Open Design and Innovation

Facilitating Creativity in Everyone

Leon Cruickshank

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317085539
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Conception
• Categoría: Conception des produits

Open innovation, crowd sourcing, democratised innovation, vernacular design and brand fanaticism are amongst a handful of new approaches to design and innovation that have generated discussion and media coverage in recent years. In practice, these ideas are often inspiring propositions rather than providing pragmatic strategies. Open Design and Innovation develops the argument for a more nuanced acknowledgement and facilitation of 'non-professional' forms of creativity; drawing on lessons from commercial design practice; theoretical analysis and a wider understanding of innovation. Specifically this book examines: innovation and design, the reality and myth of mass creativity and the future of the design profession, through a series of case studies of new approaches to open design practices. The text draws on academic research, practical experience of the author in delivering open design projects and first hand interviews with leaders in the fields. The author challenges the notion of the designer as 'fountain-head' of innovation and, equally, the idea of 'user creativity' as a replacement for traditional design and innovation. The book offers a critique of the hype surrounding some of the emerging phenomena and a framework to help understand the emerging relationship between citizens and designers. It goes on to propose a roadmap for the development of the design profession, welcoming and facilitating new modes of design activity where designers facilitate creative collaborations.

Part 1:
Open
Design in
Context

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Open Design

This chapter introduces a new perspective on open design that places an emphasis not on technology but rather on the underlying human motivations that shape the way open design will develop in the coming years. It goes on to describe the five key open design themes that are built on throughout this book. Finally it lays out the structure of the book. This will take us from the foundations of open design within innovation and design and vernacular activity, to a series of new case studies, to a proposal for a new breed of ‘open designer’.

Open Design in Context

Design and the design profession have so many interpretations that it is impossible to talk about them without qualification of the context. Frequently we talk about the design of a product, the design of a place and the design of policy; we might be talking about the actions of a professional designer, that is, someone who earns a living through doing design, but we might also be talking about the creation and production of said product, place or policy, and this involves many decision makers, who may or may not be design professionals.

So what do we mean by ‘open’ design? Open literally means ‘not fastened or sealed’, or ‘exposed to the air’, or ‘on view’. So when we consider open design we could say that design has always been ‘open’ – everyone makes design every day through a hundred value judgments and decisions; most people make design decisions about how they conduct their daily work, but more specifically the way they dress, the décor of their homes and the style of their communication.

In this sense we are looking specifically at ‘open design’ as a term representing a wide range of approaches where the pre-eminence of the professional designer is not recognised in the creative process. There are, for instance, products and services that are the result of skilled design activity but have not included design professionals at all; for example, Lego has developed global communities of everyday users who help develop its Mindstorms products. There are also projects that are set up directly by design professionals where they are not ‘in control’ or doing the designing, but rather are one of many equal collaborators in the creative process, for example, in large urban development projects but also in co-design projects where community buy-in is essential.

Many commentators have credited open design’s growth to digital production and distribution; however, it is a phenomenon that has a rich history that pre-dates digital technology. For example, we see open design activity between business rivals in the emergence of both iron working and steam engine development as far back as the 1800s. Iron foundry owners freely shared their experiments in smelting iron both with competitors and potential new entrants. The result was that, over the period of 20 years, ‘the height of the furnace increased from fifty feet – the previous norm – to eighty feet or more, and the increase in the temperature of the blast from 600°F to 1400°F’ (Allen, 1983), offering dramatic increases in efficiency to the industry as a whole.

In a more contemporary example from the 1980s, the widespread availability of photocopiers in offices offered the facility for an explosion of fanzines and ephemeral self-published magazines. These homemade magazines were distributed by hand to local communities or networks of friends. One particular example stands out as it offered ‘a free bowl of breakfast cereal with every 1000 copies’ purchased and had a sugar puff taped to the front cover. This is just one example of the ingenuity, wit and creativity of non-designers and also demonstrates the transient nature of non-design innovation or vernacular design. These types of intervention are happening all the time without any connection to professional design, appearing, thriving and disappearing with little recognition or record outside their community.

This ‘vernacular’ design is separate from the conventional design economy and is little represented in open design literature. It illustrates that actually open design is not well understood within design discourse. Indeed to understand the intellectual foundations informing and guiding open design, one has to look (with a few notable exceptions) to innovation studies. Innovation is a significant area of research that emerged in the 1930s as a branch of management studies. There are many branches of research in innovation that are relevant to open design, including democratized innovation, open innovation, absorptive capacity (taking in new ideas), dynamic capability (changing as the result of taking in new ideas), social innovation and the effects and characteristics of networks, communities and clusters. We will discuss some of these in the following chapters.

