Open design and inovation

Acknowledgements: Part 1: Open Design in Context 1 Introduction to Open Design 3 2 Innovation and Design 3 Mass Creativity: Design Beyond the Design Profession 25 4 Design Responses

Open

Design

and Innovation

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Open

Design

and Innovation

Facilitating Creativity in Everyone

Leon Cruickshank

© Leon Cruickshank 2014

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording

or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher

Published by

Gower Publishing Limited Gower Publishing Company

Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street

Union Road Suite 3-1

Leon Cruickshank has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,

1988, to be identified as the author of this work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:

Cruickshank, Leon

Open design and innovation : facilitating creativity in everyone / by Leon Cruickshank pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 978-1-4094-4854-9 (hardback : alk paper) ISBN 978-1-4094-4855-6 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4094-7475-3 (epub)

1 Creative ability 2 Democratization I Title

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD

Acknowledgements:

Part 1:

Open Design in Context

1 Introduction to Open Design 3

2 Innovation and Design

3 Mass Creativity: Design

Beyond the Design Profession 25

4 Design Responses to Mass

Part 2:

Open Design Case Studies

6 Introduction to Case Studies 77

CaSe StuDy 1: the Net Gadgeteer:

CaSe StuDy 2: La Region 27 and the

Open Design of Public Services 93

vi Design Leadership

CaSe StuDy 3: Silver = Gold:

Professional Designers Working in Open Creative Processes 113

CaSe StuDy 4: educating Open

Acknowledgements:

Openness in a Book

It is worth taking time here to address the issue of openness when writing a book on open design Openness as it is used throughout this book is a general description of processes that include a high degree of porosity, exchange and collaboration in all areas of the

creative process This grows from the belief that in many cases openness has practical and philosophical advantages over closeness

I am not the first author to want to make their book open When Charles Leadbeater wrote

his book We–Think: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production: The Power of Mass Creativity

(Leadbeater, 2008), he made early drafts of his manuscript freely available online and invited comments and contributions It led to hundreds of downloads of the text and thousands of individual edits on the wiki of the text to be found at www.charlesleadbeater.net/

The excellent Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive (Abel, Evers, Klaassen

and Troxler, 2011) took another approach The authors decided to launch the book in the normal way but with a small amount of content freely available online Over the next 18 months gradually more and more of the book was available freely, until at the end of 2012 all of the book can be accessed cost-free at http://opendesignnow.org

Other less practical responses have included leaving a space in physical texts and encouraging readers to add to or amend it The first newspapers in the seventeenth century were sold to the 400 or so coffee shops in London; these had blank sections for local announcements, and papers were read aloud as few people could read

In this book, none of these approaches has been used While there is power in a multitude of small but good contributions from across the complete spectrum of perspectives, experience and agendas, there is also power in spending an hour or two with someone who has thought deeply about the subject for a very long time and having a lively discussion This is especially effective when the people are at the leading edge of thinking on open design This book could not have been written without the generous contribution of Paul Atkinson, Rachel Cooper, Antoinette Kripps, Helen Ryan, Marc Tassoul, Peter Troxler, Nicolas Villas, Stephan Vincent, Ingrid van de Wecht and Lotte van Wulfften Palthe A heartfelt thanks to these contributors

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Reviews of

Open Design and Innovation

‘Open Design and Innovation by Leon Cruickshank is in many ways the most comprehensive, courageous, and useful contribution to the discussion around open design so far – historically founded, professionally reflective, giving substantial evidence in five case studies, and including practical advice for “open designers” With this monograph, Leon Cruickshank successfully adds his voice and profound thinking to the discussion of open design, prevailing over previous collective works such as my own Open Design Now and the excellent “Dutch Open” issue of The Design Journal.’

Peter Troxler, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands

and senior editor of Open Design Now

‘Cruickshank provides us with unique and fascinating insights into the rapidly expanding field of open design and innovation, describing its origins and underlying theories alongside contemporary applications that do facilitate creativity in everyone.’

Rachel Cooper, University of Lancaster, UK

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Part 1: Open Design in

Context

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Chapter 1

Introduction to Open Design

This chapter introduces a new perspective on open design that places an

emphasis not on technology but rather on the underlying human motivations that shape the way open design will develop in the coming years It goes on to describe the five key open design themes that are built on throughout this book Finally it lays out the structure of the book This will take us from the foundations of open design within innovation and design and vernacular activity, to a series of new case studies, to a proposal for a new breed of ‘open designer’.

Open Design in Context

Design and the design profession have so many interpretations that it is impossible to talk about them without qualification of the context Frequently we talk about the design of a product, the design of a place and the design of policy; we might be talking about the actions of

a professional designer, that is, someone who earns a living through doing design, but we might also be talking about the creation and production of said product, place or policy, and this involves many decision makers, who may or may not be design professionals

So what do we mean by ‘open’ design? Open literally means ‘not fastened or sealed’, or

‘exposed to the air’, or ‘on view’ So when we consider open design we could say that design has always been ‘open’ – everyone makes design every day through a hundred value judgments and decisions; most people make design decisions about how they conduct their daily work, but more specifically the way they dress, the décor of their homes and the style of their

communication

In this sense we are looking specifically at ‘open design’ as a term representing a wide range

of approaches where the pre-eminence of the professional designer is not recognised in the creative process There are, for instance, products and services that are the result of skilled design activity but have not included design professionals at all; for example, Lego has

developed global communities of everyday users who help develop its Mindstorms products There are also projects that are set up directly by design professionals where they are not ‘in control’ or doing the designing, but rather are one of many equal collaborators in the creative process, for example, in large urban development projects but also in co-design projects where community buy-in is essential

4 Part 1: Open Design in Context

Many commentators have credited open design’s growth to digital production and distribution; however, it is a phenomenon that has a rich history that pre-dates digital technology For example,

we see open design activity between business rivals in the emergence of both iron working and steam engine development as far back as the 1800s Iron foundry owners freely shared their experiments in smelting iron both with competitors and potential new entrants The result was that, over the period of 20 years, ‘the height of the furnace increased from fifty feet – the previous norm – to eighty feet or more, and the increase in the temperature of the blast from 600°F to 1400°F’ (Allen, 1983), offering dramatic increases in efficiency to the industry as a whole

