accessed 30 September 2010).
4 Sir Paul Reilly, Head of the Design Council in the UK, wrote in 1967: “We are shifting perhaps from attachment to permanent, universal values to acceptance that a design may be valid at a given time for a given purpose to a given group of people in a given set of circumstances, but that outside these limits it may not be valid at all.” Reilly, P, ‘The Challenge of Pop’, Architectural Review, October 1967, p. 256.
5 ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ is the title of Andrew Keen’s polemic 2007 book, which urges caution in allowing the user too much authority in any creative field if the status quo is to be maintained.
6 See Atkinson, P, ‘Boundaries? What Boundaries? The Crisis of Design in a Post-Professional Era’, Design Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2010, p. 137-155.
10 Charles Leadbeater, in his seminal book on open design We-Think, gives a variety of examples (including an excellent case study of the Cornish Steam Engine) where collaborative open development has created a much stronger and more successful end product than a protected, closed design. See Leadbeater, C, We-Think: Mass Innovation, not mass production, Profile Books, (2nd Ed. 2009), p. 56.
14 As Tadeo Toulis wrote: “Failure to appreciate DIY/Hack Culture is to risk having professional design become as irrelevant to the contemporary landscape as record labels and network television are in the age of iTunes and YouTube.” Toulis, T, ‘Ugly: How unorthodox thinking will save design’, Core 77, October 2008 (www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/ugly_how_unorthodox_thinking_will_save_design_by_tad_toulis_11563.asp, accessed 30 September 2010).
REDESIGNING DESIGN
JOS DE MUL
Open design is not a clear and unambiguous development or practice. Jos de Mul names a few of the problems he perceives with open design, without venturing to suggest any indication of how they might be solved. He then goes on to extend his well-documented and widely published ‘database’ metaphor to design, attempting to define the concept of design as metadesign.
Jos de Mul is a full professor in Philosophical Anthropology and head of the Philosophy of Man and Culture section at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is the scientific director of the ‘Philosophy of Information and Communication Technology’ research institute. His research focuses on the (partly overlapping) domains of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of art and culture, and the philosophy of information and communication technologies. According to Jos, “the open design movement 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, as my colleague Henk Oosterling expressed it in his Premsela Lecture last year.”
www2.eur.nl/fw/hyper/home.html
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
