semblance of easy access, many of these resources require the user to be extremely tech-savvy. In addition, purposeful and effective utilization of these resources requires considerable social skills and expertise in social engineering. This combination of technical and social skills is extremely interesting and very rare. Tech-savvy usually carries the connotation of nerdy, socially handicapped and awkward at communication, while the socially adept are generally assumed to lack technical skills.
A similar schism is strikingly evident in education. As a media student, you might finish your degree without ever having made anything yourself, or being responsible for a product. You may have spent your time studying games made by other people, instead of learning to make good games. As a vocational student learning a trade, you might end up sitting at old machines the whole time, never getting to see a 3D printer, or only encountering these relevantly recent developments at the end of your education, or in an external module instead of in the core programme.
In fact, it may be argued that there is a fundamental dichotomy in society, an essential separation between the field of making and the field of science. There is too little science in making, and too little making in science; these two fields are far too disconnected.
Examples of the opposite are emerging, and the connection between modern technology and craft traditions is sometimes aptly named hyper-craft. The implications for education are huge, and hyper-craft broadens the perspectives in education – not only for design, but for all crafts. Hyper-craft as a practice of open design is not primarily concerned with the objects that are being made. Its focus is on the process of making itself and the responsibilities that makers take – for the monsters they may be creating, for the process of creating, and for the ingredients used. PRINTING
Recently, a vocational school in the Dutch province of Brabant took the idea of the Instructables Restaurant and used it as a blueprint for a cross-over programme that combined elements of their hotel and catering education and their design education. Together, they realized an Instructables Restaurant for the CultuurNacht event – students created furniture based on blueprints BLUEPRINTS they had downloaded and cooked meals prepared according to online recipes. The restaurant served 1500 people that night. The school made a smart addition to the very classical trade of cooking, adding more dimensions, more layers, and creating their first open curriculum.
The agenda of open design – increasing transparency in the production chain, talking about responsibility – is certainly a political agenda. Open design is part of today’s possibilitarian movements, such as open data provided by governments seeking greater transparency. The potentially extreme effects of open information initiatives like Wikileaks are becoming apparent in the enormous backlash affecting the people involved. This is a manifestation of the clash between two worlds: the people operating within the bounds of ‘reality’ fighting back against the challenge to their system.
WHEN ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE STARTED TO DISAPPEAR BEHIND THE PAYWALLS OF LARGE PUBLISHERS, THE OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT CREATED NEW WAYS TO MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE AGAIN FOR EVERYBODY.
Open design may appear less extreme: designing is seen as more friendly, more creative, more playful. Much of the unfairness in the field of open design is ‘petty injustice’. These incidents include small production runs that are impossible or prohibitively expensive in a mass-production environment – or manufacturers accustomed to mass marketing who decide what will be included in their collection.
These forms of petty injustice are certainly not the only problems in open design, however; there are also profit-driven corporations limiting technical and design solutions, preventing new possibilities from being put to good use. This immediately invokes the global dimension of open design. When international trade agreements become a guise for Western corporations to privatize indigenous knowledge, activists ACTIVISM and librarians deploy open design strategies, documenting and codifying this knowledge and developing protection mechanisms such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Archive Protocols in Australia.
When sustainable solutions are locked away in patents, initiatives such as the GreenXchange started by Creative Commons and Nike facilitate easy licensing schemes. When academic knowledge started to disappear behind the paywalls of large publishers, the Open Access movement created new ways to make it accessible again for everybody.
When transnational supply chains blur the provenance of raw materials and the labour conditions of mining, harvesting and manufacturing, fair trade campaigns advocate transparency and propose alternatives, for example the Max Havelaar product range or the Fairphone project.
Disrupting these macro-political movements that privatize the commons or control access to the public domain is the major challenge for open design. An effective response to that challenge starts with understanding and reflecting on what we are doing when we make things.
NOTES
1 Musil, R, The Man without Qualities. 1933. Trans. S. Wilkins. London: Picador, 1997, p. 16.
2 Gabor, D, Inventing the Future. London: Secker & Warburg, 1963. p. 207.
ARTICLES
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN DESIGN
PAUL ATKINSON
Investigating the roots of open design and identifying its resulting technological, economical and societal changes, Atkinson contemplates the vast consequences this development will have for the design profession and the distribution of design.
Paul Atkinson is an industrial designer, design historian and educator; he lectures and conducts research at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK as a Reader in Design. For Paul, open design is “the internet-enabled collaborative creation of artefacts by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals. As a purely creative exercise, open design promotes the unprecedented sharing of knowledge between the professional and amateur designer, breaking down unnecessary barriers. When carried out for the common good rather than for capital gain or profit, open design allows the sharing of creative skills between developed and undeveloped nations for humanitarian benefit, countering the ramifications of global product consumerism.”
http://shu.academia.edu/paulatkinson
The concepts of open design – the collaborative creation SHARE of artefacts by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals – and of individualized production – the direct digital manufacture of goods at the point of use – at first sound like something from a utopian science fiction film. And yet, here we are. We can now easily download designs DOWNLOADABLE DESIGN from the internet, alter them at will to suit our own needs and then produce perfect products at the push of a button. Magic.
Back to the Future
In many ways though, there are huge similarities here to much older practices of production and consumption. The emergence of Do It Yourself DIY as a necessity for many is lost in the mists of time, but defined as a leisure pursuit, a pastime, it emerged from a perceived need to ‘keep idle hands busy’. In the hours following a long working day, it acted only to bring the Victorian work ethic from the factory into the home. DIY = productive leisure.
In promoting DIY as an amateur pastime, the professional practices of design (which had themselves only
