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.
9 Lanier, J, ‘One-Half of a Manifesto’, on the Edge Foundation’s forum. Available online at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_p1.html, accessed 16 January 2011.
10 Maslow, A, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. 1966, 2002. Available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=3_40fK8PW6QC, accessed 16 January 2011.
11 Manovich, L, The Language of New Media. MIT Press: Boston, 2002, p. 82. Available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=7m1GhPKuN3cC, accessed 17 January 2011.
12 Borges, L, ‘The Library of Babel’, reprinted in The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986. The Penguin Press, London, 2000, p. 214-216. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.
13 Kelly, K, ‘Better Than Free’, 2008. Available online at www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php, accessed on 16 January 2011.
INTO THE OPEN
JOHN THACKARA
John Thackara portrays openness in general as a matter of survival to overcome the legacy of an industrial economy obsessed with control, and open design in particular as a new way to make, use and look after things. He calls upon open designers to take this responsibility seriously.
John Thackara is an author, speaker and events facilitator with a background in philosophy and journalism. He was the first director of the Netherlands Design Institute and programme director in 2007 of Designs of the time (Dott 07), a biennial event in northeast England. John is the initiator of the long-standing pivotal series of events, festivals and projects ‘Doors of Perception’. The series connects paradigm-changing designers, technology innovators, and grassroots inventors. For John, “openness is more than a commercial and cultural issue, it’s a matter of survival. Open design is one of the preconditions for the continuous, collaborative, social modes of enquiry and action that are needed.”
In 1909, Peter Kropotkin was asked whether it was possible to learn a trade as difficult as gardening from books. “Yes, it is possible,” he replied, “but a necessary condition of success, in work on the land, is communicativeness – continual friendly intercourse with your neighbours.”
Although a book can offer good general advice, Kropotkin explained, every acre of land is unique. Each plot is shaped by the soil, its topography and biodiversity,
