Introduction

This site is dedicated to two pioneers of peer to peer inspired physical production: Franz Nahrada and Marcin Jakubowski. We dedicate these pages to the memory of Lawrence J. Rhoades, pioneer of distributed digital production, who passed away last year.

The category was originally proposed and constructed by Franz Nahrada, and aims to encompass every form of design, including of hardware (i.e. Free Hardware Design) and physical production, that can benefit from peer production and open design methodologies.

Goals: the larger context is how to handle a broad shift from centralized, high capital production to decentralized, low capital production, preferably based on Open Designs in order to generate Attainable Utopias.

Our aims are therefore also congruent with the Open Sustainability Network movement, as expressed in the Standarrd blog and platform.

Therefore, this section will be:

1) monitoring the progress towards a world of constant social innovation based on open designs;

2) monitoring the expansion of open sourcing in the physical world

3) monitoring the field of emerging solutions in the field of social organization such as Global Villages and Localization trends.

Visualization

A visualization of the Future of Production, by the Institute of the Future. large version

Introductory Articles

1. The Future of Making by the Institute for the Future contains a summary visualization (mini-version here of "making" trends
2. Can peer production make washing machines?. Graham Seaman.
3. The Importance of distributed digital production. By Lawrence J. Rhoades.
4. In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned
5. Agroblogger on the state of the Open Source Appropriate Technology movement
6. Reread the classic essay on The Next Industrial Revolution on applying biological zero-waste cycles to industrial production. By William McDonough and Michael Braungart. The Atlantic, October 1998.
7. Facilitating International Development through Free / Open Source: about changing the direction of international development by giving away free designs for great and useful technologies #[2]. Vinay Gupta also offers a list of priority projects.
8. Open Source outside the Domain of Software. Clay Shirky
9. Why Open Hardware?. Patrick McNamara.
10. John Robb calls for the construction of Resilient Communities

Resource pages

1. What do we need to have "economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts?", i.e. true Distributive Production. Marcin Jakubowski proposes a set of OSE Specifications to judge such efforts.
2. Key entries: Free Hardware Design, Open Development, Open Customization ; Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Source Product Design, Open Source Hardware
3. See also: Citizen Product Design; Co-Creation; Co-Design ; Desktop Manufacturing ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs ; Self-organized Design Communities
4. Open Source for Appropriate Technology: Instructables, Honeybee Network, Appropedia, Howtopedia, Demotech
5. Sixteen Key Technologies for an Open Habitat. Marcin Jakubowski [3]
6. Key organizations: Open Design Foundation ; Open Hardware Foundation
7. Typology by degree of openness: Closed Hardware; Open Interface, Open Design, Open Implementation
8. The Open Source Product Design platform has a list of Open Design projects
9. MAKE magazine "has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace"
10. The Village Forum focuses on how we design and build our habitat.
11. The P2P-Design Delicious tag monitors the topic
12. Overview of Open Hardware Licenses
13. Stephen Vermeulen has compiled a long list of Product Hacking initiatives
14. It is increasingly easy and popular to share and swap physical goods, i.e. Freecycling‎, using Free Stores‎ and FreeSharing Network‎s. See also: Regifting and Regiving
15. Designing physical prototypes through Electronic Design Automation Software such as Fritzing

Books

1. Christian Siefkes. From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. 2007
2. Digital Fabrication Primer. Smari McCarthy.

Graphics

1. The Future of Making Map [4] (commentary [5])

Podcasts (Audio)

Selection from our full Podcasts Directory:

1. Alex Lindsay on Digital Craftsmen for Development
2. Alex Steffen on Distributed Disaster Relief and P2P Energy Networks
3. Anil Gupta on Appropriate Technology for Agroinnovations
4. Beth Kolko on the effect of Hackers and ProduSers on Creativity and Consumerism
5. Brenda Dayne on Knitting as an Open Craft
6. Bruce Sterling on the Internet of Things
7. Chris Watkins on Changing the World through Free Content
8. Clay Shirky on the Age of the Amateur
9. Clayton Christensen on Open Source and Innovation in Business
10. Craig Newmark on Customer Co-development at Craigslist
11. David Orban and Roberto Ostinelli on Open Spime

Conferences

Fab Labs Three and Four

Short Citations

What can be digitized will be shared

- Sheen S. Levine [6]

In the 21st century economy, it isn't factories and it isn't people that make things. It's communities.

