Open Design. Bas van Abel
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At the 2010 edition of PICNIC, EVENTS an annual Amsterdam event that aims to bring together the world’s top creative and business professionals to develop new partnerships and opportunities, Tom Hulme talked about ‘Redesigning Design’1: “The design industry is going through fundamental changes. Open design, downloadable design DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN and distributed design democratize the design industry, and imply that anyone can be a designer or a producer.” The subtext of this message seems to be that open design2 is something intrinsically good and should therefore be promoted. Though I generally view open design as a positive development, it is important to stay alert to potential obstacles and pitfalls in order to avoid throwing out the (designed) baby with the proverbial bathwater.
Like other fields influenced by the ‘open movement’, such as open source software, open science, and open technology, open design is closely connected with the rise of computers and internet. In view of this intrinsic association, the fundamental characteristics of the digital domain are worth examining further. To develop the positive aspects of open design without falling prey to its pitfalls, the designer should not abandon his activities as a designer; rather, the designer should redesign the activities themselves. The designer of the future has to become a database designer, a meta-designer, not designing objects, but shaping a design space in which unskilled users can access user-friendly environments in which they can design their own objects. TEMPLATE CULTURE
Design as Open Design
Openness is a fundamental part of life – and so is closedness. Although organisms have to remain separate from their environment in order to retain their discrete identity, they also need to open themselves up to their environment in order to nourish themselves and to dispose of the by-products of their essential processes. However, whereas the openness of other animals is limited in the sense that they are locked up in their specific environment (their niche or Umwelt), human beings are characterized by a much more radical openness. Their world is unlimited in the sense that it is open to an endless supply of new environments and new experiences. This makes human life incredibly varied and rich, compared to the life of other animals, but at the same time it also imposes a burden on us that animals do not share. Animals are thrown in an environment that is just given to them (which does not exclude, of course, that their environment may sometimes undergo radical changes due to forces beyond their control or understanding), but humans have to design their own world. Dasein, or ‘being-in-the-world’, as Heidegger characterizes the life of human beings, is always design – not only in the sense that they have to shape an already existing world, but in the more radical sense that human beings have to establish their world: they always live in an artificial world. To quote German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, humans are artificial by nature.3 This is a never-ending process. Over the past few decades, accompanying the development of computers and the internet, we are witnessing the exploration and establishment of a whole new realm of human experience that leaves hardly any aspect of our lives untouched, including the world of design.
DESIGN AS METADESIGN
In the digital era, we have moved from the computer to the database as material or conceptual metaphor. It functions as a material metaphor when it evokes actions in the material world. Examples of this are databases implemented in industrial robots, enabling mass customization (e.g. ‘built-to-order’ cars) and biotechnological databases used for genetic engineering. Conversely, it functions as a conceptual metaphor if it expresses a surplus of meaning that adds a semantic layer on top of the material object.
The psychologist Maslow once remarked that if the only tool you have is a hammer, it may be tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.10 In a world in which the computer has become the dominant technology –more than 50 billion processors worldwide are doing their job – everything is becoming a material or conceptual database. Databases have become the dominant cultural form of the computer age, as “cinema was the key cultural form of the twentieth century”.11
They are ‘ontological machines’ that shape both our world and our worldview. In the age of digital recombination, everything – nature and culture alike – becomes an object for manipulation. The almost unlimited number of combinations that databases offer would seem to prescribe some form of limitation imposed on the possibilities. In the case of open, database-mediated design, this calls for a new role for the designer. The designer should not give up his role as a designer (or restrict himself to his traditional role as designer of material or immaterial objects). Instead, he should become a metadesigner who designs a multidimensional design space that provides a user-friendly interface, enabling the user to become a co-designer, even when this user has no designer experience or no time to gain such experience through trial and error.
Designing Models
The task of the metadesigner is to create a pathway through design space, to combine the building blocks into a meaningful design. In this respect, the meta-designer resembles the scientist who no longer creates a linear argument, but a model or simulation that enables the user to explore and analyse a specific domain of reality, or a game designer who designs a game space that facilitates meaningful and enjoyable play, if he is successful.
Although human beings have, from the very dawn of humanity, been characterized by a fundamental openness, the concept of ‘openness’ has become especially popular in the last couple of decades. Wikipedia – one of the most successful examples of an open movement project – offers the following definition: “Openness is a very general philosophical position from which some individuals and organizations operate, often highlighted by a decision-making process recognizing communal management by distributed stakeholders (users/ producers/ contributors), rather than a centralized authority (owners, experts, boards of directors, etc.)”.4 In the global information society, openness has become an international buzzword. OPEN EVERYTHING One of the recent developments has been the emergence of open software, from operating systems to a variety of applications. However, the demand for open access not only concerns software, but also extends to all possible cultural content, ranging from music and movies to books. All information (enslaved by copyrights) wants to be free. MANIFESTOS Moreover, open access is not limited to the digital world. An increasing number of scientists are pleading for open science and open technology. They cooperate with the public and demand open access for their publications and databases. The Open Dinosaur project, for example, which advertises itself on its website as ‘crowdsourcing dinosaur science’, involves scientists and the public alike in developing a comprehensive database of dinosaur limb bone measurements, to investigate questions of dinosaur function and evolution.5 However, in this case, the demand for open access not only targets the results of their research, but also extends their objects. The OpenWetWare organization not only promotes the sharing of information, know-how and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology and biological engineering, it also tries to prevent efforts to patent living matter, such as DNA.
The Tower of Babel
This implies that the designer’s task is to limit the virtually unlimited combinational space in order to create order from disorder. After all, like the infinite hexagonal rooms in the Library of Babel postulated by Jorge Luis Borges12, most of the (re)combinations of design elements will have little or no value. To some extent, the designer will create these design elements himself, while others will be added by the co-designer. The recombination of the elements will also take the form of an interaction between the possible paths within the design space on the one hand, and the choices of the co-designer on the other. Of course, data mining and profiling algorithms will also play a role by suggesting or autonomously adding design elements (depending on the metadesign). You might ask yourselves what makes the metadesign presented here essentially different from forms of mass customization that already exist, for example on the Nike website. The answer is that mass customization is part of the project of metadesign, but only part. In the main article I referred to the three dimensions of open design.
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