= What is a Modular System? Modularity is an essential condition for Peer Production

Context

The two key conditions for Peer Production to emerge are Abundance and Distribution.

Distribution is also dependent on modularity, which means the break up of the raw materials into smaller modules, so that there is both an abundance of choice in terms of remixing them, and a very low treshold for participation, since the individuals can have access to the modules, rather than to centralized forms of capital.

Source

Article: Of Hackers and Hairdressers: Modularity and the Organizational Economics of Open-source Collaboration. By Richard N. Langlois. (The University of Connecticut, Richard.Langlois@UConn.edu) and Giampaolo Garzarelli (Università degli Studi di Roma, ggarzarelli@tiscali.it). Journal Industry & Innovation, Volume 15 Issue 2 2008

URL = http://web.uconn.edu/ciom/Open1C.pdf (2005 draft version)

Excerpts are from the above 2005 draft version.

Description

“The term modular system takes on many meanings in the literature; but one important candidate definition, which we adopt here, is that a modular system is a nearly Decomposable System that preserves the possibility of cooperation by adopting a common interface. The common interface enables, but also governs and disciplines, the communication among subsystems.

Let us refer to a common interface as lean if it enables communication among the subsystems without creating a non-decomposable system,

As we will see, an interface may become standardized; it may also be “open” as against “closed.” But it is the leanness of the interface, not its standardization or openness, that makes a system modular.

Baldwin and Clark (2000) suggest thinking about modularity in terms of a partitioning of information into visible design rules and hidden design parameters. The visible design rules (or visible information) consist of three parts. (1) An architecture specifies what modules will be part of the system and what their functions will be. (2) Interfaces describe in detail how the modules will interact, including how they fit together and communicate. And (3) standards test a module’s conformity to design rules and measure the module’s performance relative to other modules." (http://web.uconn.edu/ciom/Open1C.)

Discussion

See our separate entry for an extensive discussion of Modularity in Open Source

Eric Hunting on the relation between modularity and creativity

The example relates mainly to architecture:

"I think of modularization and standardization as a way of creating new vernaculars, which were not merely regional styles but a way of encoding as a cultural tradition a collection of knowledge of things that were known to work so that, as shelter become more sophisticated in technology with time, the ease and speed of building a home could be increased by eliminating experimentation. In engineering, modularity functions as a way of encoding and compartmentalizing knowledge into the topology and architecture of components so that someone farther down the chain of development doesn't need to know all that knowledge to use it. This is how we get to the point today where a child can successfully assemble a computer with ease.

Modernist architects in the past employed modularity for a number of reasons. Some sought to adapt construction to accommodate industrial mass production so as to apply its benefits to the reduction of the cost of housing, making it as close to universally affordable as possible and improving the base standard of living for all. Some sought to 'automate' design and engineering through the reduction of the functional elements of a home to spatially interchangeable units of standardized -pre-tested or proven- individual design -the closest they got to the idea of a vernacular. And, of course, some just employed it as as style. A way of being deliberately different and unusual for its own sake.

Later designers abandoned modularity in architecture because they considered it a folly stifling creativity for the sake of mass-production industrialization. (which, of course, never did pan out because designers of the era wouldn't employ modularity at a level and scale low enough to where it might threaten the loss of their own professional control over design -like in the early computer era when everyone thought 'standards' were such a great idea that every company wanted to 'own' one while still exploiting deliberate non-interoperability as a means to control market shares) And yet the example of the PC shows that, instead of stifling creativity, the compartmentalization of knowledge through modularity enables creativity by lowering the bar of engineering knowledge needed to perform different kinds of 'hacking'. And so while the PC has become very 'standardized' in underlying architecture, it has diversified endlessly in physical form. You see today this wild and strange diversity of PCs manufactured and home-made that range from simple mass-produced pocket devices, laptops, tablets, and monitors to the most outrageous objet d'art such as picture frames, Chinese urns, steampunk contraptions, stuffed animals (http://www.instructables.com/id/Compubeaver---%3e-How-to-case-mod-a-beaver---in-29-e/), elegant hand-crafted wooden artifacts akin to classic radios, pieces of furniture, recyclable cardboard boxes, hardcover books, and statues of cartoon characters and anime pin-ups. As silly as some of these things are (personally, I'd be happy if they were all black boxes and seamless ceramic tablets -http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/File:Geode.jpg), it's in this process that 'standards' evolve, hacks turning de rigueur to become the basis of later standards, the iterative design of the technology collecting and concentrating knowledge through its use -and mis-use.

