Joeke Written Assignment

ORIENTATION

Questions and Anwers:

1. What is your craft? (define your discipline, method or approach)

An important part of my craft is documenting my work process and making it accessible for others.
By doing this, a project is never finished, because others will participate and maybe use your ideas and techniques for their own projects.
During my internship at Instructables and my job at Stadslab I learned a lot about Open Design and sharing communities.
I use Instructables during my projects and also upload projects on the website, to get feedback and collect new ideas.
I use objects from Thingiverse, transform the objects and place them in another context so they fit my project.

2. What are the tools and media of your craft?
Sharing communities: Instructables, Thingiverse, Lynda, Wikipedia.
Open workstations: Fablabs, Open Wetlab, workstations academy.
Open source tools: Arduino, Processing, Ultimaker (basic). But also experimenting with materials and photographing the process

3. What are the borders of this practice? (what new media technologies have arisen / what is its future of the field))

The ideas of Open Source and peer production spilled over from the digital domain of software into material domains of hardware and manufacturing.
Now these ideas are also getting involved in more practices. Such as education. In his essay 'The Need for Open Design' (from the book 'Re-inventing the Art School 21st Century'),
Peter Troxler sais that the voice of the student still is notably absent, and teaching at times lacks concern for students' aspirations.
Mushon Zer-Aviv calls in the article 'Learning by Doing' from the book 'Open Design Now' tutorials an involved interactive design task for art students.

Bio-hacking is also an interesting development. By making tools and knowledge available, Open Wetlab encourages artists and designers to take part in the biosciences.
Even society is subjected to open source experiments at the Institute for the Future, an influential think tank in Palo Alto:
‘The Governance Futures Lab brings social inventors and futures thinking to the challenge of designing better systems of governance.’
The article about Open Source Government on the IFTF blog quotes: ‘Well, if we humans can use open-source technology tools to collaboratively write the best encyclopedia in the world,
and build the core of the world’s most popular mobile operating system, what is to stop us from collaboratively rewriting democracy, as we know it?’
http://www.iftf.org/govfutures/

4. Connect to a historical discourse and give concrete examples (images too please) of inspiring historical and contemporary practitioners.
The EULA’s (end-user license agreement) treated software as a form of artistic expression and made it impossible for others to share, copy, re-sell or ‘fork’ (edit) the software.
In this case the ‘concept of scarcity’ was applied. This is similar to original paintings; they draw their value from social scarcity, multiplication would destroy the value of it.
But, digital copies can’t be compared to paintings. Digital copies are absolutely identical and copying won’t alter the original code. So the ‘concept of scarcity’ doesn’t work.
Creative Commons reverse content scarcity created artificially by copyright.
The Open Source Software development, described by Eric S. Raymond: ‘release early and often, delegate everything you can and be open to the point of promiscuity’.
This is leading to a movement of users who become co-developers, because a lot of them can write code as well.
These ideas of Open Source Software led to a maker movement, focused on bringing together computer science and physical science.
The concept of Fablab started at the Media Lab of MIT by Neil Gershenfeld and spread out all over the world.
He says in his TED talk that Fablabs now have to focus on how to improve social and organizational engineering.
Eric J Wilhelm was a student at MIT and founded Squid Labs, an engineering and technology company. Instructables started as an internal Squid Labs project.
In 2011, Autodesk announced the acquisition of Instructables. All the staff of Instructables contributes to the site by sharing projects.

Contemporary practitioners are: Eric J Wilhelm (CEO Instructables), Randy Sarafan (Manager Design Studio Instructables), The Oakland Toy Lab (Artist in Residence Instructables),
David Sjunnesson (founder Box Creator), Ingrid Nijhoff (project Levende Pixels at Open Wetlab), Mickael Boulay (users as partners at WAAG Society), Droog Studio (Design for Download).
http://opendesigncontest.org

My Fantastic Forgeries project & Open Design:

According to Peter Troxler is Open Design a process for enabling design literacy in everyone.
The role of the professional designer will be to guide users and to deal with complexity for making tools needed by non-designers to express themselves creatively.
During the project of Fantastic Forgeries I focus on making tools that anyone can use for making a replica of the artefact ‘Birth of Bubbles II’.
This raises the critical question: can everyone be an artist? And is the artefact still valuable if it's replicated many times?
Do we have to question the concept of scarcity of artefacts?

