and hardened at the end points.

At the same time, historically speaking, in periods of economic dislocation where increasing shares of the population have been unemployed or underemployed, and long-distance industrial supply and distribution chains have broken down, people have responded by relocalizing production and shifting the process of meeting their own material needs from the wage system to direct production for use in the social economy.

And when social safety nets and wage employment break down together, people tend to coalesce into self-organized social units for mutual aid of the kind described by Pyotr Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson, and institutions for pooling costs, risks and money incomes among extended families or multiple households.

We’re already seeing all these background conditions in spades. Capitalism is experiencing a number of steadily worsening terminal crisis tendencies. Thanks to Peak Oil and other crises of peak resource inputs, capitalism has reached the limits of extensive growth based on endless addition of artificially cheap, subsidized energy and other material inputs, mostly obtained through colonial enclosure and looting with the help of the state.

Along with the end of artificial abundance of material inputs, capitalism is hit from the other side by an equally devastating crisis: an end to the artificial scarcity of information — not only the open-source production of information as a counter-model (e.g. Wikipedia largely destroying the revenue of Britannica) but the growing unenforceability of copyrights and patents. Digital file-sharing has put an enormous dent in the revenue of proprietary content industries. And cheap micro-manufacturing technology means that production will be dispersed to hundreds of thousands of neighborhood shops, so that the transaction costs of enforcement render patents meaningless, and downloading pirated CAD/CAM files becomes as commonplace as downloading mp3s is now.

Industrial capitalism’s chronic tendencies towards surplus investment capital and excess capacity are being rendered much worse by the implosion of capital outlays required for material and immaterial production. The crisis of surplus capital that had been temporarily ended by WWII was resumed around 1970; even increasing financialization and political attack on labor’s earlier gains, which capital resorted to as a response, was insufficient. The desktop computer revolution and the Internet reduced the required capital outlays for production by two orders of magnitude or more in the information industries. The micro-manufacturing revolution (especially in its open-source hardware manifestations) has similarly reduced the capital outlays required for physical production. That means that the problem of finding enough profitable outlets to fully absorb available investment capital, already serious, has become insurmountable.

Meanwhile, the United States reached peak wage employment in 2000 — even before the Great Recession — and labor force participation has declined steadily ever since. Among those still in the labor force, a steadily growing percentage are underemployed, and employment has shifted from secure full-time jobs to low-paying service jobs and precarious temp or gig economy work.

The combination of new production and communications technologies, along with new forms of organization, presents a level of insupportable complexity that the old-style hierarchies of corporation and state are able neither to limit, contain or adapt to.

States are unable to effectively respond to terrorist networks organized on a stigmergic, open source model. Their ability to anticipate and prevent attacks is near zero, thanks to the virtually insurmountable problem of false positives and the inferior agility of bureaucratic hierarchies. This means that chronic disruption from the potential of terrorist attacks will further degrade transportation infrastructures, power grids, and supply and distribution chains.

The rise to power of right-authoritarian governments in Europe and the United States means that nation-states are more useless than before as a source of solutions to these problems, and if anything add to the level of turbulence from which ordinary people need protection. And fiscal exhaustion and austerity, along with the ongoing disintegration of the corporate-centered economy, means that state- and employer-based safety nets are disappearing.

Put all these things together and the “killer app” for adopting post-capitalist technologies of abundance and libertarian counter-institutions becomes clear:  SURVIVAL.

The cyclical crises which provided the material incentive for previous waves of adopting alternative technologies, are eclipsed by the scale of necessity entailed in the new era of systemic crises we’re entering. But at the same time as the material necessity for adoption surpasses anything in our collective memory, the sheer potential for abundance and freedom in the new technologies is also beyond our previous experience.

Decades ago, Jane Jacobs, Colin Ward and Karl Hess all argued for industrial relocalization and decentralized production as means of community economic bootstrapping, and for enabling the unemployed and underemployed to produce directly for use in the social economy.

Jacobs presented the growth of the Japanese bicycle industry at the turn of the 20th century as a classic example of import substitution. Because existing bicycle manufactures in America and Europe were unwilling to open production facilities in Japan, Japanese bicycle repair shops frequently resorted to custom-machining their own replacement parts. This eventually grew into a networked industrial ecology where different shops specialized in different parts that were in particularly high demand, and finally entire bicycles could be produced by such networked shops.

