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Open Design. Bas van Abel
Читать онлайн.Название Open Design
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9789063693596
Автор произведения Bas van Abel
Жанр Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Издательство Ingram
Designability
Some time ago, Kevin Kelly published an article called ‘Better Than Free’13 which advocated a new business model, based on free copies in almost every domain – from music, books and films to your DNA – which should be supplemented by added value. He lists eight ‘generative values’ that might enhance the value of the free copies, and for which people will be prepared to pay: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. I think we should add one more value: designability. It is my belief that this value will encompass all the others, presenting a great challenge for the meta-designer.
I could list many more examples of the open movement, from open gaming to open love. We seem to be open to everything. In the presence of so many trends towards openness, it does not come as a surprise that we also are witnessing the emergence of an open design movement, albeit slightly later than in many other domains. It seems to be part of a shift in the world of design from form via content to context, or from syntax via semantics to pragmatics.6 But what does ‘open design’ actually mean? In his article The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing,7 Michel Bauwens distinguishes three different dimensions of open design:
Input side
On the input side we have voluntary contributors, who do not have to ask permission to participate, and use open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright ACTIVISM so that it can be freely improved and modified. If no open and free raw material is available, as long as the option exists to create new one, then peer production is a possibility.
Process side
On the process side, it is based on design for inclusion, low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives (peer governance).
Output side
On the output side, it creates a commons, using licenses that insure that the resulting value is available to all, again without permission. This common output in turn recreates a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration.
Making Almost Anything
At the Fab Labs, founded by Neil Gershenfeld at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, these three dimensions are merging. Fab Labs give individuals access to tools for digital fabrication; the only provisos are that you must learn to do it yourself, and you must share the lab with other uses and users. Users can use the Fab Lab ‘to make almost anything’. This sounds exciting – and indeed, it is. However, there are also some serious problems connected with open design, three of which are associated with the open source movement in general.
THE DESIGNER OF THE FUTURE HAS TO BECOME A META-DESIGNER, SHAPING ENVIRONMENTS IN WHICH UNSKILLED USERS CAN DESIGN THEIR OWN OBJECTS.
The first problem is particularly linked with open source movements that deal with the production of physical objects. Where any immaterial project is concerned, as long as there is a general infrastructure for cooperation, and there is open and free input that is available or can be created, then knowledge workers can work together on a common project. However, the production of physical goods inevitably involves costs of raising the necessary capital, and the result at least needs to recoup the costs. Indeed. such goods compete with each other by definition; if they are in the possession of one individual, they are more difficult to share, and once used up, they have to be replenished. Thanks to the 3D printer, this problem seems to become less urgent every month. The first consumer 3D printer has been announced for this autumn, produced by Hewlett-Packard. PRINTING Although it will still cost about 5000 euros, it is expected that the price will soon drop below 1000 euros. Nevertheless, the laws of the physical economy will remain a serious constraint, compared to open source activities in the digital domain. A second problem for the open design movement is that many people are not able or willing to join the open design movement. Human life is an eternal oscillation between openness and closedness, and this holds true for design. Many people do not have the skills, the time or the interest to design their own clothes, furniture, software, pets, or weapons (see below, under the fourth problem).
Third, we should not automatically trust those who think that they are able to design. As long as the individual is happy with the result, this issue does not seem like a big problem. But as soon as the crowd starts sourcing, CROWDSOURCING the varied input might affect the reliability, functionality or the beauty of the design. Unfortunately, crowdsourcing does not always result in wisdom; quite often, all it produces is the folly of the crowds. In You Are Not a Gadget8, Jaron Lanier argues convincingly that design by committee often does not result in the best product, and that the new collectivist ethos – embodied by everything from Wikipedia to American Idol to Google searches – diminishes the importance and uniqueness of the individual voice, and that the ‘hive mind’ can easily lead to mob rule, digital Maoism and ‘cybernetic totalism’.9
Fourth, I want to address an additional problem. We should not forget that the 3D printers and DNA printers PRINTING in the Fab Labs and homes of the future probably will not be used solely to design beautiful vases and flowers; they could also be used to engineer less benign things, such as lethal viruses. This is not a doomsday scenario about a possible distant future. In 2002, molecular biologist Eckhard Wimmer designed a functional polio virus on his computer with the help of biobricks and printed it with the help of a DNA synthesizer; in 2005, researchers at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington reconstructed the Spanish flu, which caused the death of between 50 and 100 million people in the 1920s, roughly 3% of the world’s population at that time; to understand the virulent nature of that influenza virus, consider this: if a similar flu pandemic killed off 3% of the world population today, that would be over 206 million deaths.
Although we have to take these problems seriously, they should not lead to the conclusion that we should avoid further development of open design. It should urge us not to ignore or underestimate the potentially dangerous pitfalls of open design, and invent new strategies to face up to them.
NOTES
1 http://.picnicnetwork.org/program/sessions/redesigning-design.html, accessed on 16 January 2011.
2 In this article, for brevity’s sake, I use the term ‘open design’ as a catch-all to cover open source design, downloadable design and distributed design.
3 Plessner, H, ‘Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die Philosophische Anthropologie’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975 [1928], p. 310.
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness, accessed on 16 January 2011.
5 http://opendino.wordpress.com
6 Oosterling, H, ‘Dasein as Design’. Premsela Lecture 2009, p. 15. Available online at www.premsela.org/sbeos/doc/file.php?nid=1673, accessed 16 January 2011.
7 Available online at www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-02/the-emergence-of-open-design-and-open-manufacturing/, accessed 16 January 2011.
8 Lanier, J, You Are Not a Gadget. Knopf, 2010. More information at www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html.