Open design, co-design and p2p production are influencing not only the way we think about designing and making things but also the way we approach economical sustainability, supply chain and business models.
In the past weeks Massimo Menichinelli interviewed us (Bertram Niessen and me) on Openwear and Peter Toxler  on some issues regarding these topics and it’s worth it to reblog here:

Openwear.org (Zoe Romano + Bertram Niessen) interview about DIY Craft / Fashion Microproductions

Openwear is the new open source concept and community in course of developing by EDUfashion, a two-year project for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. It is born out of the collaboration of Poper – a social communication studio based in Ljubljana – Ethical Economy – the company based in London providing web tools to build ethically significant relations, and 3 universities from Italy (Faculty of Political Science in Milano), Slovenia (Faculty of Natural Sciences in Ljubljana) and Denmark (Copenhagen Business School).

In Openwear’s online space, small fashion producers, designers, stylists, students, interns,tailors, photographers, models, crafters, sewing cafes, silk-screen printers, fashion schools and others will all be able to open their own web space and personal profile, have access to the service and tools made available by the community, network, learn but also take part to the first collaborative, peer-produced, open-source fashion brand and its collections.
For the first time, the result of the innovative process of crowdsourcing will not be owned by a particular firm or company because the owners will be the community itself.

In this post I’m going to interview two of Openwear’s members, Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen.

Massimo Menichinelli: The phenomena of Open Hardware, DIY and Makers have reached a remarkable level of development, fame and reputation. Perhaps less famous but equally important is the phenomenon of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises that are often visible on platforms such as Etsy. What are the differences and similarities between these phenomena and how do they relate to each other?

Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen: All these new scenes have in common a desire to empower understanding what they have in their hands, how it was made and improved. This desire blurs the distinction between producers and consumers, not in the sense that everyone will make everything they need, but that everyone more and more often will able to produce or design something and make it available in a flux of exchange out of which everyone could benefit.

Both phenomena are related with crucial changes that are undergoing in our social and economical environment. The Peak Oil calls to 0 Km chains of production. The rise of 2.0 social networks, mixed with the spreading of p2p communities, encourages new forms of global/local communities of producers and consumers. New technologies in communication and material production foster distributed manufacturing.

The difference is that DIY crafters sometimes have the tendency to perceive themselves more far away from technology because of their handmade pledge. It’s more a problem of cultural background. But as long as they envision the possibilities of new on-demand machines, they realize how craftsmanship could be revolutionized without losing its soul. Continue on openp2pdesign.org

An interview with Peter Troxler about Open Design and Fab Labs

After the interview with Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen from Openwear.org, I have now the pleasure to interview Peter Troxler, an independent researcher (see his personal website here) and one of the few researchers (if not the only one) that are investigating the business models of Fab Labs and Open Design.

Peter Troxler is also one of the editors of the forthcoming Open Design Now book and runs Square One, an independent research company at the intersection of business administration, society and technology. He has also been an instructor at Fab Academy and Business Developer at Fab Lab Luzern.

Massimo Menichinelli: It seems that the Netherlands are the country where Fab Labs and Open Design have encountered most interest so far. Which are the reasons for such a success and what is the current situation?

Peter Troxler: I am not entirely sure this assessment is actually correct. Let’s look at the two topics, Fab Labs and Open Design, seperately.

01. Fab Labs
It is obvious that the Netherlands has seen a quick growth in number of Fab Labs — from one in 2007/2008 to 6 labs (on the official list and 3 more (mobile, Maastricht, Enschede) that are not on the list now (2010/11). Also, with 9 Labs for 16 million inhabitants this is probably the highest density; the US has 19 Fab Labs for 311 million of people (at this density the Netherlands would only have 1 Fab Lab).

But we should not forget, that Fab Labs are only one player in the fabbing universe; there are Tech Shops, Hacker Spaces, “Offene Werkstätten” (in Germany) etc. that also provide a personal manufacturing infrastructure. According to hackerspaces.org, Germany has some 56 HS, about 40 “Offene Werkstätten” and a handful of Fab Lab initiatives.
And I am just starting to understand what’s going on in France …

So the apparent pole position of the Netherlands might need to be taken “cum grano salis”.

Probably another element helped spread the Fab Lab idea in the Netherlands: the fact that it is just such a small and relatively densely populated country. Ideas can spread really quickly, and that might be the reason why many things are adopted quickly over here.

2. Open Design

Open Design is somewhat vaguely defined. And open design in general is very much in its infancy. If you restrict it to open source type approaches in industrial/product design, you’ll find pockets of it in Berlin, the Dutch Randstad, and probably the Bay Area (US). If you look at fashion, open design has a longer history, and maybe Italy might figure more prominently on the map.

An interesting aside in this context is, that Asian artists/designers traditionally used to get more cudos by copying old masters while the Western culture (at least as of the 19th century romantic illusion of the lone creator as promoted by Diderot) seems more inclined to admire “original creation”.

But then there is the whole area of design where we talk about hardware and electronics — there the Netherlands figure probably not even as second runner up, but you would have to analyse open hardware project collections such as those of Make Magazine and Kerstin Balka’s http://open-innovation-projects.org/ to get some idea of national figure — I have not done that so far and actually don’t intend to do that.

It’s difficult to say, why the Netherlands would be the fore-runner of Fab Labs and Open Design.

What strikes me is that the Netherlands also have one of the least transparent and “greedy” ecosystem of private organisations collecting royalties for all sorts of intellectual property (there seem to be over 20 organisations in the Netherlands collecting (and allegedly re-distributing) such fees).

Having said that, one could think that actually this country is sort of obsessed with dealing with intellectual property. The Netherlands is — to my knowledge — the only country where the national Creative Commons chapter received substantial government funding over a prolonged period of time. It is certainly highly speculative to use that as an explanation for the apparent attention for Open Design in the Netherlands.

Similarly, one would also have to speculate about the role of design in general in the Dutch society — at least in the national self-perception Dutch Design is almost equalled to a (if not *the*) international benchmark of good design. This creates an environment where it is not unlikely that all sorts of off-mainstream projects do get to benefit from the critical mass interested in the overall topic. Continue on openp2pdesign.org