One of the highlights of my last lecture tour in Europe, was meeting Franz Nahrada, the pioneer, amongst other things, of the concept of Global Villages, which proposes the “combining the immaterial wealth of global connectedness and peer design with the material wealth of local natural resource cycles and human community.” In other words, it is now possible to combine the advantages of re-localization, living in local communities in a more natural environment, without losing the benefits of global connectivity.

One of the small initiatives that came out of our discussion, is to create a new area in our wiki to monitor peer-based design trends. We are interested in collaborative design, in open designs which can be worked on together using commons-oriented licenses, and in the economic models that might be associated with such development (hence the notion, first mentioned by Eric von Hippel, of ‘built only capitalism’).

See the new directory section here, if you want to monitor such topics.
(in the words of Franz, it will cover: “everything from visual design, fashion design to hardware design”.

As an example, our latest entry concerns the development of Phidgets, i.e. widgets associated to physical objects that can be connected to our computer.

Here is how the University of Calgary-based GroupLab summarizes the development:

“We can now build physical devices that can be attached to a computer by various means: serial ports, USB, or even wireless connections. However, these are usually hard to program because they typically require intimate knowledge in how these devices are built as well as their communication protocol. As an alternative, we believe that these devices can be packaged as a physical widget, or Phidget. As with conventional GUI widgets, the important idea of a phidget is that it presents the programmer with an easily used entity with a well defined interface, where details of how the entity is implemented is hidden away. This project was motivated by our work on Digital but Physical widgets.”

For more information, see also our delicious tag: P2P-Design