In a more contemporary example from the 1980s, the widespread availability of photocopiers

in offices offered the facility for an explosion of fanzines and ephemeral self-published magazines These homemade magazines were distributed by hand to local communities

or networks of friends One particular example stands out as it offered ‘a free bowl of

breakfast cereal with every 1000 copies’ purchased and had a sugar puff taped to the front cover This is just one example of the ingenuity, wit and creativity of non-designers and also demonstrates the transient nature of non-design innovation or vernacular design These types

of intervention are happening all the time without any connection to professional design, appearing, thriving and disappearing with little recognition or record outside their community.This ‘vernacular’ design is separate from the conventional design economy and is little represented in open design literature It illustrates that actually open design is not well understood within design discourse Indeed to understand the intellectual foundations informing and guiding open design, one has to look (with a few notable exceptions) to

innovation studies Innovation is a significant area of research that emerged in the 1930s as

a branch of management studies There are many branches of research in innovation that are relevant to open design, including democratized innovation, open innovation, absorptive capacity (taking in new ideas), dynamic capability (changing as the result of taking in new ideas), social innovation and the effects and characteristics of networks, communities and clusters We will discuss some of these in the following chapters

The Role of Digital Technology

Digital technology has had an accelerating effect in this emerging open design landscape While people have always exploited technological possibilities (see Oudshoorn and Pinch,

How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology, 2003), digital technology

has introduced new possibilities to open design This is evident in all stages of innovation, from looking for ideas and information for inspiration, to concept development, to testing, prototyping, marketing and selling design Above all it is the easy dissemination, duplication, modification and exchange of ideas that is having the biggest impact on design In a well-

Chapter 1: Introduction to Open Design

documented case study from innovation studies, the extreme sport of kite surfing was

revolutionised by a small, globally distributed community of enthusiasts developing their own kite designs and exchanging CAD files, to such an extent that one of the leading companies closed their R&D and design departments as they were seen to be less effective than

community designers (Von Hippel, 2006) Having said this, the reality is that new technological capabilities will only gain traction if they chime with wider society, and so understanding non-technological factors is crucial when engaging with open design

Looking Beyond Technical Capability

The aim of this book is to look at the substance beneath the general descriptions of open design and, putting utopian predictions to one side, examine some of the fundamental issues that will inform the development (or retreat) of open design in the coming years While these key issues are mediated by technology, the argument made here is that, fundamentally, open design will appropriate technological capabilities however it develops In essence it does not really matter what next year’s 3D printers can do, or what a specific web-based service is offering; what is much more important for the sustainability of open design is the processes and activities that exploit these emerging possibilities connecting them to the enthusiasm and motivations of everyday people

This de-emphasis of technology goes against some definitions of open design, including Atkinson who describes open design as ‘internet-enabled collaborative creation of artifacts

by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals’ (Cruickshank and Atkinson, 2013)

In contrast to Atkinson’s position, here I argue that the underlying motivations for open

design are much slower to change than the tools they exploit as these motivations rely more

on human nature than technical possibilities These foundations are just as evident in the call for creative revolution in the 1960s, in the rash of punk bands in the 1970s and people photocopying fanzines in the 1980s as they are in Fab Labs and Kickstarter, or other examples

of contemporary open design platforms

Throughout this book we will be focusing on five key issues that together will determine how the design profession adapts to the possibilities of open design Broadly this will involve the design profession’s move away from being the gatekeepers of creation and technological production (such as printing presses, websites or heavy production machinery) to a more collaborative, collective mode of working The key issues covered by this book are:

1 The landscape and literature of open design

2 The diversity of open design approaches in practice

3 The problems traditional designers face when operating in an open manner when working

on real-world, commercial projects

6 Part 1: Open Design in Context

4 Strategies in design education to develop a new type of open designer

5 New open designers in action and the benefits this new type of designer has to offer

Through these five key themes we will be exploring, proposing and sometimes promoting the participation of professional design in open design It may seem a little odd to have to make the argument that designers should be involved in open design processes, but in reality professional design is not a driving force in this area and in many cases the position of a professional designer is just not seen as relevant For example, when looking at the volume

of graphic communication, especially for the web, the proportion of this created by graphic designers (or others trained as designers) is getting smaller and smaller as more and more people exploit the increasingly easy to use platforms to create their own communication These platforms include blogging sites such as Wordpress, to Facebook, to commercially available

‘design your own company website’ services using templates to quickly create generic but serviceable sites

For some the profusion of creative activity beyond any professional design is a good thing and they assume that the design profession will fade away over time In contrast there is

an argument that if there was a way for designers to help people do their own thing without imposing their own values, the outcomes could be better Design education has been

recognised as engendering skills and competencies, for instance, in creativity, holistic thinking and visualisation techniques, that can contribute to open design in a significant manner One of the key challenges for designers in open design processes is to assist participants in reaching their full creative potential without the designer taking a controlling, hierarchical position This

is not a trivial or niche issue for the design profession; the radical changes seen in photography and graphic design are now starting to affect product design and other disciplines In time almost every area of design will have to respond to open design, and it is adapt or die for many design sectors

Book Structure

This book is divided into three sections: the first draws together ideas from across the spectrum of open design and innovation; the second introduces new, in-depth case studies of open design not previously published; the third looks to the future of design Section one also explores the first theme, the landscape of design, innovation and open design Understanding this foundation is critical because it is only through this that we will be able to develop new, productive relationships between the design profession and wider open design activity This starts with a close look at the relationship between design and innovation Design and innovation have many overlaps and commonalities but also a great deal of distance; for

example, the 650-page Oxford Handbook of Innovation does not include design in the index

Chapter 1: Introduction to Open Design

Precisely because innovation studies is not preoccupied by design, it is highly relevant to open design In particular there is interesting work on open creative processes that do not include any design input; these include democratised innovation, crowd sourcing and the activities of pro-sumers

Open design has grown out of activities such as mass creativity and inclusive design processes Building on an analysis of innovation, we go on to explore the impact and implications of mass creativity This is where groups of people, often distributed around the world, collaborate together on a creative project For example, a large group of surgeons collaborated together to create the first heart–lung machine, a machine to keep a patient alive while their heart and lungs are simultaneously transplanted In a more populist

example, hundreds of amateur film makers around the world came together to remake the

film Star Wars, with each participant making a 15-second scene all in different styles and

using different techniques, from live action to computer animation to glove puppets (www.starwarsuncut.com)

