Open Design. Bas van Abel
in advance for his or her work to be shared, distributed and modified – depending on the specific terms stated in the licence. While the licences can no longer be considered innovative, they are being applied in creative new ways. By putting open design on the agenda, Creative Commons Netherlands is expanding the use of open licences into the domain of product design and giving intellectual property back to its creators. After all, before an object is designed and produced, it leads a separate life as an idea, often taking on a range of forms during the process, from a sketch on a scrap of paper to the final CAD drawings used in production. Open licences can be used to protect every form in between. These licences smooth the way for creativity and innovation, but also remind us of a fundamental issue in design: that design cannot remain exclusive.
Digitization BLUEPRINTS has brought unprecedented growth to industries like industrial design, architecture, fashion and media. It has led to technological and professional changes that have also had great social significance. Open design offers unprecedented possibilities for the design of our surroundings, for design as a profession, and for designers – professionals and amateurs alike. The industrial era was mainly about designing products for the masses; in the post-industrial digital era, the masses themselves are seizing the chance to design, manufacture and distribute products.
Design
It is perhaps not surprising that the Netherlands has proven to be a fertile breeding ground for open design. In a culture characterized by a continuous battle to hold the sea at bay, the Netherlands has built up a rich history in adapting and designing the human living environment and can be considered one of the first modern democracies. The relatively open-minded society has allowed experimental design to flourish. This small country has a proportionally high number of designers, most of whom tend not to be highly specialized or tied to an industry. Consequently, they cannot limit themselves to one area and must remain open to other disciplines, inside the field of design and beyond. It is no coincidence that Premsela, the Dutch platform for design, encourages the development of an open design culture. In the 1990s, this mentality led to what became known as conceptual design. Today, a decade later, we can see that an open design philosophy is essential to coping with a changing world. Open Design Now!
Now
Where do we go from here? Reading this book could be a good start. It has become an open project; anything else was hardly conceivable. Open Design Now is meant as a travel guide to the emerging and expanding world of international open design. Pore over it in your study, take it with you to work and discuss it with your colleagues, and allow it to inspire you. This book provides an overview of best practices in ‘creative innovation’, as Waag Society calls it. Or perhaps we should call it ‘social and participatory innovation’, since the term refers to the continuous search for meaningful applications of technology and design that will benefit the general population.
According to Paul Valéry6, creativity springs less from one’s own ideas and originality than from a structure that compels new insights. CO-CREATION In his eyes, the true creative never stops searching. Creation itself is the work, the primary goal, an end in itself; in his view, your completed object is no different from anyone else’s. The same is essentially true of this book: it is not finished, nor can we claim full credit for its contents.7
Textually, Open Design Now is structured around feature articles and case studies. Visually, however, it is structured around images that show how open design has changed the way the world looks. Although many of the examples in this book are small in scale, they indicate the promise open design holds for the near future – a future of $50 prosthetic legs, SOCIAL DESIGN DesignSmashes, REMIX FairPhones, Fritzing, Instructables Restaurants, COMMUNITY RepRaps and (Un)limited Design.
NOTES
1 Vallance, R, ‘Bazaar Design of Nano and Micro Manufacturing Equipment’, 2000. Available online at http://www.engr.uky.edu/psl/omne/download/BazaarDesignOpenMicroAndNanofabricationEquipment.PDF accessed on 17 January 2011.
3 http://opencollector.org; http://opencollector.org/history/OpenDesignCircuits/reinoud_announce.
4 Bollier, D, and Racine, L, ‘Ready to Share. Creativity in Fashion & Digital Culture’. The Norman Lear Center: Annenberg, 2005. Available online at www.learcenter.org/pdf/RTSBollierRacine.PDF, accessed 17 January 2011.
5 http://unlimiteddesigncontest.org
6 Valéry, P, ‘Cahier’, cited in www.8weekly.nl/artikel/1774/paul-valry-de-macht-van-de-afwezigheid.html.
INTRODUCTION
MARLEEN STIKKER
The pioneers of our time are not taking the world at face value, as a given from outside; rather, they see the world as something you can pry open, something you can tinker with.
Marleen Stikker developed the ‘Digital City’ (DDS) in Amsterdam, which was the first European free gateway and virtual community on the internet, a place where many Dutch citizens, organizations, companies and publishers took their first tentative steps on the digital highway. Marleen also founded Waag Society, a media lab developing creative technical applications for societal innovation. Waag Society is also concerned with the social effects of the internet and actively promotes Open Data. For Marleen, “Open design is part of a growing possibilitarian movement. Rooted in information and communication technology, it gives us all the instruments to become the one-man factory, the world player operating from a small back room.”
In his novel The Man Without Qualities, Austrian author Robert Musil describes two ways of thinking and interacting with the world.
“If you want to pass through open doors you have to respect the fact that they have a fixed frame: this principle is simply a prerequisite of reality. But if there is a sense of reality then there must also be something that you might call a sense of possibility. Someone who possesses this sense of possibility does not say for example: here this or that has happened, or it will happen or it must happen. Rather he invents: here this could or should happen. And if anybody explains to him that it is as it is, then he thinks: well, it probably could be otherwise.”1
Possibilitarians think in new possibilities, and get all excited when things get messy and life becomes disorderly. In disruption, possibilitarians see new opportunities, even if they do not know where they might lead. They believe, with Denis Gabor, that “the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented”2.
Realitarians are operating within a given framework, according to the rules that are given, following to the powers there are. They accept the conditions and the institutions as given, and are fearful of disruption.
Whether a person is a possibilitarian or a realitarian has nothing to do with their creativity. People representing these frames of reference can be found in all professions: entrepreneurs, politicians, artists. In fact, art and design are not avant-garde by definition, and it would be overstating the matter to claim that innovation is an inherent quality in the arts – or science, for that matter.
It would