The Role of Digital Technology

Digital technology has had an accelerating effect in this emerging open design landscape. While people have always exploited technological possibilities (see Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology, 2003), digital technology has introduced new possibilities to open design. This is evident in all stages of innovation, from looking for ideas and information for inspiration, to concept development, to testing, prototyping, marketing and selling design. Above all it is the easy dissemination, duplication, modification and exchange of ideas that is having the biggest impact on design. In a well-documented case study from innovation studies, the extreme sport of kite surfing was revolutionised by a small, globally distributed community of enthusiasts developing their own kite designs and exchanging CAD files, to such an extent that one of the leading companies closed their R&D and design departments as they were seen to be less effective than community designers (Von Hippel, 2006). Having said this, the reality is that new technological capabilities will only gain traction if they chime with wider society, and so understanding non-technological factors is crucial when engaging with open design.

Looking Beyond Technical Capability

The aim of this book is to look at the substance beneath the general descriptions of open design and, putting utopian predictions to one side, examine some of the fundamental issues that will inform the development (or retreat) of open design in the coming years. While these key issues are mediated by technology, the argument made here is that, fundamentally, open design will appropriate technological capabilities however it develops. In essence it does not really matter what next year’s 3D printers can do, or what a specific web-based service is offering; what is much more important for the sustainability of open design is the processes and activities that exploit these emerging possibilities connecting them to the enthusiasm and motivations of everyday people.

This de-emphasis of technology goes against some definitions of open design, including Atkinson who describes open design as ‘internet-enabled collaborative creation of artifacts by a dispersed group of otherwise unrelated individuals’ (Cruickshank and Atkinson, 2013). In contrast to Atkinson’s position, here I argue that the underlying motivations for open design are much slower to change than the tools they exploit as these motivations rely more on human nature than technical possibilities. These foundations are just as evident in the call for creative revolution in the 1960s, in the rash of punk bands in the 1970s and people photocopying fanzines in the 1980s as they are in Fab Labs and Kickstarter, or other examples of contemporary open design platforms.

Throughout this book we will be focusing on five key issues that together will determine how the design profession adapts to the possibilities of open design. Broadly this will involve the design profession’s move away from being the gatekeepers of creation and technological production (such as printing presses, websites or heavy production machinery) to a more collaborative, collective mode of working. The key issues covered by this book are:

1. The landscape and literature of open design

2. The diversity of open design approaches in practice

3. The problems traditional designers face when operating in an open manner when working on real-world, commercial projects

4. Strategies in design education to develop a new type of open designer

5. New open designers in action and the benefits this new type of designer has to offer.

Through these five key themes we will be exploring, proposing and sometimes promoting the participation of professional design in open design. It may seem a little odd to have to make the argument that designers should be involved in open design processes, but in reality professional design is not a driving force in this area and in many cases the position of a professional designer is just not seen as relevant. For example, when looking at the volume of graphic communication, especially for the web, the proportion of this created by graphic designers (or others trained as designers) is getting smaller and smaller as more and more people exploit the increasingly easy to use platforms to create their own communication. These platforms include blogging sites such as Wordpress, to Facebook, to commercially available ‘design your own company website’ services using templates to quickly create generic but serviceable sites.

For some the profusion of creative activity beyond any professional design is a good thing and they assume that the design profession will fade away over time. In contrast there is an argument that if there was a way for designers to help people do their own thing without imposing their own values, the outcomes could be better. Design education has been recognised as engendering skills and competencies, for instance, in creativity, holistic thinking and visualisation techniques, that can contribute to open design in a significant manner. One of the key challenges for designers in open design processes is to assist participants in reaching their full creative potential without the designer taking a controlling, hierarchical position. This is not a trivial or niche issue for the design profession; the radical changes seen in photography and graphic design are now starting to affect product design and other disciplines. In time almost every area of design will have to respond to open design, and it is adapt or die for many design sectors.

Book Structure

This book is divided into three sections: the first draws together ideas from across the spectrum of open design and innovation; the second introduces new, in-depth case studies of open design not previously published; the third looks to the future of design. Section one also explores the first theme, the landscape of design, innovation and open design. Understanding this foundation is critical because it is only through this that we will be able to develop new, productive relationships between the design profession and wider open design activity. This starts with a close look at the relationship between design and innovation. Design and innovation have many overlaps and commonalities but also a great deal of distance; for example, the 650-page Oxford Handbook of Innovation does not include design in the index. Precisely because innovation studies is not preoccupied by design, it is highly relevant to open design. In particular there is interesting work on open creative processes that do not include any design input; these include democratised innovation, crowd sourcing and the activities of pro-sumers.