Following this the often slightly anarchic processes in mass creativity, we look at how the design profession is responding to mass creativity and the methods it uses to include people

in the creative process, a key requirement of open design This focuses on user-centred design that exploits observation and focus groups (amongst other methods) and is popular

in the conventional design mainstream We contrast this with participatory design; this is an interesting example as it places a strong emphasis on being open to participant creativity but in

a quite controlling, structured set of processes

Finally this first section looks at some of the practical responses the design industry has had

to both ‘ground up’ creativity and ideas filtering through from innovation studies, such as mass creativity and crowd sourcing These include designers trying to make things that appear to have been ‘not designed’ – for example, design agencies faking ‘user-generated content’;

or creating part-finished objects for customers to complete at home, for example, Droog’s bash into shape metal cube chair We will also be considering approaches where designers create new structures to help people be creative in their own way – blogging websites such as Wordpress are a good example of this sort of platform approach

The second half of the book consists of a series of extended case studies, each addressing one

of the core themes identified above These case studies ground one of the themes in real-world projects and activity not previously published or described in the design or open design literature.The first two case studies focus on the diversity of open design approaches, contrasting Gadgeteer, an open source technology platform developed by Microsoft research, with a much more human-focused approach employed by Region 27, a group pioneering the collaborative development and prototyping of public services in France

8 Part 1: Open Design in Context

The third case study identifies some of the problems traditional designers face when operating

in an open manner Specifically this addresses the challenges designers faced when working in

an open way with recently retired residents on a design project in Eindhoven The Silver=Gold project exemplifies the difficulty some designers have in giving up control of the creative aspects of design processes

The fourth case study looks at how Delft Technical University has changed its curriculum to help its students use more open approaches in their design projects They now run a course (or module, as we would say in the UK) to help students facilitate creative contributions from others This represents the first moves in the systematic development of a new kind of open designer

The fifth case study documents a new design process built on an open design ethos A team

of open designers developed an approach that enabled them to play an active part in a profile urban design project whilst remaining equal partners rather than gatekeepers of the creative process

high-Finally we conclude with a chapter that draws together the wider understanding of design, mass creativity and innovation with the case studies This goes on to articulate a framework for how designers can contribute more proactively and progressively to open design projects in the future

Chapter 2

Innovation and Design in Context

Open design occupies a space between design and innovation This chapter explores the relationship between these two areas and, through this, describes the landscape in which new open design projects and activities operate

The chapter pays particular attention to open innovation, challenging the

conventional understanding of this and its relationship to open design.

The Relationship Between Innovation and Design

Innovation is one of the most overused words in contemporary culture – it is often used as a cover-all for newness, progress or economic success While this can be rather bewildering, the underlying research on innovation is very important in understanding open design The trick is

to be able to filter the significant ideas and research from the froth of political expediency and populist ‘airport books’ aimed at owner managers looking for a quick fix To do this we need

to firstly understand the relationship between design and innovation It is at this boundary that most of the insights for open design are to be gathered

Even filtering out generalist or superficial uses of the term ‘innovation’, there is still a huge body

of work to draw from Equally design has its own large body of literature The aim of this chapter

is not to provide a definitive description of either of these – for that, start with Guy Julier’s The Culture of Design and Jan Fagerberg’s Oxford Handbook of Innovation Rather this chapter will

establish the common ground between these often overlapping areas

The borders between innovation and design are complicated and fractious, with a general lack

of acknowledgement of the relationships between these two areas For example, Fagerberg’s definitive anthology of essays on innovation does not mention design in the index of its 650 pages In a recent review of the ten leading textbooks on innovation, none of them had a chapter on design and many did not even have a design section (Hobday, Boddington and Grantham, 2011)

From a design perspective, there is sometimes an outright hostility towards innovation In ‘Down with innovation’, Rick Poynor argues that ‘innovation’ is a term invented by business to take design activity away from designers (Poynor, 2008) Other design commentators treat design

and innovation as though they are the same thing Books such as The Art of Innovation and The

10 Part 1: Open Design in Context

Ten Faces of Innovation by IDEO founder Tom Kelley adopt this position – the term innovation

is used interchangeably with design IDEO is looking to promote its services to as wide an audience as possible, so strategically it suits them to be seen as innovation as well as design specialists

This blending of design and innovation does both fields a disservice; as we will see below, they are distinctly different and have very different contributions to make to the open design debate.There is small but growing common ground between innovation and design This is still

coming into focus through writers including Roberto Verganti, James Utterback, Bettina von Stamm, Michael Hobday and others It is too much to suggest that there is agreement between these authors but there is an emerging common context for discussion between design and innovation; this is described in more detail in ‘The innovation dimension: designing in a broader context’ (Cruickshank, 2010)

Design and Open Design

One of the first uses of the term ‘open design’ in the context in which we are using it here was by Ronen Kadushin in his master’s thesis and it was later formalised into the open design manifesto (Kadushin, 2010) This simple document calls for a physical analogy of open source software production What is missing from the open design manifesto is a connection to a wider design tradition or the design profession Open design challenges some of the characteristics that define professional design, for example, in the value of individuality and the role of the designer as creative master It is only through understanding the nature of professional design that a new role for design in open design can be developed

Understanding the Designer

Designers often adopt the romantic pose of the creative genius; traditionally this has been fostered in art and design schools where being quirky and swimming against convention are encouraged and rewarded This culture of eccentricity is deeply engrained in design – in the Bauhaus in 1930s Germany (the birthplace of contemporary design education), students would occasionally come to classes with shoes painted on their bare feet

Many contemporary designers sell their services on the strength of the ‘magic’ they can weave

to solve problems and then move onto the next challenge in another town/company/sector This view of the designer as a knight in shining armour using their innate talents to find and then solve the problem is the mainstay of traditional design For example, Paul Rand, a grandee of graphic design, especially in the US from the 1950s onwards declares:

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

‘Design is a personal activity and springs from the creative impulse of an individual Group design or design by committee, although occasionally useful, deprives

the designer of the distinct pleasure

of personal accomplishment and

self-realisation It may even hinder his or her thought processes, because work is not practiced under natural, tension-free

conditions …’ (rand, 1993)

It is now very unusual for contemporary designers to work in isolation professionally More and more there is a collaborative emphasis in design, and team-working is becoming the norm; open design is an extreme manifestation of these new collaborative realities In open design the designer is absolutely not in control of the creative process, although they may have an active contribution to it In the case studies in the second half of this book we see a shift from