The key here is _whose_ creativity is being enabled by this. Modernist use of modularity generally wasn't concerned with enabling the creativity of the inhabitants of buildings and so was indeed folly. But post-modernists still didn't offer anything better in that they were still not enabling creativity outside their professional community based on the very same presumption that experts always know best. Most of the architecture in the world isn't designed by architects -just as most of the clothes in the world isn't haute couture. Thinking about where building technology has the most impact in terms of social empowerment is what matters here. I'm not suggesting the obsolesce of architectural design by new building technology. I'm suggesting something far more fundamental to the way we house ourselves and the basic access to housing -obsolescence of bankers...

When we deliberately devise any sort of modular standard it should be with the anticipation of losing control of it to its users and of its evolving in ways we can't always expect -and we should consider that the sign of its success, a proof of it being alive. Given the way our culture is so rapidly evolving today, I think the contemporary architect should consider his role as something more akin to the genetic engineer than the simple designer producing a discrete 'perfect' artifact. We are in an age where the notion that the function and role of anything stays the same over time is an anachronism. We should think of 'ways of habitation' occupants 'engage in' and the 'platforms' they use instead of discrete buildings as products or some kind of public sculpture. In the future the physical structure may not matter much. It may all be as ephemeral as the architecture in Second Life -it's persistence based not on how durable it is -skyscrapers built to last centuries are torn down daily- but rather on the persistence of its social function in a particular place and time. Like eddies in the flow.

(I recently returned to use of Second Life after regaining a more civilized Internet connection and -as an example of the kind of nut I am...- the first thing I did was look for a virtual shipping container to pull out of my pocket as a portable house. SL's virtual environment is a kind of VR oxymoron that exposes the limitations of contemporary notions of space and property. Linden Labs' business model is based on trying to create an analog of the real-world real-estate market to exploit for profit in an environment whose role is simply socialization and where, logically, no one should actually need static personal property. The use of it has actually becomes detrimental -resulting in an aesthetic Crisis of the Commons! It's gotten to the point where sophisticated users with some design and programming skill actually developed their own virtual-virtual reality platform -called Horizons- to create on-demand private environments isolated from the main virtual environment without the cost of real estate. Nomadic virtual environment inside another virtual environment!)"

Examples of Modularity in Industry and Culture

The following treatment is by Lev Manovich at http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

Modularity in Industry

Excerpt from an in-depth essay by Lev Manovich on remixability and modularity at http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

"Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other - i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for mass production, until twentieth cenrtuy they have separate histroical cases. But soon after Ford installs first moving assembly lines at his factory in 1913, others follow, and soon modularity permuates most areas of modern society. ("An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which interchangeable parts are added to a product in a sequential manner to create an end product.") Most products we use are mass produced, which means they are modular, i.e. they consist from standardised mass produced parts which fit together in standardised way. Moderns also applied modulary principle outside of factory. For instance, already in 1932 – longe before IKEA and Logo sets – belgian designer Louis Herman De Kornick developed first modular furniture suitable for smaller council flats being built at the time.

Of course, modularity principle did not stayed unchanged since the beginning of mass production a hundred years ago. Think of just-in-time manufacturing, just-in-time programing or the use of standardized containeres for shippment around the world since the 1960s (over %90 of all goods in the world today are shipped in these containers). The logic of modularity seems to be permuating more layers of society than ever before, and computers – which are great to keeping track of numerous parts and coordinating their movements – only help this process.

The logic of culture often runs behind the changes in economy – so while modularity has been the basis of modern industrial society since the early twentiteh century, we only start seeing the modularity principle in cultural production and distribution on a large scale in the last few decades. While Adorno and Horkheimer were writing about "culture industry" already in the 1940s, it was not then - and its not today - a true modern industry. In some areas such as production of Hollywood animated features or computer games we see more of the factory logic at work with extensive division of labor. In the case of software enginnering (i.e. programming), software is put together to a large extent from already available software modules - but this is done by individual programmers or teams who often spend months or years on one project – quite diffirent from Ford production line assembling one identical car after another. In short, today cultural modularity has not reached the systematic character of the industrial standardisation circa 1913.

Modularity in Culture

Excerpt from an in-depth essay by Lev Manovich on remixability and modularity at http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

See the related entry on Remix Culture which discusses Remixability or read the full essay.

"Will the separation between libraries of samples and “authentic” cultural works blur in the future? Will the future cultural forms be deliberately made from discrete samples designed to be copied and incorporated into other projects? It is interesting to imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural objects regardless of the medium or material are made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks come with complete information necessary to easily copy and paste them in a new object – either by a human or machine. A block knows how to couple with other blocks – and it even can modify itself to enable such coupling. The block can also tell the designer and the user about its cultural history – the sequence of historical borrowings which led to the present form. And if original Lego (or a typical twentieth century housing project) contains only a few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can design with Lego rather similar in appearance, computers can keep track of unlimited number of different blocks. At least, they can already keep track of all the possible samples we can pick from all cultural objects available today.

The standard twentieth century notion of cultural modularity involved artists, designers or architects making finished works from the small vocabulary of elemental shapes, or other modules. The scenario I am entertaining proposes a very different kind of modularity that may appear like a contradiction in terms. It is modularity without a priori defined vocabulary. In this scenario, any well-defined part of any finished cultural object can automatically become a building block for new objects in the same medium. Parts can even ‘publish’ themselves and other cultural objects can “subscribe” to them the way you subscribe now to RSS feeds or podcasts.

When we think of modularity today, we assume that a number of objects that can be created in a modular system is limited. Indeed, if we are building these objects from a very small set of blocks, there are a limited number of ways in which these blocks can go together. (Although as the relative physical size of the blocks in relation to the finished object get smaller, the number of different objects which can be built increases: think IKEA modular bookcase versus a Lego set.) However, in my scenario modularity does not involve any reduction in the number of forms that can be created. On the contrary, if the blocks themselves are created using one of many already developed computer designed methods (such as parametric design), every time they are used again they can modify themselves automatically to assure that they look different. In other words, if pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction, post-computer modularity can produce unlimited diversity.

I think that such “real-time” or “on-demand” modularity can only be imagined today after online stores such as Amazon, blog indexing services such as Technorati, and architectural projects such as Yokohama International Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Frank Gehry visibly demonstrated that we can develop hardware and software to coordinate massive numbers of cultural objects and their building blocks: books, bog entries, construction parts. But whether we will ever have such a cultural ecology is not important. We often look at the present by placing it within long historical trajectories. But I believe that we can also productively use a different, complementary method. We can imagine what will happen if the contemporary techno-cultural conditions which are already firmly established are pushed to their logical limit. In other words, rather than placing the present in the context of the past, we can look at it in the context of a logically possible future. This “look from the future” approach may illuminate the present in a way not possible if we only “look from the past.” The sketch of logically possible cultural ecology I just made is a little experiment in this method: futurology or science fiction as a method of contemporary cultural analysis.