Open design has grown out of activities such as mass creativity and inclusive design processes. Building on an analysis of innovation, we go on to explore the impact and implications of mass creativity. This is where groups of people, often distributed around the world, collaborate together on a creative project. For example, a large group of surgeons collaborated together to create the first heart–lung machine, a machine to keep a patient alive while their heart and lungs are simultaneously transplanted. In a more populist example, hundreds of amateur film makers around the world came together to remake the film Star Wars, with each participant making a 15-second scene all in different styles and using different techniques, from live action to computer animation to glove puppets (www.starwarsuncut.com).

Following this the often slightly anarchic processes in mass creativity, we look at how the design profession is responding to mass creativity and the methods it uses to include people in the creative process, a key requirement of open design. This focuses on user-centred design that exploits observation and focus groups (amongst other methods) and is popular in the conventional design mainstream. We contrast this with participatory design; this is an interesting example as it places a strong emphasis on being open to participant creativity but in a quite controlling, structured set of processes.

Finally this first section looks at some of the practical responses the design industry has had to both ‘ground up’ creativity and ideas filtering through from innovation studies, such as mass creativity and crowd sourcing. These include designers trying to make things that appear to have been ‘not designed’ – for example, design agencies faking ‘user-generated content’; or creating part-finished objects for customers to complete at home, for example, Droog’s bash into shape metal cube chair. We will also be considering approaches where designers create new structures to help people be creative in their own way – blogging websites such as Wordpress are a good example of this sort of platform approach.

The second half of the book consists of a series of extended case studies, each addressing one of the core themes identified above. These case studies ground one of the themes in real-world projects and activity not previously published or described in the design or open design literature.

The first two case studies focus on the diversity of open design approaches, contrasting Gadgeteer, an open source technology platform developed by Microsoft research, with a much more human-focused approach employed by Region 27, a group pioneering the collaborative development and prototyping of public services in France.

The third case study identifies some of the problems traditional designers face when operating in an open manner. Specifically this addresses the challenges designers faced when working in an open way with recently retired residents on a design project in Eindhoven. The Silver=Gold project exemplifies the difficulty some designers have in giving up control of the creative aspects of design processes.

The fourth case study looks at how Delft Technical University has changed its curriculum to help its students use more open approaches in their design projects. They now run a course (or module, as we would say in the UK) to help students facilitate creative contributions from others. This represents the first moves in the systematic development of a new kind of open designer.

The fifth case study documents a new design process built on an open design ethos. A team of open designers developed an approach that enabled them to play an active part in a high-profile urban design project whilst remaining equal partners rather than gatekeepers of the creative process.

Finally we conclude with a chapter that draws together the wider understanding of design, mass creativity and innovation with the case studies. This goes on to articulate a framework for how designers can contribute more proactively and progressively to open design projects in the future.

CHAPTER 2
Innovation and Design in Context

Open design occupies a space between design and innovation. This chapter explores the relationship between these two areas and, through this, describes the landscape in which new open design projects and activities operate. The chapter pays particular attention to open innovation, challenging the conventional understanding of this and its relationship to open design.

The Relationship Between Innovation and Design

Innovation is one of the most overused words in contemporary culture – it is often used as a cover-all for newness, progress or economic success. While this can be rather bewildering, the underlying research on innovation is very important in understanding open design. The trick is to be able to filter the significant ideas and research from the froth of political expediency and populist ‘airport books’ aimed at owner managers looking for a quick fix. To do this we need to firstly understand the relationship between design and innovation. It is at this boundary that most of the insights for open design are to be gathered.

Even filtering out generalist or superficial uses of the term ‘innovation’, there is still a huge body of work to draw from. Equally design has its own large body of literature. The aim of this chapter is not to provide a definitive description of either of these – for that, start with Guy Julier’s The Culture of Design and Jan Fagerberg’s Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Rather this chapter will establish the common ground between these often overlapping areas.

The borders between innovation and design are complicated and fractious, with a general lack of acknowledgement of the relationships between these two areas. For example, Fagerberg’s definitive anthology of essays on innovation does not mention design in the index of its 650 pages. In a recent review of the ten leading textbooks on innovation, none of them had a chapter on design and many did not even have a design section (Hobday, Boddington and Grantham, 2011).

From a design perspective, there is sometimes an outright hostility towards innovation. In ‘Down with innovation’, Rick Poynor argues that ‘innovation’ is a term invented by business to take design activity away from designers (Poynor, 2008). Other design commentators treat design and innovation as though they are the same thing. Books such as The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation by IDEO founder Tom Kelley adopt this position – the term innovation is used interchangeably with design. IDEO is looking to promote its services to as wide an audience as possible, so strategically it suits them to be seen as innovation as well as design specialists.

This blending of design and innovation does both fields a disservice; as we will see below, they are distinctly different and have very different contributions to make to the open design debate.

There is small but growing common ground between innovation and design. This is still coming into focus through writers including Roberto Verganti, James Utterback, Bettina von Stamm, Michael Hobday and...