Open Design - A Creative Approach to Designing

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Open Design - A Creative Approach to Designing"

Ashley Barbra Osborne
3 years ago
Views:

1 Eclipse light,ronen Kadushin 2006

2 An introduction to Open Design Open Design is a personal attempt, as a designer and design educator, to close a creativity gap between product design and other fields (music, graphic design, animation and photography), who found their creative products in phase with the realities of information technology and economics. It anticipates an imminent change in future product development, production and distribution due to the web's disruptive nature. Open Design tunes in to an essential cultural wave: towards open and freer information and Web- based collaborations, where an individual's creative spirit can find a supportive space to express itself. It is based on the principles of the already successful Open Source method that revolutionized the software industry, and gave birth to a social movement that is cooperative, community-minded and seeks legitimate ways of sharing creativity. In Open Design, a design is digital information. It relies on the Internet's communication resources, to publish, distribute, and copy the designs. Designs can be produced by any CNC manufacturing facility that's local to you, your consumers, or distributors, and encourage a direct contact with the designer. Open Design makes all technically conforming designs continuously available for production, in any number, with no tooling investment, anywhere and by anyone. Designs that typically live only a few years in the marketplace can live on and develop into new shapes and uses. Open Design places the designer at the center of an enterprise. At a fairly low cost, a designer can select suitable producers and sell products at a price he or she sees right. It is a flexible venture that easily adapts to customer's needs and locations, and is scalable in quantities. The presence of the designs on the web gives a large number of designers, producers and entrepreneurs access to creative content to experiment with, and consider as a business opportunity, on a "try before you buy" basis. It also creates a space for new business practices that are unknown in "normal" circumstances.

It anticipates an imminent change in future product development, production and distribution due to the web's disruptive nature.

3 Open Design as an educational tool Open Design offers an alternative to traditional industrial design education. Universities and art academies train designers to integrate into an industrial production scenario, and in order to do so, accept that consumer product industries are in a position to regulate creativity, design, production, consumer considerations and product development possibilities. Open Design on the other hand, bypasses this affiliation by offering the student an unbiased creative scenario, where ideas can be freely expressed, and production, in small or large numbers, is a key outcome of the design process. Moreover, openly sharing ideas, cooperating in problem solving and idea development among the course students, or by web communication with other students, regardless of geographic location, creates a sense of community, a social code of conduct that is similar in many ways to Open Source development practices, and "remix" and share mind sets within music, 2D design, video, photography and text content creators. Open Design is a "grass root" design approach aimed both at web publication and CNC production. It is a design challenge that calls for an integration of all its aspects; functional, aesthetic, technical, material, production, and cultural, into an object that favors easy, quick and repeatable production. Students are rewarded with a functioning, full scale prototype, precisely manufactured to their design specifications. And since the design is native to the web, and is intended to be used by others, a new aspect of functionality is added: the usability of the design itself. This unique feature of Open Design highlights issues such as simplicity versus complexity, modification possibilities as a value, and technical and design transformation potentials into other products.

creativity, design, production, consumer considerations and product development possibilities.

4 Open Design education program activities Workshop The Workshop provides students with an environment to freely express their creativity with Open Design methodologies, realize the results as products, and publish their designs over the Internet. Students contribute to a shared online knowledge base of ideas and designs, develop a personal project, and produce their designs with CNC manufacturing techniques. The products that result from this workshop along with their CAD files are then published on the web (under a creative commons license) to be distributed copied and used by others. Monetizing the designs is possible when they are published at appropriate platforms such as Ponoko.com. Design areas can include furniture, lighting, accessories, jewelry, electronic devices (moding and hacking), toys, or anything the students would like to get creative with. Having fun is a core educational principal in this workshop. This is a work intensive workshop that includes frontal lectures, discussions, ideation, design development, computer imaging, mock up building, mid project presentations, final design process, CAD preparation, production, assembly, final presentation and online publishing. The workshop will utilize online services such as creating a wiki for documentation, planning and research notes, dropbox for open access collaborative work, and flickr for photo documentation. Of course, open source based services will be preferred. Time: about 8 hours a day, 7-10 days, depending on CNC cutting availability. Participants: 8-16 students. Prior skills: CAD 2D and 3D modeling proficiency. Price: 450 /day plus travel and stay expenses. Seminar The seminar brings together a group of students to actively research and discuss the different aspects of Open Design. The seminar aims to familiarize students more extensively with Open Design Background, methodology, and implications and allow them to interact with examples of the practical and theoretical problems that will come up during their research. The seminar begins with a presentation by the seminar leader, followed by an open discussion and debate period. The seminar participants will then have a time frame to research and come up with their own ideas for potential Open Design projects. These will be presented and jointly discussed. It is a relatively informal seminar where students are encouraged to openly express their creative endeavors in a supportive atmosphere. Participants will be assigned a reading list before the seminar. Time: about 8 hours a day, 1-2 days. Participants: 8-12 students. Prior skills: basic CAD 2D and 3D modeling proficiency. Price: 500 /day plus travel and stay expenses. Lecture A presentation intended to communicate historic background, personal points of view, methodology, examples and implications of Open Design. It is followed by a Q&A period. Time: up to 2 hours. Participants: Any number. Price: 500 plus travel and stay expenses.

Students contribute to a shared online knowledge base of ideas and designs, develop a personal project, and produce their designs with CNC manufacturing techniques.

5 About the program leader Ronen Kadushin (b.1964, MA. DES) is an awarded Israeli designer and design educator living in Berlin since He taught furniture design and design creativity courses at leading Israeli design academies since In 2004 Kadushin developed the Open Design concept. Based on this concept, he formed Open Design, a design and production company for furniture, lighting and accessories which are produced in Berlin and sold in Europe and the USA. Kadushin s Open Design products are regularly presented in solo and group exhibitions world wide and published in professional literature. Ronen Kadushin also designs furniture for international producers and is a design lecturer at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. For further information please contact Ronen Kadushin Fehrbellinerstr. 82, Berlin. Tel: +49 (0) Mobile:+49 (0) Info@ronen-kadushin.com

Based on this concept, he formed Open Design, a design and production company for furniture, lighting and accessories which are produced in Berlin and sold in Europe and the USA.

Camp for Company. How to structure a business idea Business Model Generation: Design. August 2013

Camp for Company. How to structure a business idea Business Model Generation: Design. August 2013 Camp for Company How to structure a business idea Business Model Generation: Design August 2013 Some diagrams and concepts taken from Business Model Foundry Gmbh 1 Business Model Generation 2 Design tools