So what else can we see today if we will look at it from this logically possible future of complete remixability and universal modularity? If my scenario sketched above looks like a “cultural science fiction,” consider the process that is already happening on the one end of remixability continuum. Although strictly speaking it does not involve increasing modularity to help remixability, ultimately its logic is the same: helping cultural bits move around more easily. I am talking about a move in Internet culture today from intricately packaged and highly designed “information objects” which are hard to take apart – such as web sites made in Flash – to “strait” information: ASCII text files, feeds of RSS feeds, blog entries, SMS messages. As Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter put it, “Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” And it is much easier to “aggregate and remix microcontent” if it is not locked by a design. Strait ASCII file, a JPEG, a map, a sound or video file can move around the Web and enter into user-defined remixes such as a set of RSS feeds; cultural objects where the parts are locked together (such as Flash interface) cant. In short, in the era of Web 2.0, “information wants to be ASCII.”

If we approach the present from the perspective of a potential future of “ultimate modularity / remixability,” we can see other incremental steps towards this future which are already occurring. For instance, Orange <orange.blender.org> (an animation studio n Amsterdam) has setup a team of artists and developers around the world to collaborate on an animated short film; the studio plans to release all of their production files, 3D models, textures, and animation as Creative Commons open content on a extended edition DVD.

Creative Commons offers a special set of Sampling Licenses which “let artists and authors invite other people to use a part of their work and make it new.”[5] Flickr offers multiple tools to combine multiple photos (not broken into parts – at least so far) together: tags, sets, groups, Organizr. Flickr interface thus position each photo within multiple “mixes.” Flickr also offers “notes” which allows the users to assign short notes to individual parts of a photograph. To add a note to a photo posted on Flickr, you draw a rectangle on any part of the phone and then attach some text to it. A number of notes can be attached to the same photo. I read this feature as another a sign of modularity/remixability mentality, as it encourages users to mentally break a photo into separate parts. In other words, “notes” break a single media object – a photograph – into blocks.

In a similar fashion, the common interface of DVDs breaks a film into chapters. Media players such as iPod and online media stores such as iTunes break music CDs into separate tracks – making a track into a new basic unit of musical culture. In all these examples, what was previously a single coherent cultural object is broken into separate blocks that can be accessed individually. In other words, if “information wants to be ASCII,” “contents wants to be granular.” And culture as a whole? Culture has always been about remixability – but now this remixability is available to all participants of Internet culture.

cultural modularity seems to be governed by a diffirent logic than industrial modularity. On the one hand, “mass culture” is made possible by a complete industrial-type modularity on the levels of packaging and distribution. In other words, all the materials carriers of cultural content in the modern period have been standarised, just as it was done in the production of all goods - from first photo and films formats in the end of the nineteenth century to game catridges, DVDs, memory cards, interchangeable camera lenses, etc. But the actual making of content was never standardised in the same way.[8] So while mass culture involves putting together new products – fims, television programs, songs, games – from a limited repertoir of themes, narratives, icons using a limited number of conventions, this is done by the teams of human authors on a one by one basis. And whiile more recently we see the trend toward the resuse of cultural assets in comercial culture, i.e. media franchising – characters, settings, icons which appear not in one but a whole range of cultural products – film sequals, computer games, theme parks, toys, etc. – this does not seem to change the basic “pre-industrial” logic of the production process) For Adorno, this individual character of each product is part of the ideology of mass culture: “Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life.”

On the other hand, what seems to be happening is that the "users" themselves have been gradually "modularising" culture. In other words, modularity has been coming into modern culture from the outside, so to speak, rather than being built-in, as in industrial production. In the 1980s musicans start sampling already published music; TV fans start sampling their favorite TV series to produce their own “slash films,” game fans start creating new game levels and all other kinds of game modifications. (Mods “can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, and story lines.”) And of course, from the verry beginning of mass culture in early twentieth century, artists have immediately starting sampling and remixing mass cultural products – think of Kurt Schwitters, collage and particularly photomontage practice which becomes popular right after WWI among artists in Russia and Germany. This continued with Pop Art, appropriation art, and video art." (http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc)

Modularity in Open Source

See the article: Of Hackers and Hairdressers, and excerpts from it in the extensive treatment of Modularity in Open Source

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