Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive

Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive BAS VAN ABEL, LUCUS EVERS, ROEL KLAASSEN AND PETER TROXLER Amsterdam, NL: BIS Publishers, 2011 ISBN 9789063692599 Softbound, 320 pages, full color illustrations, $39.00 "Open design is rooted in information and communication technology, giving us all the instruments to become the one-man factory, the world player operating from a small back room" (p.17). Peppered with words like amateurissmo, hyper-craft, co-creation, social design, remix, open source and crowd-sourcing, this book examines the freeing aspects of technology and what pursuit of them might mean today. It runs counter to our conservative expectations for the future that usually look a lot like an expanded present. The book is very much a Dutch production based on the collaborative effort of Creative Commons (Netherlands), Premsela and the Waag Society's Open Design Lab. Creative Commons is a different take on copyright fostering more openness, while Premsela promotes design and fashion in The Netherlands from a cultural perspective and the Waag Society is a foundation interested in developing creative technology for social innovation. Taking its cue from technology, the feature articles forming the bulk of the book and case studies delivering a smaller portion push on possibilities for culture production rather than culture consumption by ordinary citizens. It takes Norbert Wiener's 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings, seriously. Wiener, the father of cybernetics, was ahead of his time, both his book and this one share a Utopian perspective. But this book gives credence and a practical viewpoint to releasing people to be creative and celebrate human inventiveness, sharing and community. The book also contains a visual index that covers 32 concepts dealt with in the book. Each concept is visually documented by grassroot or designer applications. These sometimes show the breadth of application and make the conceptual idea real. Some individual images are tied back to discussion in an article or case study. The images demonstrate creative possibility with a technological backdrop. The case studies discuss specific projects and most have a uri attached for further investigation. The range of case ideas is impressive. There has been much talk of the democratization of media and information; this book takes democratization into the world of object design; it challenges copyright along with patent, production and distribution as well. While user-centered and co-design practices have developed and taken hold, this variation on thinking about design goes further proposing the development of a post-professional design world, citing, as examples, the changes to journalism, photography and graphic design that technology has effected through putting hardware and software into the hands of amateurs. One key to the open design initiative is the 60 Fab Labs distributed globally. Fab is short for fabrication; these labs use 3D technology to generate objects for a limited run and are available to amateurs. It supports personal design and one-off creations. What does this mean for designers and their process, even what they design, if they are no longer designing for mass production or even customization within the frame of mass production? In his article, Paul Atkinson suggests that designers create generative software, templates and systems that can morph giving the amateur a base from which to create. This could facilitate the sharing of knowledge between professional designer and amateur. Sharing knowledge is a critical idea to open design- how to identify what knowledge is needed and how to effectively share it. The limited number of case studies (21) and their brief presentations suggest that this is a design change in the early stages. Clearly there is much thinking, investigation and development yet to do. Jos de MuI offers an article from a more critical perspective, briefly discussing four problems inherent in the development of open design. …