‘designer as genius’ to ‘designer as facilitator’ We also see how difficult this transformation is for some designers This opening up of the design universe into more collaborative possibilities

is driving curriculum development in some of the leading design education institutions (for example, Delft Technical University), helping to create designers who have these facilitation skills

Later in this book we see designers who define their personal value as a designer on ‘having the ideas’ In the Silver=Gold case study we see that others in the open design project identified the value of designers not in terms of the concepts suggested but in the approaches and perspectives they brought to the process For them, the ideas generated were rather mundane but, as one of the council officers says: ‘why would they be exciting ideas, we do this every day while they are just visiting.’ The challenge for designers is that often they assume that their ideas will be better, even if they are ‘just visiting’

Rethinking the role of the designer and not seeing them as the primary source of creativity in projects impacts on the very bedrock of what it is to be a designer To get to the bottom of this

we need to look at where ‘design’ comes from While Klaus Kripendorff traces the meaning of the word ‘design’ back to De + signare, as something describing a sign (Krippendorff, 1989), Guy

12 Part 1: Open Design in Context

Julier draws the contemporary meaning of the word ‘design’ from ‘designo’, the Renaissance word denoting the person who drew frescos while others came later and painted them

In Julier’s view, the separation of drawing a plan, fixing the composition of a fresco with someone else coming along to paint between the lines represents a separation between planning and doing that is the fundamental characteristic of design Designers create a plan, blueprint or specification that someone else actually manufactures

The Birth of the Designer

There have always been entrepreneurs and hobbyists who employed people to make things

to their plans, but the advent of the industrial revolution changed this picture radically In the early nineteenth century the need for large numbers of people who could help capitalise on new technical possibilities became critical The result was the establishment of ‘Schools of Design’ in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham in the 1850s, promoting ‘visual innovation for manufactured articles’ By 1875 these schools had trained 15,000 people to design for sectors including textiles, furniture and ceramics (Pavitt, 1984) Designers became the connection point between production technology, market demand and business issues such as return on investment

This nineteenth-century role for design still shapes our conception of the contemporary designer, even though consumers, production technology and business models have all radically transformed during this time For example, in the automotive industry the business model of reducing costs through standardised mass production is no longer dominant Now even budget cars are customised at the point of order and efficient manufacturing and supply chain management allows for mass production efficiency to be combined with a personalised product In Chapter 4 we explore how design transformed from a need in manufacturing to an emerging professional body

Brian Lawson has written extensively on the separation between planning and doing as the

defining factor of design activity In How Designers Think (Lawson, 1999) and What Designers Know (Lawson, 2004), he draws on research from cognitive science to argue that designers

are different from other people He claims that, because they draw heavily on visualisation

to solve problems, they have a distinct advantage in problem solving compared with more practical hands-on or experimental approaches He compares architectural innovation (with rapid progress through visualisation) with that of the blacksmith (with very slow progress and a practice-based approach)

The argument for designers as special people (with special brains!) prompts the question, who actually does design? Some take a very general view of design – for example, Herbert Simon

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

declared: ‘design is the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones’ (Hobday, Boddington and Grantham, 2011) – and Victor Papanek insisted we are all designers These definitions and a general common sense understanding of designing contradict Lawson.Determining exactly who is a designer is rather like attempting to establish whether someone

is a photographer In design, like photography, there are highly specialised professionals but there are also many people who take photographs or design without any training and, for example, successfully create their own house, or magazine or a Facebook page The difficulty

in comparing these two types of design activity is that they have radically different criteria or

‘frames’ for success For example, a corporate identity for a multinational company will have very different success criteria than a blog or local newspaper

Open design depends on bringing together but also preserving the distinctiveness of different frames of reference A large team of designers working together is likely to think in similar ways and come up with similar ideas, and making the team bigger will result in more ideas but of a similar type The power of open design is to combine very different outlooks and perspectives in a creative process in such a way that they can have a creative contribution in

a manner that is both distinctive but also builds on the other perspectives in the group This

is very difficult but has a double benefit: it can enable professional designers to continue to contribute when their role as gatekeeper to production technology is removed; it also offers the potential of simply better design solutions

The most well known description of frames of reference controlling how we see the world

comes from Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Kuhn,

1970) Kuhn introduced the notion of ‘paradigms’ as a framework through which our view of the world is shaped He uses how we think about astronomy as an example of paradigms and how these are stretched until they break and there is a revolution In the second

century AD, Claudius Ptolemy developed the scientific method and undertook astronomical studies that followed accepted practice, placing the earth at the centre of the universe with everything revolving around it In the following centuries this model was modified in increasingly unlikely ways to accommodate more and more accurate observation of how the stars and planets moved in reality This adaptation continued for a few hundred years until the model was broken by Copernicus placing the sun at the centre of the universe, causing

a scientific revolution and a new model to emerge that in turn is refined and modified to fit observation

Wicked Problems

People operating in different frames of reference find it very difficult to relate meaningfully

to each other; their view of the world is fundamentally different The design theorist Richard

14 Part 1: Open Design in Context

Coyne drew on this ‘incommensurability between frames’ very effectively to explain the clash of ideology between design scientists such as Herbert Simons (the ‘systemisers’, as Coyne labels them) and designers with a more hermeneutical, postmodern approach Coyne embraces this latter approach with its lack of certainty and metrics Specifically he draws

on ideas such as Horst Rittel’s ‘wicked problems’ (Coyne, 2005) Wicked problems are characterised by (amongst other things) being impossible to define clearly and not having

a single correct answer Coyne argues that almost all problems outside mathematics are wicked The contrast between the two frames Coyne presents is exemplified in architecture

In a housing scheme the rationalist architect Le Corbusier determined the ‘best’ place to put the furniture in a room and permanently built this into the fabric of the houses This sort of rigid design is diametrically opposed to wicked thinking where design problems are not equations to be solved, but need to reflect the uniqueness of the context and people involved

Open design very much fits into this second, emergent, wicked-friendly role for the

designer One of the drivers for this book is the idea that the conventional frames for understanding and doing design are changing dramatically, led by a rejection of one-size-fits-all in manufacturing and business The role of the designer as gatekeeper of the means of production is changing We will be exploring this in more depth in Chapter 4, looking at the future of design, but there are new possibilities and challenges emerging across the design spectrum The idea of the star designer is ebbing away; gone are the days when it was OK for a designer to sign all the design sheets they worked on to give the ideas personal authority, the way that the architect Philip Johnson used to As the likes of Philippe Starck recede into self-parody and entertainment, designers are having to get to grips with the fact that in almost every case they are not the central figure in the creation of new products, services or systems Open design is a strong example of the erosion of the creative authority of the designer