Quotes:

'Openness is more than a commercial and cultural issue, it's a matter of survival.'
 - John Thackara

'A tutorial is an involved interactive design task.'
 - Mushon Zer-Aviv

'Finally, the ordinary person is in the unique position of being able to make almost anything,
 with  off-the-shelf modules, parts community and shared code.'
 - Bre Pettis

Feedback Jon: think about how you write the essay and how to structure your text. Experiment with participatory writing, use others' texts.
What does craft mean for communities? What is the difference between the hobbyist and designer?
Writing an essay can also help you to explorer your position in crafts.
Book: 'Participation s Risky' by Liesbeth Huybrechts

Brainstorming:

BOOK: Re-inventing the Art-school 21st century

Essay #4 The Need for Open Design
Peter Troxler

Open Design is a participative method, a collective-reflective practice and a dynamic, social and iterative design process which invites users to modify a design.

1. Industrial Heritage

The development of information processing and communication technologies for controlling energy and flows of materials within the industry.
This created new qualities of experience and contingent possibilities how to engage social, political and economic demands with technology.

2. Third Industrial Revolution: Societal Changes 21st Century

First industrial revolution focused on a control paradigm, the second on managerial capitalism and the third on individuals, self-expression and participation.
Zuboff and Maxmin call this ‘distributed capitalism’, a paradigm that serves the needs of individuals and treats them as a source of value.
It is the costumes who determines what a business is and what valuable is.
According to Rifkin the third revolution promotes lateral power, because internet and energy sources allow decentralized, lateral structures.
Examples of working anarchies are Wiki, Open Source Software. But businesses such as Apple, Google and Walmart are definitely not and don’t benefit society at large.

3. Open Source Freedoms

FOSS means Free and Open Source Software and have a legal proposition to obliterate (erase) intellectual property protection and a social proposition for peer-to-peer production.
This means that any piece of code may be used for any purpose, even commercial purposes.
This is diametrically opposite of EULA, this agreement treats software as a form of artistic expression and applies the concept of scarcity.
This concept draws value from social scarcity, multiplication will destroy this value. But this concept doesn´t work for digital copies,
because they are identical and don´t alter the original.Creative Commons licenses reverse the content scarcity created artificially by copyright.

4. Open Source Practice

Raymond describes the FOSS development: ‘release early and often, delegate everything you can and be open to the point of promiscuity’.
Users become co-developers, because they can write code as well.

5. Open Hardware and Maker Movement

The ideas of FOSS and peer production spilled over from the digital domain of software into the material domain of hardware and manufacturing. This is called the Maker Movement.
Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT was looking for new ways of bringing together computer science and physical science and created the Fablab.
Other Fablabs arised around the globe and became part of the Fablab charter. Gershenfeld sais they now have to focus on how to improve social and organizational engineering.
At the Institute from the Future at Palo Alto they even experiment with prototypes of citizen-led governance.

6. Open Design in Art Education and Practice

Academic art education experienced an utilitarian reorientation during industrial revolution.
Economic and cultural imperialism and globalization led to almost worldwide dissemination (scattering seeds) of the utilitarian art education.
Felix Stalder sais that the 'commodity culture' creativity treats as a scarce resource. Cultures without commodity moves authorship from individuals towards
groups, networks and communities. Boundaries between artists and audiences become blurred. Creative processes are organized as networks.

