design, participation and open source

The intersection of design, participation and open source methods is an area of ongoing research for me, and recently I received a range of responses to a query about projects in open source product design or architecture. In the meantime I've come across some additional useful resources myself. I'm not sure that all of them have as direct a link to "open source" methods as I was looking for, but perhaps they reflect the range of current interpretations. Some take it to mean simply participation, some tie it to ecological sustainability...I’m posting everything here for the benefit of those who may also be interested in this topic:

now defunct RED group at the UK Design Council penned the report RED Paper 01 Health: Co-creating Services

"Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential" a report by the group DEMOS (authors Geoff Mulgan, Tom Steinberg and Omar Salem) in the UK -- one of the most useful and concise reports I've seen. Downloadable form the Demos website here

you can download Charles Leadbeater's new book, "We Think: why mass creativity is the next big thing" here.

the online journal First Monday is a free, online, peer-reviewed journal that covers the internet, I found an article by Coffin in 2006 ("Analysis of Open Source Principles in Diverse Collaborative Communities") particularly interesting as it includes an assessment of Thinkcycle.

collection of cases from "designing communities", in the Sustainable Everyday project

Report on success factors for Purposeful Communities, which is based on workshops held in Ireland, Sweden and US with people engaged in leading communities as well as interviews with several leaders of successful communities.

"Rethinking design history from an evolutionary perspective: Background and implications," includes some references to open source in The Design Journal (vol. 8, issue 3, 2005, 50-60). pdf of the paper available.

designer Ronen Kadushin set up a workshop in Berlin about three years ago started a project called "open design" offering CAD-/ CAM-downloads for accessoires.

Book GameSetAndMatch II: On Computergames, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies, Kas Oosterhuis and Lukas Feireiss [ed.], Episode Publishers ISBN 9059730364 charts application of contemporary technologies to architectural practice focusing on open source sharing, bi-directional networks, swarm behavior, intelligent agents, and complex adaptive systems in general.

Haque, Usman, 'The Choreography of Sensations: Three Case studies of Responsive Environmental Interfaces', in Proceedings Of The Tenth International Conference On Virtual Systems And Multimedia, ed. by Hal Thwaites (Ann Arbor, MI: OCSL Press, 2005), pp. 432-441 and Some interesting open architecture experiments

Project examples carrying names such as: Whole System Design, Integrated Solutions and Design Sustainable Solutions for example. Some that specifically relate to architecture are: The Living Village, Bedzed, Porto: A Sustainable City (an MSc group project at Cranfield)

Arch-OS is an open source system that can be easily reconfigured to allow artists, engineers and scientists to create new work from the streams of data that feeds the Core system. New work is enabled through audio-visual manifestations of the dynamic data processed by the Core.

a project of Architecture for Humanity, the open architecture network

participatory innovation sessions around future door environments and a housing area project (contact me for the paper)

research in fashion and hacking www.selfpassage.org from Sweden

The C_Lab at the Academy of Art and Design Offenbach/ Germany –active in this field, particularly in terms of "neo-craft" technology, decentralized small-batch production. (contact me for the 2 papers).

A few books and reports lay out the issues around sustainability and ICT (information and computer technologies), and these often touch upon open source:

Sterling, B., Shaping Things. Mediawork Pamphlet Series, ed. P. Lunenfeld. 2005, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Pamlin, D., ed. Sustainability at the Speed of Light. 2002, WWF Sweden: Solna. available online at http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/ict/index.cfm

Ryan, C., Digital Eco-Sense: Sustainability and ICT – a New Terrain for Innovation, in Lab.3000. 2004, RMIT University: Melbourne. available online at www.lab.3000.com.au

Alakeson, V., et al., Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Age. 2003, Teddington: Xeris Publishing Co. Ltd.

And if you really want to dig in to the "open, sharing communities" model, then you may well need to dig into these: