Open Design and Innovation: Facilitating Creativity in Everyone

Open
Design
and
Innovation
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Open
Design
and
Innovation
Facilitating Creativity in Everyone
Leon Cruickshank
Leon Cruickshank 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published by
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Leon Cruickshank has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:

Cruickshank, Leon.
Open design and innovation : facilitating creativity in everyone / by Leon Cruickshank.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4854-9 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-4855-6 (ebook) --
ISBN 978-1-4094-7475-3 (epub)
1. Creative ability. 2. Democratization. I. Title.
BF408.C764 2014
658.3'14--dc23
2014000208
ISBN: 9781409448549 (hbk)

IV
9781409448556 (ebk)
9781409474753 (ePub)
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
Acknowledgements:
Openness in a Book vii
Part 1:
Open Design in Context
1 Introduction to Open Design 3
2 Innovation and Design

in Context 9
3 Mass Creativity: Design

Beyond the Design Profession 25
4 Design Responses to Mass

Creativity 39
5 Open Design Futures 51
Part 2:
Open Design Case Studies
6 Introduction to Case Studies 77
Case Study 1: The .NET Gadgeteer:

Open Design Platform 81
Case Study 2: La Region 27 and the

Open Design of Public Services 93
vi Design Leadership
Case Study 3: Silver=Gold:

Professional Designers Working in
Open Creative Processes 113
Case Study 4: Educating Open

Designers 127
Case Study 5: PROUD: Beyond the

Castle: Open Designers in Action 145
Part 3:
The Future
7 The Future for Open Designers 161
Bibliography167
Index173
Acknowledgements:
Openness in a Book
It is worth taking time here to address the issue of openness when writing a book on open
design. Openness as it is used throughout this book is a general description of processes
that include a high degree of porosity, exchange and collaboration in all areas of the
creative process. This grows from the belief that in many cases openness has practical and
philosophical advantages over closeness.
I am not the first author to want to make their book open. When Charles Leadbeater wrote
his book WeThink: Mass Innovation Not Mass Production: The Power of Mass Creativity
(Leadbeater, 2008), he made early drafts of his manuscript freely available online and invited
comments and contributions. It led to hundreds of downloads of the text and thousands of
individual edits on the wiki of the text to be found at www.charlesleadbeater.net/.
The excellent Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive (Abel, Evers, Klaassen
and Troxler, 2011) took another approach. The authors decided to launch the book in the
normal way but with a small amount of content freely available online. Over the next 18 months
gradually more and more of the book was available freely, until at the end of 2012 all of the book
can be accessed cost-free at http://opendesignnow.org.
Other less practical responses have included leaving a space in physical texts and encouraging
readers to add to or amend it. The first newspapers in the seventeenth century were sold to
the 400 or so coffee shops in London; these had blank sections for local announcements, and
papers were read aloud as few people could read.
In this book, none of these approaches has been used. While there is power in a multitude of
small but good contributions from across the complete spectrum of perspectives, experience
and agendas, there is also power in spending an hour or two with someone who has thought
deeply about the subject for a very long time and having a lively discussion. This is especially
effective when the people are at the leading edge of thinking on open design. This book could
not have been written without the generous contribution of Paul Atkinson, Rachel Cooper,
Antoinette Kripps, Helen Ryan, Marc Tassoul, Peter Troxler, Nicolas Villas, Stephan Vincent,
Ingrid van de Wecht and Lotte van Wulfften Palthe. A heartfelt thanks to these contributors.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Reviews of