7. Open Design Between Sharing and Protecting

Pragmatic approach of Open Design: distribute the blue prints with CC licenses and get a fair share if someone makes big money with it.
Not all the design disciplines have a strong tradition of intellectual property, for example fashion, hairstyles etc.
In these disciplines there's no need for opening design in legal terms.

8. Open Design as Collaborative Practice

In 1970 there was already a collective research approach, called participatory design, in Scandinavia.
Co-design means that the collective creativity is applied across the whole span of the design process.
According to Sanders and Stappers, the new role of the professional designers will be to guide users and to make generative tools
needed by non-designers to express themselves creatively.
Open Design is a process for enabling fesign literacy in everyone.

BOOK: Open Design Now

Case: Form Follows User
Deanna Herst

Participatory design changed the role of the designer from an author of finished products into a developer of frameworks of open works.
This encourages the user to complete a form or product and they share the responsibility for the design, in a process directed by the designer.
Important are the usability and the aesthetics, the last one is complementing the functional properties.
The next step is to explorer participatory strategies derived from other disciplines, such as storytelling.
For example cadavre equis, a structure that triggers its users.

BLOGPOST: Mickael Boulay

Blogpost Waag.org: Designing in Context(s)

The introduction of the symposium 'Design Through Exploration', held at Media Plaza Utrecht, said:
"One of the tenets of user-centered design is that users should be involved as much as possible in the design process. [...]
However, in practice it is often a challenge for companies to actively and advantageously involve end-users in the design process of their products.
Main reasons are that users find it often difficult to understand the implications of the early ideas and concepts proposed by the designers
and to imagine the future use of the products."

Boulay noticed a good solution for this problem, used by the REPAR project of Océ. They gathered qualitative insights by using virtual reality.
Staff of a printshop were asked to load paper into a Océ printer, with multiple design arrangements proposed, in a virtual printshop.
This virtual printshop imitated a real life printshop, with realistic mess (such as clients, space). You can never achieve such a realistic setting
in a lab setting.

By making such a realistic setting, users have less difficulties to understand the ideas and concepts.

Another important element in user-centered design according to Boulay: use the appropriate designer.

https://www.waag.org/nl/blog/designing-contexts

WIKI: Participatory Design

Participatory design (originally Cooperative Design) is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders
(e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable.
This is a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs.

History:

In Australia many people believed that they were not being planned ‘for’ but planned ‘at’. (Nichols 2009).
In Britain ‘the idea that the public should participate was first raised in 1965’ (Taylor, 1998, p. 86).
Participatory design has attempted to create a platform for active participation in the design process, for end users.

Participatory design was actually born in Scandinavia and called cooperative design. But each group was participating in the process,
not directly cooperating.
Research projects on user participation in systems development date back to the 1970s. The so-called "collective resource approach"
developed strategies and techniques for workers to influence the design and use of computer applications at the workplace:
The Norwegian Iron and Metal Workers Union (NJMF) project took a first move from traditional research to working with people,
directly changing the role of the union clubs in the project.
The Scandinavian projects developed an action research approach, emphasizing active co-operation between researchers and workers
of the organization to help improve the latter's work situation.

In the Utopia project (Bødker et al., 1987, Ehn, 1988), the major achievements were the experience-based design methods,
developed through the focus on hands-on experiences, emphasizing the need for technical and organizational alternatives (Bødker et al., 1987).

Software development:

Indeed, user-centered design is a useful and important construct, but one that suggests that users are taken as centers in the design process,
consulting with users heavily, but not allowing users to make the decisions, nor empowering users with the tools that the experts use.
Wikipedia content is user-designed. Users are given the necessary tools to make their own entries.
Wikipedia's underlying wiki software is based on user-centered design: while users are allowed to propose changes or have input on the design,
a smaller and more specialized group decide about features and system design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design

WIKI: Exquisite Corpse

This writing and drawing method is to assemble a collection of words or images.
Collaborators add to a composition by following a rule or being allowed to see only the end of what the previous collaborator wrote or drew.
Invented by Surrealists and similar to a game called Consequences, found before 1918.
Similar to a Papua New Guinean tradition to tell half a story and let the listener finish the story themselves.

