Open Meta Design
Discussion
Massimo Menichinelli:
"Open P2P Design is not about a project or an innovation, but it’s about how to organize the process and the tools that leads to a design project or an innovation. Therefore Open P2P Design belongs to a different dimension: we enter in the meta- dimension of meta-design and meta-innovation. Meta (from Greek: μετά = “after”, “beyond”, “with”, “adjacent”), is a prefix used in order to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on).
Meta-design is therefore the design of the design process/tool, meta-innovation is innovating the way we innovate. The Open P2P Design methodology is intended as a tool to organize the development of collaborative activities project; more specifically, in Open P2P Design the Open P2P principles, practices and organizational forms are both a Design Methodology and a Design project or Design goal. We use Open P2P forms in the design process in order to co-create other Open P2P forms.
Open P2P Design does not refer to a project (intended as the outcome, the object of a design activity), but it refers instead to the design process and tools that can be used to develop that project; Open P2P Design does not refer to a specific innovation, but it refers to the way we can set up and facilitate collaborative processes that develop the innovations. With Open P2P Design, we don’t design the solutions, but the tools and processes a social system, a community, a collective intelligence can use in order to find its own proper solutions.
The idea of meta-design and meta-innovation comes from a reflection about the same Open P2P phenomenon in software and knowledge production. I think that the most important innovation of Free Software / Open Source / P2P movement is not a new kind of licenses, but the way a license can facilitate the emergence of a community. In a broader term, the Open P2P phenomenon is not really about publishing information under a certain license and through a specific software; the Open P2P phenomenon is about giving the right tools to a social system, a community, in order to enable it self-organize and build an evolution of the original information to solve its own problems and needs.
A Design discipline interested in enabling a community rather than designing an artefact is going to undergo a very important change: from artefacts to social systems, from objects to networks, from providing a solution to enabling a social system collaboratively produce a solution. This is a very interesting challenge for designers that have to face now the changes about copyright and IP brought by the digital revolution, and the rising of mass-collaboration-based creativity initiatives. It’s not only about opening their project to someone else, which is a big step too that is needed towards Open Design; it’s about shifting from a role of provider of their own creativity, to a role of enablers of the distributed creativity. From providers of a solution, to enablers of a social system who will eventually provide such a solution.
The designers that will be able to understand this change will have more opportunities in a marketplace and a society that give more and more importance on mass collaboration and sharing of information and knowledge rather than in proprietary creativity. Furthermore, they will be able to find a place in the very important social learning process that is trying to collectively and collaboratively develop complex solutions, changes and innovations to a more sustainable society in the economic, environmental and social dimensions." (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/massimo-menichinelli-open-p2p-design-as-enabling-open-p2p-systems/2008/11/24)