Open Design and Innovation
Open Design and Innovation by Leon Cruickshank is in many ways the most comprehensive,
courageous, and useful contribution to the discussion around open design so far historically
founded, professionally reflective, giving substantial evidence in five case studies, and
including practical advice for open designers. With this monograph, Leon Cruickshank
successfully adds his voice and profound thinking to the discussion of open design, prevailing
over previous collective works such as my own Open Design Now and the excellent Dutch
Open issue of The Design Journal.
Peter Troxler, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands
and senior editor of Open Design Now
Cruickshank provides us with unique and fascinating insights into the rapidly expanding
field of open design and innovation, describing its origins and underlying theories alongside
contemporary applications that do facilitate creativity in everyone.
Rachel Cooper, University of Lancaster, UK
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 dcor 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.
4 Part 1: Open Design in Context
Many commentators have credited open designs 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 600F to
1400F (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-
Chapter 1: Introduction to Open Design 5
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 years 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 Atkinsons 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
professions 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.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Open Design 7
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 heartlung 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, Droogs
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 Juliers The
Culture of Design and Jan Fagerbergs 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, Fagerbergs
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 others. It is too much to suggest that there is agreement between
these authors but there is an emerging common context for discussion between design and
innovation; this is described in more detail in The innovation dimension: designing in a broader
context (Cruickshank, 2010).
Design and Open Design
One of the first uses of the term open design in the context in which we are using it here was by
Ronen Kadushin in his masters thesis and it was later formalised into the open design manifesto
(Kadushin, 2010). This simple document calls for a physical analogy of open source software
production. What is missing from the open design manifesto is a connection to a wider design
tradition or the design profession. Open design challenges some of the characteristics that define
professional design, for example, in the value of individuality and the role of the designer as creative
master. It is only through understanding the nature of professional design that a new role for design in
open design can be developed.
Understanding the Designer
Designers often adopt the romantic pose of the creative genius; traditionally this has been
fostered in art and design schools where being quirky and swimming against convention are
encouraged and rewarded. This culture of eccentricity is deeply engrained in design in the
Bauhaus in 1930s Germany (the birthplace of contemporary design education), students would
occasionally come to classes with shoes painted on their bare feet.
Many contemporary designers sell their services on the strength of the magic they can weave
to solve problems and then move onto the next challenge in another town/company/sector. This
view of the designer as a knight in shining armour using their innate talents to find and then
solve the problem is the mainstay of traditional design. For example, Paul Rand, a grandee of
graphic design, especially in the US from the 1950s onwards declares:
Chapter 2: Innovation and Design in Context 11
Design is a personal activity and springs