Examples:
Poetry made at an Exquisite Corpse workshop ('A Community Poem'). Drawing made by Noah Ryan and Erica Parrott.
Drawing made by Bea Nettles, Steve Kostell and Megan Diddie

WRITING METHOD: PARTICIPATORY WRITING

What phenomenon did I research?

Participatory design, in the context of open design.
This design movement transforms users into co-developers and designers into developers of frameworks to trigger its users.

Why?

The field of design is changing and this change is a possibility to take a closer look to the structures and approaches within the design field.
Open design has become more important, because the internet and new technologies make it impossible for design to remain exclusive.
Participatory design is an important element of this movement. The boundaries between designers and users become blurred.
On the one hand you have the evolving DIY culture, all the tools and knowledge that you need can be found online or in open workstations.
On the other hand you have the customers and businesses who are looking for products with value that meet the needs of the users.
By giving users access to a design process, these two issues are used for a new design approach within the open design movement.

In the 1970's a participatory method was applied for workers to influence the design and use of computer applications at the workplace.
But participatory ways of writing, storytelling and drawing, such as exquisite corpse, started at least before 1918.

By involving a participatory approach in the writing process I'm going to examine how innovative these methods are.
I also want to experience what role the 'designer/writer' has in this participatory writing process, how useful the input of a select group of potential 'users/readers'
actually is and if the participatory approaches of design can be transferred to other disciplines, such as writing.

I did research by reading books and articles about open and participatory design.
But also by experiencing the design process with my project for Fantastic Forgeries, this project is about making tools which enables almost everyone to
become an artist like Satoru Hoshino.

With this knowledge and experience I want to challenge 'users/readers' to become co-writers of my essay.
I'm going to use the exquisite corpse method, a poetry method where one starts the poem, folds the paper
and let another person finish the poem. A participatory way of poetry, you could say.
By doing this I want to start a dialogue about design with potential 'users/readers', lead by me as 'writer/designer'.

What is the expected outcome?

I expect to write an informative essay that is not only written about, but also with participatory methods.
An essay that shows the basic information, such as the history and contemporary practitioners, of participatory design.
And at the same time examines the role of the designer and the user and the ability to use the methods of the participatory approach in other disciplines.
The essay will end with an evaluation: what is useful from this participatory approach and what can be improved?
This will lead to an informative, surprising and critical essay about participatory design.

WRITING EXPERIMENT: PARTICIPATORY WRITING

Writing experiment with potential readers of my essay (people who have a relation to design or open source),
by starting a piece of writing, let the other finish the last sentence and go on with that sentence (Exquisite Corpse method).
The framed text is from the potential readers.

Experiment #1: after I collected all the information I needed to write the essay, I started a 'conversation' with two potential readers.
In order to get the input that I needed from them, I had to push them in a direction. But even though I did that, I still got surprised by their answers.

Martijn, 29, account manager of software, has to deal with open source software as competition in his sales market.
Especially his definition about the roles of a designer and an user was interesting, and his idea for non-designers to express their creativity:

Shanna, 23, Lifestyle & Design student.
Shanna's input was not extensive, so I had to write a lot to keep the conversation going.
But in the end she had a really interesting note that designs have to appeal to the users' emotions:

Experiment #2: after the input of Martijn and Shanna, I began to write my essay.
After I almost finished the essay, I realised I could use some more input from a potential reader.

Jan, 50, owner of Zelf Bogen Maken.
I started as usual with writing a couple of sentences and asked Jan to finish my last sentence.
He finished my sentences with interesting answers, but also made his sentence open ended, so I had to finish his last sentence.
Sometimes he made it pretty difficult for me to come back to the theme, participatory design, but we had a really surprising and interesting conversation on paper.
I challenged him, but he also challenged me. that is how I think participatory design would work the best!