This non-design-centric perspective is normal within innovation thinking and offers one explanation why innovation research is often leading design in terms of new creative

processes, especially as they relate to open design There is, however, a flip side to this –

across innovation literature as a whole there is little engagement with invention This shying

away from the creative spark has made it difficult for design and designers to contribute to innovation literature as conversely design starts from this point of creation

In essence this is why it is fruitful to think about design and innovation together; design

is comfortable with the uncertainty and risk through iteration and fast prototyping, while

innovation is not bound to this way of thinking and can offer more strategic insights across the development process

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

Innovation and Open Design

Open design is not widely written about in innovation literature This is not because the ideas that underpin open design are not present in innovation studies, but it is an indication that innovation does not have a design-centric perspective on new creative processes There

is a great deal of writing which looks at creative processes involving people from many

backgrounds, not just ‘professional innovators’ In short, innovation is not hung up on design, designers and their position (or not) in these new processes and as a result much of the thinking within innovation thinking is highly relevant to open design

Innovation studies is also characterised by its focus on understanding real-world activity, often with the aim of harnessing this activity for profit This is in contrast to much writing on open design where, as we will see in the following chapters, there is less focus on profit but also

a lack of real-world evidence For example, the design group Droog’s open design platform,

‘downloadable design’, has been ‘about to launch’ since 2011

Understanding Innovation

Even though currently innovation is an overused buzzword, the practice of innovation itself is

as old as human activity Even the claim of the topicality of innovation is not new As Downs and Mohr stated in 1976: ‘Innovation has emerged over the last decade as possibly the most fashionable of social science areas’ In fact there is a body of research going back to at least

Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development in 1934.

There is a substantial academic tradition of innovation study in the UK, some of the foundations

of which were established by Science and Technology Policy Research University (SPRU)

of Sussex Established in 1966, SPRU undertook one of the key early empirical studies of innovation in the UK Using a team of 300 experts in panels, they analysed and catalogued every significant (non-incremental) innovation in the UK from 1945 to 1983, resulting in a database of 4,300 innovations (Powell and Grodal, 2005)

Also noteworthy is the Open University’s Design Innovation Group, formed in 1979 as an early example of innovation explicitly linked to design, although this group’s focus is currently directed toward sustainable design rather than innovation Looking at contemporary activity, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIIR) at Manchester University is one of the largest academic centres dedicated to innovation in the UK

When looking for a widely agreed definition of innovation, a good place to start is the Oslo Manual The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group

of the 40 leading industrialised nations, developed the Oslo Manual to allow any survey

16 Part 1: Open Design in Context

or measurement of innovation to be comparable with any other survey, following the Oslo principles

The Oslo Manual defines innovation as ‘the implementation of a new or significantly

improved product (good or service) or process, a new marketing method, or a new

organisation in business practices, workplace organisation, or external relations’ (Dosi, 1982) This definition has recently been modified, removing the word ‘technological’, recognising that innovation is more than the translation of science and ‘R&D’ into

products This demonstrates a key difference between design and innovation For

something to be a valid innovation, it needs to be implemented, and some definitions

go further, demanding the need for successful implementation This contrasts with

design, where ideas are often not implemented

There are many ways of categorising innovation within this general definition One way of doing

so is to look at sectors such as aerospace, biotechnology or automotive In contrast, Kline and Rosenberg (1986) propose that the degree of uncertainty for success is a useful metric for looking at innovation processes This is useful because the more ‘energetic’ the innovation, the more likely it is to span different sectors or disciplines, making a disciplinary approach difficult

Going further, Malcolm Gladwell promotes the advantage of the third mover into an area of innovation He argues that each ‘mover’ in a particular area of innovation will have particular

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

aptitudes and that companies should acknowledge these, rather than trying to always be a first mover even if this does not suit them Gladwell describes the first mover doing the fundamental thinking, the second mover solving the critical technical challenges and the third mover taking the opportunity to evaluate the previous movers’ activities and provide a solution that really works effectively

As an example of this argument, Gladwell cites the development of the integrated missile system This system allows ground-based radar to direct missiles fired from fighter planes The USSR did the first theoretical work on this – central planning resulted in time and space for deep theoretical work without funding problems The second movers in this space were the US; they had engineering and entrepreneurial skills that facilitated the translation

of theory into practice The third movers in this were the Israelis; unlike the US, they had

a really strong reason to take a functional innovation and really optimise it, in fact their survival depended on it

So how does this relate to open design? For both the creation of new platforms of methods for open design and the design of new products and services within these, the level of innovation could have a critical impact on the success of the activity Different communities will have different strengths in terms of first, second or third mover advantage For example, a group of teenage parents may have particular aptitude in taking a working innovative pushchair and really perfecting it (third mover advantage) because they have both a need and practical experience

A robot club might be more adept at translating a theoretical innovation into something closer to engineering because they are good at making things, but also are used to translating theory into practice and so are more suited to a second move engagement

Open Innovation

In practical terms there is a close relationship between innovation and open design Open innovation (OI) is, however, an area of contemporary innovation research that merits particular attention Although open design was originally linked with open source, it came to be more widely used as OI grew in popularity It is possible to see open design as the creative or

inventive relation of open innovation One thing that cannot be contested is the impact OI has had in innovation studies, business and wider society In a recent review Eelko evaluated 150 journal papers on open innovation (Huizingh, 2010)

This remarkable range of research has grown from a book (with some preliminary papers)

published by Henry Chesbrough, titled Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Chesbrough, 2003) This is a highly accessible book aimed at

managers and business readers It was quickly followed by a more academic anthology called

Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008)

18 Part 1: Open Design in Context

We will come back to the claim that this is a new paradigm later, but in essence open innovation

is very straightforward As Chesbrough says: ‘open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation and expand the markets for external use on innovation, respectively’ (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008)

The exchange of knowledge is a vital component of open design; ideas, design concepts, critical comments and manufacturing expertise all fit within the loose definition of knowledge used here It is the lowering of the barriers to knowledge exchange (often by digital media) that

is driving the growth of open design activity

Chesbrough bases his argument for OI as a reaction against closed innovation models that he claims as the dominant mode of thinking characterised by the following assumptions:

• The smart people in our field work for us

• To profit from R&D, we must discover, develop and ship it ourselves

• If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market first

• If we are the first to commercialise an innovation, we will win

• If we create the most and best ideas in the industry, we will win

• We should control our intellectual property (IP) so that our competitors do not

profit from our ideas

Chesbrough very persuasively argues that these assumptions are mistaken and that breaking away from these can offer dramatic advantages to a company He claims that new product development is dependent on ecosystems rather than lone invention and that knowledge and ideas are inherently mobile He goes on to argue that understanding and facilitating flows of knowledge are more likely to result in profitable operations for a company

Open innovation has been explicitly adopted by many firms; examples include Procter and Gamble (P&G), a huge company with household brands such as Duracell, Gillette, Flash

and Pantene P&G has net sales of over $40 billion and close to 100,000 employees In the 1990s it faced a significant shortfall in growth and innovation As a response to this, Gordon Brunner, Chief Technology Officer and Head Worldwide R&D at the time, wanted to change the innovation culture; he wanted R&D (research and development) to become C&D (connect and develop) This commitment to open innovation is evident on their Connect + Develop website (www.pgconnectdevelop.com) This is a portal for competitions to be launched, for collaborators to meet and for the submission of innovative proposals to Procter and Gamble It

is also seen in a culture change spreading throughout the whole company (Dodgson Gann and Salter, 2006) Similarly the online media company Netflix used open innovation principles to help with business challenges and Lego has a ‘cloud’ of innovators who help devise new sensors and models for their Lego Mindstorms range

Han van der Meer identifies a range of mechanisms for the implementing of OI in practice (Van Der Meer, 2007) His list includes: licensing, cluster projects, patent brokering and spinning out, attending conferences, patent searches and networking with universities This is pretty much what you would expect companies with some sense of forethought or strategic vision to

do Above all, OI is a business model that tries to maximise possible profit for a company from the resources available, understanding that the resources available will be present as much outside the company as within it This traditional business position is in tension with the more liberal, open-source-like impression that many have when thinking about OI This conservative business perspective that underlies open innovation is demonstrated in the classic case study used to illustrate the consequences of not adopting an OI approach, the PARC lab set up by Xerox in 1970

This contains an important lesson for the development of open design OI uses the

extraordinary development of PARC Xerox as a way of supporting their attack on closed innovation without really reflecting on the benefits and the larger picture of innovation present

at the time and since then There is a similar danger of a myopic focus in open design, so, for instance, there is a danger of the evangelism of 3D printing when it is only a tiny part, a symptom, of open design Concentrating on this without a wider historical and theoretical perspective is to invite criticism when technology develops in new directions This book seeks

to start to develop this bigger picture understanding of open design

PARC Xerox: A Counter Case Study

PARC Xerox is held up as the killer example of how bad things can go if you do not adopt open innovation It is used to haunt CEOs and managers Here we will slay this bogeyman and show that in fact PARC Xerox is an example of excellent open innovation once you start

to think beyond the limited and deeply conventional view of companies and business and shift to a wider focus It is this wider landscape that open design is emerging into and a better understanding of the value of open innovation in this wider sense will help open design flourish

20 Part 1: Open Design in Context

In the 1970s Xerox inc had an 80 per cent share of the global photocopier market In order

to protect their market position, Xerox employed Jacob Goldman to set up PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley to the south of San Francisco His mission was to undertake long-term research exploring the ‘architecture of information’ The lab was given almost unlimited funds and was able to attract some of the best computer scientists and engineers; it also led the world by including social scientists and ethnographers on its staff Projects at PARC were curiosity driven and had a very light managerial review

This resulted in a series of world-changing inventions ranging from software to hardware to new computer–user interactions For example, PARC developed the ethernet protocol that underpins how computers communicate across a network even today In hardware, the computer mouse and laser printer were developed, as was the first graphic user interface that allowed computers

to be controlled and manipulated visually rather than by typing in commands All of these (and others) have become a ubiquitous part of the computers that we use today

Few of these innovations actually came to fruition or gave any substantial financial benefit

to Xerox For the most part Xerox allowed them to spin off into new companies; for example, Adobe was one of these companies that formed to develop the post-script language for

controlling laser printers and now dominates graphics and desktop publishing Chesbrough’s analysis identified four companies that span out of Xerox that were worth over $100 million within seven years of leaving, and calculated that the total value of all spin-offs was double the value of Xerox itself (Chesbrough, 2002) This echoes thinking at the time, such as Douglas

Smith and Robert Alexander’s 1989 book criticising Xerox: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer.

Superficially this is a powerful case for companies understanding flows of information and engaging in open innovation, but crucially is based on a traditional business agenda of

maximising the exploitation of resources for a particular company, rather than being the

inclusive, slightly counter-culture approach it is often claimed to be

To respond to this, it is important to note the criticism of Xerox especially within OI circles for essentially wasting profit-making potential At this time Xerox developed the laser printer at PARC; this made (and continues to make) Xerox over $2 billion a year It is ironic that Rob Allen, the then Senior VP Xerox, says: ‘The laser printer alone paid for all the other PARC research many times over If some of the innovation results fall off the wagon, so what?’ (Chesbrough, 2002) Xerox management were close to OI thinking, even as they were used as the example of the failure of conventional, closed innovation systems

The preoccupation with profit maximisation also points to a linear, rather tactical view of innovation in the OI case studies of Xerox Broadly speaking it is very good for Xerox that we are all using computers that can talk to each other, and that they work through a visual rather

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

than command line metaphor, and that they create things we want to print All of this is good for the laser printing that, for the last 20 years, has been one of the mainstays of Xerox These are huge direct and indirect benefits that continue to help the company be profitable Many of these are outside the direct control of the company – this is the essence of good open innovation practice

The innovation ecology that Xerox stimulated and helped sustain in areas such as networking, graphic design and graphic interfaces helped it continue to flourish In some respects designers face a similar opportunity As we will see, there are emerging ecosystems in open design that will need nurturing, and professional design is in a position to help this In doing so, there are huge opportunities for new types of professional designers Conversely if designers attempt

to control design, for example, by lobbying for formal restrictions on who can call themselves designers, the chance, even in the unlikely event of this being successful, of the wider benefits will be lost and design could follow the typesetter into obsolescence

The Open Innovation Paradigm

Chesbrough and others (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008; Chiaroni and Chiesa, 2010) argue that OI represents such a new frame The value of OI and its justification as a new paradigm depends on the accuracy of Chesbrough’s description of traditional closed innovation This interpretation is far from universally accepted In a body of literature notable for its restraint, it is surprising to see Trott and Hartmann (2009) write in the International Journal of Innovation Management:

‘there are many scholars of r&D

management and innovation

management who would argue that this paradigm represents little more than

the repackaging and representation of

concepts and findings presented over the past forty years within the literature on innovation management.’