Karl Hess argued similarly in Neighborhood Power that people in poor communities could pool their individual power tools and machinery in neighborhood workshops, and pursue a gradual course of import subsitution starting from the first step of custom-machining the most needed replacement parts for home appliances that corporate manufacturers had either stopped making or price gouged customers for. From this beginning, they could apply the savings to expanding into larger product ecologies and meet a growing share of their need for manufactured goods outside the cash nexus.

Both Hess and Ward argued for such neighborhood workshops as means for the unemployed, underemployed and those on limited government benefits to produce directly for their own use as a supplement or partial alternative to the wage system.

And again, these three all wrote against the technological background of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. They predated the development of CNC machine tools scaled to medium-size shops, that fueled the rise of networked manufacturing in Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen — let alone the development of open-source tabletop CNC tools during the present explosion of micro-manufacturing technology. A collection of open-source tools like cutting table, 3D printer, router, bending machine, induction hearth, etc., costing several months skilled blue collar wage and housed in a neighborhood shop, can produce the kinds of goods that once required a million-dollar factory. Even for a multi-family unit of a few households, the potential is becoming real to produce a huge share of total consumption needs through a shared workshop and intensive horticulture.

The towns that sprang up in late Medieval Europe were basically favelas or squatter communities that coalesced at strategic crossroads and fords, populated by runaway peasants. These squatter communities, with their networked guilds — originally democratic self-governed communities of craft workers — were the site of Europe’s real first industrial revolution. Lewis Mumford called it the “Eotechnic” phase of technological history. The industrial revolution we’re familiar with from the history textbooks developed steam as a source of motive force, and developed many of the specific applications for machine production. But the most important prerequisite — clockwork technology for the transmission of power — had already been developed in the guilds and monasteries.

The new communities around which the post-capitalist abundance economy crystalizes may likewise be favelas, squats and “de-industrialized” Rust Belt neighborhoods. As a shrinking share of the population has sufficient or regular hours of paid employment to meet its needs, and as abandoned malls and unfinished housing developments host unofficial communities of people who are otherwise homeless, such centers may of necessity be the first adopters of micro-manufacturing technology, along with community gardens and off-grid power sources.

The decay of steady, secure employment and the shift to precarious freelance and temp employment is also leading to a huge outgrowth in experimentation with revived guilds, freelancers’ unions and cooperative temp agencies. Such organizations provide collective bargaining services on the model of the old longshoremen’s hiring halls, certiify skill and provide continuing training on the guild model, and offer to provide temp workers on a cooperative basis without the middleman.

And as the old national governments either succumb to fiscal exhaustion and austerity, or are actually taken over by the likes of Trump, we also see an increasing shift towards horizontal networks of local platforms that bypass national governments altogether (and abandon them as irrelevant). The most notable example is the assorted municipal movements in Spain which grew out of M15 which, despite right-wing control of the national government, are creating rich ecologies of commons-based and cooperative institutions in the major cities. In the United States, the Evergreen initiative in Cleveland and the solidarity economy initiatives in Jackson under the late mayor Chokwe Lumumba. In the present atmosphere we can expect such local initiatives to increase in importance, and to proliferate along with horizontal ties between them. We can expect them also to link up with networked movements for resistance to repression and neoliberalism — movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #NoDAPL, local remnants of Occupy, copwatch and Black Panthers armed patrols, and the like, as well as local initiatives like community land trusts and barter currencies.

There’s an old saying that the first casualty of a plan is contact with the enemy. We have to negotiate transition in the scenario that we have, not the one we would like to have. Two months ago I fully expected the transition process we’re discussing to take place against the more congenial background of a Clinton administration. Eight years of a caretaker regime by the old dying neoliberal party establishment she represents, a demographic transition within the Democratic Party to a majority of Millennials who are both more socialistic and more libertarian (and with more Green and Pirate sympathies) than the Boomers they’re replacing, and the implosion of the GOP into an irrelevant regional party of elderly white rageaholics. Today we can expect the transition to occur against a background more fraught with danger and repression. But the economic dislocation from Trump’s trade wars, and the increased rate at which social safety nets are dismantled, may if anything increase the value of social and economic counter-institutions as lifelines for survival.

And the basic forces driving the transition — the political, material and technological exhaustion of the old capitalist system, and the irrepressible post-capitalist system which is emerging from it — are just as inevitable either way. The transition may be rockier. But we’ll get there.

Photo by Hans-Werner Guth

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