from the creative impulse of an individual.
Group design or design by committee,
although occasionally useful, deprives
the designer of the distinct pleasure
of personal accomplishment and self-
realisation. It may even hinder his or her
thought processes, because work is not
practiced under natural, tension-free
conditions (Rand, 1993)
It is now very unusual for contemporary designers to work in isolation professionally. More and
more there is a collaborative emphasis in design, and team-working is becoming the norm;
open design is an extreme manifestation of these new collaborative realities. In open design
the designer is absolutely not in control of the creative process, although they may have an
active contribution to it. In the case studies in the second half of this book we see a shift from
designer as genius to designer as facilitator. We also see how difficult this transformation is
for some designers. This opening up of the design universe into more collaborative possibilities
is driving curriculum development in some of the leading design education institutions (for
example, Delft Technical University), helping to create designers who have these facilitation
skills.
Later in this book we see designers who define their personal value as a designer on having
the ideas. In the Silver=Gold case study we see that others in the open design project identified
the value of designers not in terms of the concepts suggested but in the approaches and
perspectives they brought to the process. For them, the ideas generated were rather mundane
but, as one of the council officers says: why would they be exciting ideas, we do this every
day while they are just visiting. The challenge for designers is that often they assume that their
ideas will be better, even if they are just visiting.
Rethinking the role of the designer and not seeing them as the primary source of creativity in
projects impacts on the very bedrock of what it is to be a designer. To get to the bottom of this
we need to look at where design comes from. While Klaus Kripendorff traces the meaning of
the word design back to De + signare, as something describing a sign (Krippendorff, 1989), Guy
Julier draws the contemporary meaning of the word design from designo, the Renaissance
word denoting the person who drew frescos while others came later and painted them.
In Juliers view, the separation of drawing a plan, fixing the composition of a fresco with
someone else coming along to paint between the lines represents a separation between
planning and doing that is the fundamental characteristic of design. Designers create a plan,
blueprint or specification that someone else actually manufactures.
The Birth of the Designer
There have always been entrepreneurs and hobbyists who employed people to make things
to their plans, but the advent of the industrial revolution changed this picture radically. In the
early nineteenth century the need for large numbers of people who could help capitalise on
new technical possibilities became critical. The result was the establishment of Schools of
Design in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham in the 1850s, promoting visual innovation for
manufactured articles. By 1875 these schools had trained 15,000 people to design for sectors
including textiles, furniture and ceramics (Pavitt, 1984). Designers became the connection
point between production technology, market demand and business issues such as return on
investment.
This nineteenth-century role for design still shapes our conception of the contemporary
designer, even though consumers, production technology and business models have all
radically transformed during this time. For example, in the automotive industry the business
model of reducing costs through standardised mass production is no longer dominant. Now
even budget cars are customised at the point of order and efficient manufacturing and supply
chain management allows for mass production efficiency to be combined with a personalised
product. In Chapter 4 we explore how design transformed from a need in manufacturing to an
emerging professional body.
Brian Lawson has written extensively on the separation between planning and doing as the
defining factor of design activity. In How Designers Think (Lawson, 1999) and What Designers
Know (Lawson, 2004), he draws on research from cognitive science to argue that designers
are different from other people. He claims that, because they draw heavily on visualisation
to solve problems, they have a distinct advantage in problem solving compared with more
practical hands-on or experimental approaches. He compares architectural innovation (with
rapid progress through visualisation) with that of the blacksmith (with very slow progress and a
practice-based approach).
The argument for designers as special people (with special brains!) prompts the question, who
actually does design? Some take a very general view of design for example, Herbert Simon
declared: design is the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones (Hobday,
Boddington and Grantham, 2011) and Victor Papanek insisted we are all designers. These
definitions and a general common sense understanding of designing contradict Lawson.
Determining exactly who is a designer is rather like attempting to establish whether someone
is a photographer. In design, like photography, there are highly specialised professionals but
there are also many people who take photographs or design without any training and, for
example, successfully create their own house, or magazine or a Facebook page. The difficulty
in comparing these two types of design activity is that they have radically different criteria or
frames for success. For example, a corporate identity for a multinational company will have
very different success criteria than a blog or local newspaper.
Open design depends on bringing together but also preserving the distinctiveness of different
frames of reference. A large team of designers working together is likely to think in similar
ways and come up with similar ideas, and making the team bigger will result in more ideas
but of a similar type. The power of open design is to combine very different outlooks and
perspectives in a creative process in such a way that they can have a creative contribution in
a manner that is both distinctive but also builds on the other perspectives in the group. This
is very difficult but has a double benefit: it can enable professional designers to continue to
contribute when their role as gatekeeper to production technology is removed; it also offers
the potential of simply better design solutions.
The most well known description of frames of reference controlling how we see the world
comes from Thomas Kuhns seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Kuhn,
1970). Kuhn introduced the notion of paradigms as a framework through which our view of