- Eben Moglen [7]

...it makes less and less sense to be thinking in terms of "end-users" and to be creating knowledge-jukeboxes for them. It makes more and more sense to be designing for "end-makers"

- Willard McCarty [8]

An increasing number of physical activities are becoming so data-centric that the physical aspects are simply executional steps at the end of a chain of digital manipulation.

- Clay Shirky [http://finance. groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization/message/6967]

When people talked about innovation in the '90s, they really meant technology. When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design.

- (http://opensource.org/node/169)

Long Citations

open access to digital design – perhaps in the form a global repository of shared open source designs - introduces a unique contribution to human prosperity. This contribution is the possibility that data at one location in the world can be translated immediately to a product in any other location. This means anyone equipped with flexible fabrication capacity can be a producer of just about any manufactured object. The ramifications for localization of economies are profound, and leave the access to raw material feedstocks as the only natural constraint to human prosperity.

- Marcin Jakubowski

Linus Torvalds on Open Peer to Peer Design

"“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve." (http://www.openp2pdesign.org/blog/archives/43)

"don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit." (http://kerneltrap.org/node/11)

Agroblogger on a Appropriate Technology General Public License

"Let us imagine an active online community participating in vibrant discussions and sharing of Appropriate Technology plans and experiences. Let us imagine the AT equivalent of a sourceforge.net, a place where designers and field workers can go to download plans of greenhouses, beehives, water pumps, animal traction implements, and biodiesel equipment. And, within the legal framework of an AT General Public License (GPL), those plans can be used freely, modified, and republished under the same AT GPL. IRC channels dedicated to specific programmatic areas could serve as a dynamic forum where "newbies" can gain wisdom and insight from experienced field practitioners." (Agroblogger [9])

Karim Lakhani on Communities driving Manufacturers out of the design phase

"for any given company - there are more people outside the company that have smarts about a particular technology or a particular use situation then all the R&D engineers combined. So a community around a product category may have more smart people working on the product then the firm it self. So in the end manufacturers may end up doing what they are supposed to - manufacture - and the design activity might move to the edge and into the community." (http://www.futureofcommunities.com/2007/03/25/communities-driving-manufacturers-out-of-the-design-space/)

Kevin Kelly on nearly-free material production

"Material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill." (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php)

Vinay Gupta on Open Source manufacturing for Development

"An open library of designs for refrigerators, lighting, heating, cooling, motors, and other systems will encourage manufacturers, particularly in the developing world, to leapfrog directly to the most sustainable technologies, which are much cheaper in the long run. Manufacturers will be encouraged to use the efficient designs because they are free, while inefficient designs still have to be paid for. The library could also include green chemistry and biological solutions to industry challenges, for example enzymatic reactions that could be used in place of energy, and chemical-intensive processes or nontoxic paint pigments for cars and buildings. This library should be free of all intellectual property restrictions and open for use by any manufacturer, in any nation, without charge." (http://www.guptaoption.com/5.open_source_development.php)

Steve Bosserman outlines what is most appropriate for local distributed manufacturing

"strong candidates for a locally distributed manufacturing approach include ANYTHING that is agriculturally- based like food, feed, fiber, and biofuel production, much of housing and building construction including the manufacturing of inputs used in that industry, localized electric power generation using non-bio sources like wind, solar, and geothermal, and production / manufacturing of materials, components, and assemblies that use locally sourced raw materials and draw upon open-source, relatively easy to learn, appropriate technologies that can be applied in a wide range of situations-- not just a single product."

Marcin Jakubowski on Neosubsistence

"Neosubsistence is the term we apply to a lifestyle where people produce tangible (physical) wealth, as opposed to dealing with information in the information economy. We are talking about basics: even though we live in the information economy, we cannot deny the reality that human prosperity is founded on the provision of physical needs upon which the meeting of all higher needs is predicated. Neosubsistence is related to the information economy in that the information economy is a foundation for neosubsistence"

John Thackara on the importance of design for sustainability

"Eighty per cent of the environmental impact of today's products, services and infrastructures is determined at the design stage. Design decisions shape the processes behind the products we use, the materials and energy required to make them, the ways we operate them and what happens to them when we no longer need them." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007654.html)