Open Source—standing on the shoulders of giants—is the preferred mode of production, insight and creativity today, and even more so when the 3rd industrial revolution starts to take effect: distributed and collaborative relationships, and a shift away from hierarchical power and toward lateral power. The 3rd industrial revolution is bringing affordable digital tools into the sphere of manufacturing and beyond: Affordable tools do not require huge capital investments; they bridge the labour-capital-divide, the owner-maker is re-emerging. Digital tools connect designing and manufacturing, they bridge the white collar-blue collar-divide, the designer-producer is having a comeback. Affordable digital tools also spread outside the industrial world, they bridge the producer-consumer-divide in new and powerful ways. Open source practice in software is characterized by structures that 'resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches'. Similar practices have yet to evolve in (open) design. Is it conceivable that a design brand start to release beta products early and often, to delegate designing to the ‘users’, and to involve those ‘users’ as beta testers? How likely are designers to share semi-finished work with colleagues, even from different disciplines or the other side of the world, and to accept that others might take their intermediary results, sketches and models, continue to work on them and turn them into next-step intermediary results that are quite different to what the initial designer conceived them to be? There is a small micro cosmos out there, the global network of Fab Labs, where some of these questions can be explored. Fab Labs are pretty popular with designers, but larger scale co-operative projects have so far been in the domains of engineering and education. What would be the reason: Is it a lack of interest, a disbelief in the power of the results, a missing skill, an absent opportunity, too early to tell—or are we just not seeing the projects?

1. Peter Troxler
Research Professor, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
Fab Lab — Open Design — Distributed Digital Manufacturing
OPEN DESIGN AND THE IMPACT OF THE
3RD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

2. • starting point
• open source—the freedoms
• infrastructure—the third industrial revolution
• open source—the practice
• outlook

3. STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS

4. © 2005, Lee Kindness

6. FREEDOMS

7. 1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the
cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to
share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral
and material interests resulting from any scientific,
literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

8. 3. Work towards zero tolerance of
infringement. This requires
legislative revision, through the
inclusion of a ‘Duty of Care’ for
shared responsibilities on IPR
protection across the digital
value chain. Set up a specific EU
Tribunal /Court for European IP
cases and promote and increase
the training of judges in
national courts, in relation to
the protection of Intellectual
Property Rights in the physical
world and online.

9. 8. Create guidelines, codes of
practice, legal frameworks and
experimental spaces to promote
the use of Open Design.

10. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

11. • Karl Marx (1867)
Das Kapital
• Frank B. Gilbreth (1911)
Motion Study
• Frederic W. Taylor (1911)
Principles of Scientific Management
• Henry Ford (1922)
My Life and Work (The Autobiography of Henry
Ford)
1st Industrial
Revolution
Rifkin:
Automatic printing
press
Steam-powered
technology

12. • David F. Noble (1984)
Forces of Production. A Social
History of Industrial Automation
• James R. Beniger (1986)
Control Revolution. Technological
and Economic Origins of the
Information Society
• Shoshana Zuboff (1988)
In the Age of the Smart Machine.
The Future of Work and Power
2nd Industrial
Revolution
Rifkin:
Electrical
communication
Oil-powered
combustion engine

13. • Jeremy Rifkin (2011)
The Third Industrial Revolution.
How Lateral Power is Transforming
Energy, the Economy, and the
World
• Umar Haque (2011)
The New Capitalist Manifesto:
Building a Disruptively Better
Business
• Yochai Benkler (2011)
The Penguin and the Leviathan.
How Cooperation Triumphs over
Self-Interest
3rd Industrial
Revolution
Rifkin:
Internet
Communication
(Distributed)
renewable energy
production

14. VIDEO

15. 1st revolution
Automatic printing
press
Steam-powered
technology
19th century
3rd revolution
Internet
Renewable
energy
21st century
2nd$revolu+on$
$
Electrical$
communica+on$
$
Oil3powered$
combus+on$
engine$
$
20th$century$
© 2010 Kevin Dooley, cc-by
©1968,ElginCountyArchives,St.ThomasTimes-Journalfonds
©2011WaagSociety,cc-by-nc-nd