the world is shaped. He uses how we think about astronomy as an example of paradigms
and how these are stretched until they break and there is a revolution. In the second
century AD, Claudius Ptolemy developed the scientific method and undertook astronomical
studies that followed accepted practice, placing the earth at the centre of the universe
with everything revolving around it. In the following centuries this model was modified in
increasingly unlikely ways to accommodate more and more accurate observation of how the
stars and planets moved in reality. This adaptation continued for a few hundred years until
the model was broken by Copernicus placing the sun at the centre of the universe, causing
a scientific revolution and a new model to emerge that in turn is refined and modified to fit
observation.
Wicked Problems
People operating in different frames of reference find it very difficult to relate meaningfully
to each other; their view of the world is fundamentally different. The design theorist Richard
Coyne drew on this incommensurability between frames very effectively to explain the
clash of ideology between design scientists such as Herbert Simons (the systemisers, as
Coyne labels them) and designers with a more hermeneutical, postmodern approach. Coyne
embraces this latter approach with its lack of certainty and metrics. Specifically he draws
on ideas such as Horst Rittels wicked problems (Coyne, 2005). Wicked problems are
characterised by (amongst other things) being impossible to define clearly and not having
a single correct answer. Coyne argues that almost all problems outside mathematics are
wicked. The contrast between the two frames Coyne presents is exemplified in architecture.
In a housing scheme the rationalist architect Le Corbusier determined the best place to
put the furniture in a room and permanently built this into the fabric of the houses. This
sort of rigid design is diametrically opposed to wicked thinking where design problems are
not equations to be solved, but need to reflect the uniqueness of the context and people
involved.
Open design very much fits into this second, emergent, wicked-friendly role for the
designer. One of the drivers for this book is the idea that the conventional frames for
understanding and doing design are changing dramatically, led by a rejection of one-
size-fits-all in manufacturing and business. The role of the designer as gatekeeper of the
means of production is changing. We will be exploring this in more depth in Chapter 4,
looking at the future of design, but there are new possibilities and challenges emerging
across the design spectrum. The idea of the star designer is ebbing away; gone are the
days when it was OK for a designer to sign all the design sheets they worked on to give the
ideas personal authority, the way that the architect Philip Johnson used to. As the likes of
Philippe Starck recede into self-parody and entertainment, designers are having to get to
grips with the fact that in almost every case they are not the central figure in the creation of
new products, services or systems. Open design is a strong example of the erosion of the
creative authority of the designer.
This non-design-centric perspective is normal within innovation thinking and offers one
explanation why innovation research is often leading design in terms of new creative
processes, especially as they relate to open design. There is, however, a flip side to this
across innovation literature as a whole there is little engagement with invention. This shying
away from the creative spark has made it difficult for design and designers to contribute to
innovation literature as conversely design starts from this point of creation.
In essence this is why it is fruitful to think about design and innovation together; design
is comfortable with the uncertainty and risk through iteration and fast prototyping, while
innovation is not bound to this way of thinking and can offer more strategic insights across the
development process.
Innovation and Open Design
Open design is not widely written about in innovation literature. This is not because the ideas
that underpin open design are not present in innovation studies, but it is an indication that
innovation does not have a design-centric perspective on new creative processes. There
is a great deal of writing which looks at creative processes involving people from many
backgrounds, not just professional innovators. In short, innovation is not hung up on design,
designers and their position (or not) in these new processes and as a result much of the thinking
within innovation thinking is highly relevant to open design.
Innovation studies is also characterised by its focus on understanding real-world activity, often
with the aim of harnessing this activity for profit. This is in contrast to much writing on open
design where, as we will see in the following chapters, there is less focus on profit but also
a lack of real-world evidence. For example, the design group Droogs open design platform,
downloadable design, has been about to launch since 2011.
Understanding Innovation
Even though currently innovation is an overused buzzword, the practice of innovation itself is
as old as human activity. Even the claim of the topicality of innovation is not new. As Downs
and Mohr stated in 1976: Innovation has emerged over the last decade as possibly the most
fashionable of social science areas. In fact there is a body of research going back to at least
Joseph Schumpeters Theory of Economic Development in 1934.
There is a substantial academic tradition of innovation study in the UK, some of the foundations
of which were established by Science and Technology Policy Research University (SPRU)
of Sussex. Established in 1966, SPRU undertook one of the key early empirical studies of
innovation in the UK. Using a team of 300 experts in panels, they analysed and catalogued
every significant (non-incremental) innovation in the UK from 1945 to 1983, resulting in a
database of 4,300 innovations (Powell and Grodal, 2005).
Also noteworthy is the Open Universitys Design Innovation Group, formed in 1979 as an
early example of innovation explicitly linked to design, although this groups focus is currently
directed toward sustainable design rather than innovation. Looking at contemporary activity,
Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIIR) at Manchester University is one of the
largest academic centres dedicated to innovation in the UK.
When looking for a widely agreed definition of innovation, a good place to start is the Oslo
Manual. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group
of the 40 leading industrialised nations, developed the Oslo Manual to allow any survey
or measurement of innovation to be comparable with any other survey, following the Oslo
principles.
The Oslo Manual defines innovation as the implementation of a new or significantly