Trott and Hartmann go on to attack (demolish) the notion that both thinking and practice in innovation resemble the picture of closed innovation that OI is claiming to rescue us from This

22 Part 1: Open Design in Context

attack on the way OI describes closed innovation uses literature going back sometimes to the 1920s on the benefits of clustering companies in districts It also includes literature on the role

of networks and gatekeepers in innovation and the way innovation spreads In an example

of consciously controlling flows of knowledge, when the company Pilkington developed a process to make glass in a continuous and smooth strip by floating it on molten tin in 1950, they immediately licensed it to their competitors and, as a result, almost all commercial glass made today uses this process This fits squarely with an open innovation mode of operating

Some argue that OI is the norm for innovation, that there are only a few aberrational examples of closed innovation and they tend not to last very long Today it is hard to think of sectors outside defence and nuclear technologies that do not have a very open approach

Where does this leave the increasingly popular idea of open innovation? The popularity of open innovation has been attributed by some to being the result of:

‘ Its simplicity, the texts used by trott

and hartmann are diverse, complex

and sometimes difficult to grasp Many academics and most practical innovation experts would find it difficult to get

to grips with the scope of the bigger

innovation picture, while OI condenses and simplifies this.’

‘ It’s timely, OI was “launched” during a

time of outsourcing and increasingly

distributed innovation that continues

today and OI talks directly to this.’

‘ Its extendibility, OI offers a high level

framework that invites extension and

Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context

… application into more specific

areas of application, for example, high technology, medial or organizational

areas.’ (huizingh, 2010)

There is also a more fundamental reason for the success of OI Chesbrough sets up an

unrealistic ‘straw man’ in the guise of closed innovation, then presents OI as a radical, edge response transcending this old-fashioned perspective This is attractive to most people in business because they already identify with this ‘revolutionary’ movement as it maps to some

cutting-of their day-to-day activities Managers and innovators can cast themselves as part cutting-of the vanguard of thinking, with all the benefits to ego and reputation that this entails

In reality the best way to think about OI is as a palatable, neat but over-simplified description that stands in for a much more complex and extensive set of ideas; open innovation is just innovation In itself, having an accessible version of innovation is not a bad thing – as we have discussed innovation and design have a complicated, overlapping and often misunderstood position

Open Design and Open Innovation

Things become more problematic where OI is placed in the same frame or used

interchangeably with open design As we will see in the following chapter, in citizen-led design there are tensions between ‘ground up’ innovation and open innovation models based on profit maximisation There are other ‘economies’ developing in the open design space where, for example, reputation or social capital may be in conflict with conventional financial metrics Open design should be celebrating the spill-overs from PARC and maximising the wider benefits of the emergence of new ecosystems in the future, rather than seeing OI as a model to monetise them

The next chapter examines models of design and innovation that are outside the

traditional business methods used by OI These include models based on giving things away (free revealing), mass participation in design, co-creation and a range of other approaches that seek to develop new open methods of creativity Unlike open innovation these are not necessarily based on conventional business models and a market economy, but similarly we will see that under the surface there are incredible opportunities for open design

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Chapter 3

Mass Creativity: Design Beyond

the Design profession

This chapter describes how people with no design training can be highly

innovative and creative Using ideas from innovation, it explores why this

is important for open design and how people not trained in design can be effective designers The chapter concludes by challenging accepted wisdom

on the value of democratised innovation as a replacement for design, instead arguing for active participation of professional design in open design.

as t-shirts, photos or illustrations to a global audience Consumers can now customise or create completely new products such as shoes, clothes and other personal items for their own use Secondly, it is becoming increasingly easier for distributed groups of individuals to work together on collaborative projects without ever meeting As we will see in the following chapter, this mass individual creativity (in the first case) and masses creating together (in the second) are having profound implications for the design profession, in addition to energising open design

The ecosystem that supports online design and customisation is still very much in its infancy, with many pioneering companies launching and then disappearing, often in the wake of

ambitious claims that cannot be met For example, MES custom footwear offered a model where not only could you add photos (or any other images) to a wide range of shoes, but you could also set up a shop on its site to sell your designs to others Unfortunately it was not able

to attract sufficient interest to make it profitable and went into liquidation in late 2012 MES is an example of business models that need a critical mass of customers to make a self-sustaining

26 Part 1: Open Design in Context

community and to break even financially Before this is achieved, the companies are burning money, and the temptation is to over-promise to attract a community to enable viability

Despite the volatility and risk involved in bespoke online product design, this is becoming established in mainstream design and consumer behaviour with its own sustainable business models For example, it is not extraordinary to create your own unique greeting card using online services, or to create your own calendars or photo albums In the UK, Moonpig has been offering a customisable greeting card service that has been profitable since 2005 and in 2010 had an annual turnover of over £30 million (Hanson, 2010)

2001 the creators of Nupedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sagner, launched Wikipedia, an open source approach to an encyclopaedia

The concept of a Wiki (what I know is …) is that anyone can edit or create any part of a website resulting in a collectively generated and moderated source of information There are many wikis online, ranging from academic publishing to pornography Wikipedia is by far the most popular

of these wikis, with over 25 million articles in 280 languages

The accuracy of Wikipedia is contentious; there have been formal comparisons with the

Encyclopaedia Britannica that resulted in Wikipedia gaining a lower error count (Leadbeater 2008) Equally as the number of entries grew and its use became more mainstream, it became a target for malicious postings, pranks and inaccurate information The fact remains though that

as a free information resource that taps into the knowledge and understanding of the masses online, it has transformed our ability to learn the basics of almost any subject This is useful in industrialised countries but truly transformative where books are expensive and scarce CDs capturing the key elements of Wikipedia have enabled children to come together on the single village computer to learn in a way that would have been impossible without the contributions of thousands of people who are willing to share their knowledge

This sort of exchange is not limited to information; as we have seen in the previous chapter, businesses such as Procter and Gamble have adopted an open strategy to enhance their

