Design Global, Manufacture Local

* Article: Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model. By Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros, George Dafermos, Michel Bauwens. Futures, Volume 73, October 2015, Pages 126–135

URL = http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328715001214

URL = http://www.p2plab.gr/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Futures.pdf

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Description

"This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on post-capitalist construction by exploring the contours of a commons-oriented productive model. On the basis of this model called “design global-manufacture local”, we argue that recent techno-economic developments around the emergence of commons-based peer production and desktop manufacturing technologies, may signal new alternative paths of social organization. We conclude by arguing that all commons-oriented narratives could converge, thereby supporting the creative communities which are building the world they want within the confines of the political economy they aspire to transcend."

Excerpt

We attempt to provide a tentative description of such a theoretical model that builds on the convergence of the degrowth and peer production narratives, the resilient communities and the lessons taught by the emerging DG-ML projects that utilize both ICT and desktop manufacturing technologies. To do so, the following figure would help us in outlining our proposal (Fig. 1).

A proposal for convergence: the DG-ML productive model.

The main vein of our critique to resilient communities, as stated in Section 2, is twofold. First, many resilient communities and eco-villages are producing a design/knowledge commons while working to meet their needs, but because of their local focus: they have loose connections with each other; they do not produce a global commons; and thus they fail to contribute to the formation of a global counter-power. Second, a radical shift should take place toward contraction and downscaling, whereas we claim that there are possibilities for “doing things differently” utilizing the modern community-driven technologies and practices. In line with degrowth and resilient communities narratives, we are arguably living the endgame of neoliberal material globalization based on cheap energy, which necessitates relocalization of production. However, we have new possibilities for online, affinity-based socialization, coupled with the resulting physical interactions and community building. The value-creation communities of the global commons approach might be locally based but are globally linked. Out of that, there may come new forms of business organization, which are substantially more community- oriented. This approach sees no contradiction between global open design collaboration, and local production/ manufacturing: both can occur simultaneously, so the relocalized reterritorialization will be accompanied by global networks of enterprises. The various information commons, based on shared knowledge, code and design, will be part of these new global knowledge networks, but closely linked to relocalized implementations.

It is obvious that the emergence of the community-driven development model characteristic of Wikispeed, Open Source Ecology and RepRap would have been impossible in the absence of the design/knowledge commons and the respective digital platforms of each project. So, at the most basic level, the scaling up of the DG-ML model would firstly require distributed access to enabling collaborative socio-technological digital platforms that would allow knowledge workers, farmers, hackers, engineers, scientists, hobbyists and open design communities to collaborate on joint or individual projects on a global basis. In a nutshell, it would include the state of the art of open source hardware, i.e., a stack of essential technologies in relation to each productive realm. The knowledge should be documented step-by-step in several languages, so that almost anybody may understand how a certain solution is implemented, replicated or even advanced. Moreover, it would be important to develop open assessment systems so that everyone could contribute to maturity evaluations of the projects. So, the current platforms and libraries of global design/knowledge commons should become more accessible and user-friendly. A proposal could be that the state organizes this first layer of infrastructure enriched with the design/ knowledge commons produced by the universities and other research institutes which are funded by tax payers money. Further, the legal framework of the digital commons, especially concerning the open hardware, should be advanced, maybe in line with the proposal for commons-based reciprocal licenses (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014).

Secondly, the scaling up of the DG-ML model would require distributed access to fixed capital, i.e., a spectrum of hardware technologies such as personal computers and desktop manufacturing technologies, which constitute the essential means of production in this setting. Though production is distributed and therefore facilitated at the local level, the conjunction of peer production practices and products with desktop manufacturing technologies could create sustainable business ecologies. There, the resulting micro-factories/makerspaces, essentially networked on a global scale, would profit from mutualized global cooperation, both on the design of the product and on the improvement of common machinery. “Micro- factories” is a concept that refers to small dimension, automated factories capable of greatly conserving resources like space, energy, materials and time (Okazaki, Mishima, & Ashida, 2004; Tanaka, 2001). They are likely to feature automatic machine tools, assembly systems, evaluation and control systems, a quality inspection system and waste elimination system (Koch, 2010; Kussul et al., 2002). Micro-factories can be identical to makerspaces/fablabs which can be found either in hackerspaces, media labs, and other co-working or community-driven spaces (Troxler, 2011). Community-driven micro- factories are commonly used by individuals and groups with limited financial resources as a local, physical platform for the mutualization of resources and the provision of shared access to those means of production that are not yet as distributed and generally available as personal computers and Internet connectivity. As such, they form a territorial infrastructure for the development of commons-oriented projects like RepRap and Wikispeed. Again, on the regional, national and international level, a proposal could be that the state empowers, supports and even builds micro-factories/makerspaces and intellectual hubs so that bottom-up modes of collaboration and entrepreneurship, which would build on the commons, are developed.

Any distributed enterprise could be seen in the context of transnational alliances of ethical enterprises that operate in solidarity around a particular knowledge commons (de Ugarte, 2014; P2P Foundation, 2014). As the key terrain of conflict is around the relative autonomy of the commons vis-a-vis for-profit companies, we are in favor of a preferential choice towards entrepreneurial formats which integrate the value system of the commons, rather than profit-maximization. In this context, the creation of businesses by the community, can make the commons viable and sustainable over the long run. Advocates of this scenario struggle for a shift from the current flock of community-oriented businesses towards business-enhanced communities. They believe that we need corporate entities which are sustainable from the inside out, not just via external regulation from the state, but from their own internal statutes and links to commons-oriented value systems.

Hence, the third layer relates to the local communities and the development of entrepreneurial coalitions and relevant funding ecologies. Through local hubs (private and public) and the development of a global network of micro-factories/ makerspaces and commons-oriented communities, various entrepreneurial coalitions (often in the form of co-operatives) could be catalyzed. The goal should be the creation of a funding infrastructure that benefits and sustains the design/ knowledge commons, creates added value on top, and markets these as products or services. Public authorities and governments could help orchestrate the public-private-commons triad in order to benefit from the local effects of the new networked “coopetition” between entrepreneurial coalitions and their linked communities.

Therefore, political and social mobilization on the regional, national and transnational scale is seen as part of the struggle for the transformation of institutions. Participating enterprises are vehicles for the commoners to sustain global commons as well as their own livelihoods. This approach does not take social regression as a given, and believes in frugal abundance for the whole of humanity. It envisions a transition to a paradigm which would include new decentralized and distributed systems of provisioning and democratic governance, escaping the pathologies of the current political economy and constructing an ecologically sustainable alternative (Bollier, 2014). To achieve such a transition, the global commons scenario, through the DG-ML productive model, suggests that we should work on building both global and local political and social infrastructures. Of course, we do not argue that peer production can instantly substitute all production processes or that centralized infrastructures (such as water supply) are useless. Peer production is a proto-mode of production and, thus, currently unable to perpetuate itself on its own outside capitalism, to an autonomous and real mode of production. It has been argued (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014) that the state could catalyze such a transition to hybrid modes of production reconfiguring the micro-economic and macro-economic level in the spirit of certain commons-oriented policies. Central to this discussion are the concepts of the “ethical market”, which would include commons-oriented enterprises, as well as the “partner state”, which would enable and empower direct social-value creation by providing support for the basic infrastructures, and focus on the protection of the commons sphere (Orsi, 2009; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014 and for a critical perspective Rigi 2012, 2013, 2014).