improved product (good or service) or process, a new marketing method, or a new
organisation in business practices, workplace organisation, or external relations (Dosi,
1982). This definition has recently been modified, removing the word technological,
recognising that innovation is more than the translation of science and R&D into
products. This demonstrates a key difference between design and innovation. For
something to be a valid innovation, it needs to be implemented, and some definitions
go further, demanding the need for successful implementation. This contrasts with
design, where ideas are often not implemented.
There are many ways of categorising innovation within this general definition. One way of doing
so is to look at sectors such as aerospace, biotechnology or automotive. In contrast, Kline
and Rosenberg (1986) propose that the degree of uncertainty for success is a useful metric for
looking at innovation processes. This is useful because the more energetic the innovation, the
more likely it is to span different sectors or disciplines, making a disciplinary approach difficult
in practice.
Using the degree of uncertainty (and risk) as a basis, innovation is often presented as a range
spanning from the lower degrees of innovation (through terms such as incremental, marginal
or evolutionary) to higher degrees of innovation (through terms such as radical, disruptive or
architectural).
The danger with this type of description is that this range of innovation appears to be a smooth
range activity from incremental to disruptive, or that the higher the degree of innovation the
better. This would be a big mistake, many studies agree; different types of innovation activity
need to come together to enable successful innovation to occur (Kline and Rosenberg, 1986;
Garcia and Calantone, 2002; Gatignon, Tushman, Smith and Anderson, 2002). For example,
too much radical innovation is often a recipe for failure. Inevitably radical innovations are not
well refined and as a result initial outcomes are often very inefficient or even non-functional. For
example, Apple produced the first Newton handheld computer in 1987, but it was not until 2010,
with the launch of the iPad, that this radical innovation matured into a product many people
wanted. Computer displays worn like glasses are emerging into the mainstream after even
longer in development. It is only through the quite different process of incremental innovation
that new services, products and processes become effective, often many years after the initial
radical breakthrough.
Going further, Malcolm Gladwell promotes the advantage of the third mover into an area of
innovation. He argues that each mover in a particular area of innovation will have particular
aptitudes and that companies should acknowledge these, rather than trying to always be a first
mover even if this does not suit them. Gladwell describes the first mover doing the fundamental
thinking, the second mover solving the critical technical challenges and the third mover taking
the opportunity to evaluate the previous movers activities and provide a solution that really
works effectively.
As an example of this argument, Gladwell cites the development of the integrated missile
system. This system allows ground-based radar to direct missiles fired from fighter planes.
The USSR did the first theoretical work on this central planning resulted in time and space
for deep theoretical work without funding problems. The second movers in this space
were the US; they had engineering and entrepreneurial skills that facilitated the translation
of theory into practice. The third movers in this were the Israelis; unlike the US, they had
a really strong reason to take a functional innovation and really optimise it, in fact their
survival depended on it.
So how does this relate to open design? For both the creation of new platforms of methods for
open design and the design of new products and services within these, the level of innovation
could have a critical impact on the success of the activity. Different communities will have
different strengths in terms of first, second or third mover advantage. For example, a group of
teenage parents may have particular aptitude in taking a working innovative pushchair and really
perfecting it (third mover advantage) because they have both a need and practical experience.
A robot club might be more adept at translating a theoretical innovation into something closer to
engineering because they are good at making things, but also are used to translating theory into
practice and so are more suited to a second move engagement.
Open Innovation
In practical terms there is a close relationship between innovation and open design. Open
innovation (OI) is, however, an area of contemporary innovation research that merits particular
attention. Although open design was originally linked with open source, it came to be more
widely used as OI grew in popularity. It is possible to see open design as the creative or
inventive relation of open innovation. One thing that cannot be contested is the impact OI has
had in innovation studies, business and wider society. In a recent review Eelko evaluated 150
journal papers on open innovation (Huizingh, 2010).
This remarkable range of research has grown from a book (with some preliminary papers)
published by Henry Chesbrough, titled Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating
and Profiting from Technology (Chesbrough, 2003). This is a highly accessible book aimed at
managers and business readers. It was quickly followed by a more academic anthology called
Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008).
We will come back to the claim that this is a new paradigm later, but in essence open innovation
is very straightforward. As Chesbrough says: open innovation is the use of purposive inflows
and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation and expand the markets for external use on
innovation, respectively (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008).
The exchange of knowledge is a vital component of open design; ideas, design concepts,
critical comments and manufacturing expertise all fit within the loose definition of knowledge
used here. It is the lowering of the barriers to knowledge exchange (often by digital media) that
is driving the growth of open design activity.
Chesbrough bases his argument for OI as a reaction against closed innovation models that he
claims as the dominant mode of thinking characterised by the following assumptions:
The smart people in our field work for us.