16. 1st revolution
Automatic printing
press
Steam-powered
technology
19th century
3rd revolution
Internet
Renewable
energy
21st century
2nd$revolu+on$
$
Electrical$
communica+on$
$
Oil3powered$
combus+on$
engine$
$
20th$century$
© 1907 E.A. Thomson
Butte-Silver Bow Public Library
©2009mars_discovery_district,cc-by-nc-sa
© 2011 adafruit, cc-by-nc-sa

17. • The 3rd industrial revolution scales laterally
• New chapter for the SMEs, the producer co-ops, the
consumers
• Scaling laterally requires different forms of working
together, which include
• rules
• practices

18. PRACTICE

19. “… the Linux community seemed to resemble a great
babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches
(aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take
submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and
stable system could seemingly emerge only by a
succession of miracles.”
Raymond, Eric (1999). The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

20. Zanetti et al. (2013). Categorizing bugs with social networks

21. Peer-production

22. • “It would be naïve to believe that open source software
practices could be simply copied and applied to the
manufacturing domain without any alteration or
adaptation, ignoring the constraints and opportunities
that the materiality of hardware entails.”
Troxler, Peter (2011). Libraries of the Peer-Production Era. In: Open Design Now, p. 89

23. Eric S. Raymond, Wednesday July 03 1996: Merged hostrec and option structures.

24. Abraham Bosse (1604-1676): Voici la représentation d'un sculpteur dans son atelier.

25. Tacit
knowledge
to
Explicit
knowledge
Tacit
knowledge
Socialization:
Sympathized
Knowledge
Externalization:
Conceptual
Knowledge
from
Explicit
knowledge
Internalization:
Operational
Knowledge
Combination:
Systemic
Knowledge
Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995, The Knowledge Creating Company, Oxford. p. 72

26. • “[The] isolation from others is the necessary life
condition for every mastership which consists in being
alone with the ‘idea’, the mental image of the thing to
be.”
• “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never
possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of
the capacity to act.”
Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition. p. 161 | p. 188

27. • Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ostrom, Elinor and Charlotte Hess (2003). “Ideas,
Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-
Pool Resource.” Law and Contemporary Problems 66,
Winter/Spring: 111–145.
• Ostrom, Elinor and Charlotte Hess (2007).
Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. From
Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

28. 0"
10"
20"
30"
40"
50"
60"
70"
80"
2002"+"
Fab1"
2006"+"
Fab2"
2007"+"
Fab3"
2008"+"
Fab4"
2009"+"
Fab5"
2010"+"
Fab6"
2011"+"
Fab7"
2012"+"
Fab8"
2013"+"
Fab9"
Fab$Labs$Present$at$Interna-onal$Conference$
© 2012, 2013, stadslab Rotterdam

29. Hexagonal Paper Dress Hexacopter
© 2012, nachetz, cc-by-nc-sa
design Goof van Beek, 2009
photo © 2009, Ton Zijlstra, cc-by-nc-sa

30. FabLab Solar House FabFi
© 2008, Fabfolk Inc., cc-by-sa© 2010, FabLab Barcelona, cc-by-nc-sa

31. OUTLOOK

32. • How to build effective forms of (collective) action and
(self-)organisation in lateral environments?
• How to protect the interests and creative freedom of
makers while also ensuring wide access to new
knowledge, processes and products?
• How to appropriately and effectively create and capture
value?

33. • …we need a central repository…
• …we need a centrally maintained list…
• …we need one place to go where we find all the
information…

34. “Some day that creation may become something that
many people want and as such may develop into an
extremely valuable commercial asset.”
from WIPO Magazine, June 2013© stockCharts.com, 5 July 2013

35. • inverse infrastructures
• take responsibility
• participative research & concurrent development
• emergent (organization) design

36. Destruction of icons in Zurich 1524.

37. A (?) new epistemic culture(s):
"amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms –
bonded through affinity, necessity and historical
coincidence –
which in a given field,
make up how we know what we know."
Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1999). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. p.

38. “We might miss the chance to benefit
from a distinctive socio-technical system
that promotes
not only cultural and intellectual production
but constitutes a venue
for human character development.”
Benkler, Yochai, and Helen Nissenbaum (2006). Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue

39. On this journey
we have to be prepared to get surprised,
we must dare to fail,
and we will have to disagree,
but constructively.