View source for Collaborative Production in the Material and Digital World



Proposed ongoing PhD research thesis: Collaborative production in the material and digital world. By Joon Sang Baek (Ph.D Candidate, Politecnico di Milano, joonsbaek@gmail.com), (for?) Ezio Manzini (Full professor, Politecnico di Milano, ezio.manzini@polimi.it)

=Abstract=

Innovation at the grassroots level is pervasive in our society. In various domains,
there are groups of innovative people who actively solve problems or to open new
possibilities, and doing so make a positive step in the social learning process towards social
and environmental sustainability (Manzini, 2005). Meroni (2006) collected the cases of
communities in Europe which collaborate to develop solutions to their daily problems of
housing, eating, working, socializing and commuting. Similar cases were also collected for
China, India and Brazil (Manzini, Jègou, 2007). Halme et al. (2005) introduced the cases of
sustainable consumer services, business solutions for household markets organized by
communities, local governments, corporations and non-profit organizations in Europe.
Vezzoli (2007) introduced the cases of bottom-up social innovation and analyzed their impact
on sustainability from the perspective of systemic design. Meanwhile, innovation at the
grassroots level is more eminent in the digital world, an environment that exhibits antirivarly
and inclusiveness (Cooper, 2005). Collaborative production in the digital world is based on a
peer to peer relationship where members of a community collaborate to accomplish a
common task in equipotential status (Bauwens, 2005). Well-known examples include opensource
software projects such as Linux, wiki-based collaborative production such as
wikipedia and business platforms that utilize the creative commons such as Google or
Amazon. In fact, the speed of innovation is much faster and the scale is bigger in the digital
world than the material world.

The social innovation at the grassroots level in the two domains share in
common that they are the signals of a paradigm shift that indicate inefficiency and inefficacy
of the current production. However, they also differ in several aspects in terms of the type of
resources to be shared or traded, size of a community, organizational structure, incentive
mechanism, usage of toolkits, degree of involvement and penalty of failure. In this research,
we define the characteristics of collaborative organizations that underpin social innovation at
the grassroots level in both the material and the digital worlds. They are compared and their
relationship is analyzed. We then identify the obstacles to diffusing collaborative organization
in the material world and seek for the possibility of applying collaborative production in the
digital world to the material world to eliminate the obstacles and thus facilitate social
innovation at the grassroots level.


=Reference=

#Bauwens, M., Peer to peer and human evolution - On "the P2P relational dynamic" as the premise of the next civilizational stage. 2005.
#Cooper, M., The economics of collaborative production in the spectrum commons. IEEE, 2005: p. 379-400.
#Halme, M., Sustainable consumer services: Business solutions for household markets. 2005, London: Earthscan.
#Manzini, E., Creative communities, collaborative networks and distributed economies - Promising signals for a sustainable development. 2005, INDACO, Politecnico di Milano: Milano.
#Manzini, E. and F. Jègou, Creative communities for sustainable lifestyles (CCSL). 2007, Politecnico di Milano
#Strategic Design Scenarios: Milano.
#Meroni, A., Creative communities | People inventing sustainable ways of living, ed. A.
#Meroni. 2007, Italy: Edizioni POLI.design.
#Vezzoli, C., System design for sustainability. 2007, Italy: Maggioli Editore.


[[Category:Design]]

[[Category:Manufacturing]]

[[Category:Research]]