Chapter 3: Mass Creativity: Design Beyond the Design Profession

innovation potential This mostly engages with professional innovators in other companies (designers, chemists and engineers amongst others), but there is also the potential for others

to contribute to their platform

The notion of a platform for people not working in R&D, innovation or design is evident within the product development system Gadgeteer This is discussed in detail in one of the case studies in the second half of this book It is an excellent example of how moving from a closed

to an open model of creative activity has transformed the fortunes of a product and the type

of people who use it For many years Microsoft has been selling a software product and programming platform called Net This was used in electronic devices that only had very limited processing power available to them, for example, bar code scanners

The conventional model for this software is that for each unit that has Net installed on it the company had to pay a small fee to Microsoft This was inhibiting the use of this technology as profit margins and price are extremely competitive in this area Microsoft took the decision to make this code open source, in effect to make it free to use As we see in the Gadgeteer case study later in this book, rather than this being the prelude to the death of Net, the effect was to stimulate an explosion of activity and development from a very diverse community of people, from programmers to designers and hobbyists

There is a great deal of interest in how the power of mass creativity can be harnessed

to make profits This search for opportunity is evident in a rapidly expanding body of literature, magazine articles, internet resources and journalism, as well as in books and academic publications Without attempting a comprehensive taxonomy, a representative

book sample would include: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki; Crowd Sourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe; Wikinomics: Democratizing Innovation by Erik von Hippel; How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

by Don Tapscot; Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky; and We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater.

These books have their own terms and definitions for creativity undertaken by people who have no formal training in design or innovation; these include hyper-craft, brand fanatics, lead-users or pro-ams These names are the result of the arguments developed within the books; each of these has a particular nuanced set of characteristics For example, pro-ams are a category put forward by Charles Leadbeater describing groups of people that are amateurs but work at a professional standard (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004)

Leadbeater (2008) uses examples in amateur astronomy, citizen-led journalism and many more areas to support his argument that through social networking and digital platforms we are entering a new, post-industrial era Eric von Hippel (2006; Thomke and Von Hippel, 2002) talks

28 Part 1: Open Design in Context

about lead-users as individuals who have the ability to lead radical changes in a sector, even though they are not trained designers or innovators We will be looking more closely at lead-users later in this chapter, but we can see that these terms are overlapping and complementary, and all point to there being a largely untapped and unacknowledged creative resource in the mass of people that make up the general population

Vernacular Design and DIY

The term vernacular has been used since at least the 1850s to describe activity by amateurs outside the professions associated with them, particularly in terms of architecture (Gilbert Scott, 1857) Of course such vernacular activity predates the development of professions which some see as a mechanism of control and classification rather than establishing quality and consistency (Atkinson, 2006) An increasing amount of vernacular design is enabled by new production and communication technologies Understanding vernacular design is an essential component in understanding the future of professional design, but also (and fundamentally) it is the interplay between design and vernacular creativity that characterises open design and how this could develop in the future

Amongst the most prolific areas of vernacular design activity is communication, one of the most basic activities we engage in For some radical groups the ’zine (underground or non-official

magazine) is almost the only record of its existence, such as The Misery of Football, considered

in all its forms, and a few remedies offered This 1995 photocopied pamphlet by Kicker and Hat Trick Productions mixes scandal and political comment These discussions range from Eric Cantona’s wife-swapping activities, to an analysis of how QPR are playing, to ridiculing the New Statesman for bemoaning the fact that the situationists were not around to attack the Tories

Other examples of these low cost productions include Squall, Claremont Rd and Aufheben –

this is a German word with both negative (to annul) and positive (to supersede) connotations (McKay, 1998: 101) These political or just entertaining productions are the antecedents of the blog and show a long history of design without designer

The explosion of accessible digital technology for both the production and distribution of communication has transformed the production of the ’zine from a niche subculture activity into the blog and an activity that anyone with access to the internet can engage with and relatively easily communicate with thousands of people every day, rather than a few hundred people every time a physical copy can be made and sold The ratings agency Neilson claims there are over 180 million blogs in the world

There are groups that have been considering the social and creative implications of this

freeing up of the means of production of communication for a long time – for example, design

Chapter 3: Mass Creativity: Design Beyond the Design Profession

group Archizoom, with their promotion of the ‘non-Stop city’, and Peter Cook’s system for a distributed university in 1968 using the ‘info-Gonk’ headset (Sadler, 1998), but also by Raoul

Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1994) where he writes that ‘if cybernetics were

taken from its masters it might be able to free human groups from labour and social alienation’.Electronic distribution is also replacing some forms of conventional paper-based communication This worldwide distribution of information is most often in PDF format; it is compact, easy to view, cannot easily be altered by the recipient and is finally bringing about the realisation of desktop printing, not only for niche groups and political activists but also for everyday users including businesses This is a clear example of the gatekeepers of graphic communication (designer, typesetter and printer) losing their position of control as anyone with access to a computer can create and widely distribute documents that in the past would have required a whole professional infrastructure

The opening of access to the means of digital production is prompting new relationships between active creators and designers The emergence of new opportunities for professional design is evident in the development of the blog There are over 65 million users of the free blog service Wordpress; to accompany this there are many designers that sell templates to help people making a blog change the look of it Here we see designers creating frameworks that can be selected, replaced or modified at will and at little cost in terms of time or currency by blog creators

In practice, an example of this phenomenon was the blog of someone writing under the

pseudonym of Salaman Plax He kept a daily, sometimes hourly, update of conditions in Baghdad leading up to, during and after the occupation of the country by US and allied forces This provided a human, individual, funny, microcosmic view of Baghdad before, during and after the US invasion, inaccessible in a three-minute TV slot or even an extended news article

It is not just in communication design that this revolution is evident While punk music is often seen as the starting point for the rejection of traditional professional infrastructures and

‘professional’ music, DIY music does not have to be predicated on these values As Andrew Marcus points out, in the austerity of the post-war years music was made with improvised instruments by non-professional performers In 1956 there were an estimated 1,000 skiffle groups in London (McKay, 1998) Charles Leadbeater charts the emergence of rap from the midwest of America as a new creative form rejecting the studio system and a direct mode of expression of the concerns of teenagers who did not feel represented by mainstream media.One common element that we can see in ‘ground up’ or vernacular innovation is that it tends

to flourish in areas where the requirements for machinery and physical infrastructure tend

to be low This is not surprising; it is much easier to make a website than it is to make, say, a boat, and it is easier to gradually improve a website until it functions, while when working with