To profit from R&D, we must discover, develop and ship it ourselves.
If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market first.
If we are the first to commercialise an innovation, we will win.
If we create the most and best ideas in the industry, we will win.
We should control our intellectual property (IP) so that our competitors do not
profit from our ideas.
Chesbrough very persuasively argues that these assumptions are mistaken and that breaking
away from these can offer dramatic advantages to a company. He claims that new product
development is dependent on ecosystems rather than lone invention and that knowledge and
ideas are inherently mobile. He goes on to argue that understanding and facilitating flows of
knowledge are more likely to result in profitable operations for a company.
Open innovation has been explicitly adopted by many firms; examples include Procter and
Gamble (P&G), a huge company with household brands such as Duracell, Gillette, Flash
and Pantene. P&G has net sales of over $40 billion and close to 100,000 employees. In the
1990s it faced a significant shortfall in growth and innovation. As a response to this, Gordon
Brunner, Chief Technology Officer and Head Worldwide R&D at the time, wanted to change
the innovation culture; he wanted R&D (research and development) to become C&D (connect
and develop). This commitment to open innovation is evident on their Connect + Develop
website (www.pgconnectdevelop.com). This is a portal for competitions to be launched, for
collaborators to meet and for the submission of innovative proposals to Procter and Gamble. It
is also seen in a culture change spreading throughout the whole company (Dodgson Gann and
Salter, 2006). Similarly the online media company Netflix used open innovation principles to help
with business challenges and Lego has a cloud of innovators who help devise new sensors
and models for their Lego Mindstorms range.
Misconceptions
Chesbrough and others consider open innovation to be a radical departure (Chiaroni and
Chiesa, 2010); rather than taking this at face value, it needs a closer look. To do this it is
important to distinguish OI from open source. Open source rejects copyright or restrictive
notions of intellectual property rights, or seeks legal protection to ensure rights are kept freely
available. OI is almost the opposite of this, where the use of IP protection systems enables
inbound Open Innovation, as it prevents the opportunistic behaviours of the actors with which
the firm collaborates (Chesbrough, 2003). In other words, while open source is free to use,
open innovation is about managing information to maximise profit.
Han van der Meer identifies a range of mechanisms for the implementing of OI in practice (Van
Der Meer, 2007). His list includes: licensing, cluster projects, patent brokering and spinning
out, attending conferences, patent searches and networking with universities. This is pretty
much what you would expect companies with some sense of forethought or strategic vision to
do. Above all, OI is a business model that tries to maximise possible profit for a company from
the resources available, understanding that the resources available will be present as much
outside the company as within it. This traditional business position is in tension with the more
liberal, open-source-like impression that many have when thinking about OI. This conservative
business perspective that underlies open innovation is demonstrated in the classic case study
used to illustrate the consequences of not adopting an OI approach, the PARC lab set up by
Xerox in 1970.
This contains an important lesson for the development of open design. OI uses the
extraordinary development of PARC Xerox as a way of supporting their attack on closed
innovation without really reflecting on the benefits and the larger picture of innovation present
at the time and since then. There is a similar danger of a myopic focus in open design, so,
for instance, there is a danger of the evangelism of 3D printing when it is only a tiny part, a
symptom, of open design. Concentrating on this without a wider historical and theoretical
perspective is to invite criticism when technology develops in new directions. This book seeks
to start to develop this bigger picture understanding of open design.
PARC Xerox: A Counter Case Study
PARC Xerox is held up as the killer example of how bad things can go if you do not adopt
open innovation. It is used to haunt CEOs and managers. Here we will slay this bogeyman
and show that in fact PARC Xerox is an example of excellent open innovation once you start
to think beyond the limited and deeply conventional view of companies and business and
shift to a wider focus. It is this wider landscape that open design is emerging into and a better
understanding of the value of open innovation in this wider sense will help open design flourish.
In the 1970s Xerox inc. had an 80 per cent share of the global photocopier market. In order
to protect their market position, Xerox employed Jacob Goldman to set up PARC (Palo Alto
Research Center) in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley to the south of San Francisco. His
mission was to undertake long-term research exploring the architecture of information. The lab
was given almost unlimited funds and was able to attract some of the best computer scientists
and engineers; it also led the world by including social scientists and ethnographers on its staff.
Projects at PARC were curiosity driven and had a very light managerial review.
This resulted in a series of world-changing inventions ranging from software to hardware to new
computeruser interactions. For example, PARC developed the ethernet protocol that underpins
how computers communicate across a network even today. In hardware, the computer mouse
and laser printer were developed, as was the first graphic user interface that allowed computers
to be controlled and manipulated visually rather than by typing in commands. All of these (and
others) have become a ubiquitous part of the computers that we use today.
Few of these innovations actually came to fruition or gave any substantial financial benefit
to Xerox. For the most part Xerox allowed them to spin off into new companies; for example,
Adobe was one of these companies that formed to develop the post-script language for
controlling laser printers and now dominates graphics and desktop publishing. Chesbroughs
analysis identified four companies that span out of Xerox that were worth over $100 million
within seven years of leaving, and calculated that the total value of all spin-offs was double
the value of Xerox itself (Chesbrough, 2002). This echoes thinking at the time, such as Douglas
Smith and Robert Alexanders 1989 book criticising Xerox: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox
Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer.
Superficially this is a powerful case for companies understanding flows of information and
engaging in open innovation, but crucially is based on a traditional business agenda of
maximising the exploitation of resources for a particular company, rather than being the
inclusive, slightly counter-culture approach it is often claimed to be.
To respond to this, it is important to note the criticism of Xerox especially within OI circles for
essentially wasting profit-making potential. At this time Xerox developed the laser printer at
PARC; this made (and continues to make) Xerox over $2 billion a year. It is ironic that Rob Allen,
the then Senior VP Xerox, says: The laser printer alone paid for all the other PARC research
many times over. If some of the innovation results fall off the wagon, so what? (Chesbrough,
2002). Xerox management were close to OI thinking, even as they were used as the example of
the failure of conventional, closed innovation systems.
The preoccupation with profit maximisation also points to a linear, rather tactical view of
innovation in the OI case studies of Xerox. Broadly speaking it is very good for Xerox that we
are all using computers that can talk to each other, and that they work through a visual rather
than command line metaphor, and that they create things we want to print. All of this is good for
the laser printing that, for the last 20 years, has been one of the mainstays of Xerox. These are
huge direct and indirect benefits that continue to help the company be profitable. Many of these
are outside the direct control of the company this is the essence of good open innovation
practice.
The innovation ecology that Xerox stimulated and helped sustain in areas such as networking,
graphic design and graphic interfaces helped it continue to flourish. In some respects designers
face a similar opportunity. As we will see, there are emerging ecosystems in open design that
will need nurturing, and professional design is in a position to help this. In doing so, there are
huge opportunities for new types of professional designers. Conversely if designers attempt
to control design, for example, by lobbying for formal restrictions on who can call themselves
designers, the chance, even in the unlikely event of this being successful, of the wider benefits
will be lost and design could follow the typesetter into obsolescence.
The Open Innovation Paradigm
Chesbrough and others (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West, 2008; Chiaroni and Chiesa,
2010) argue that OI represents such a new frame. The value of OI and its justification as a
new paradigm depends on the accuracy of Chesbroughs description of traditional closed
innovation. This interpretation is far from universally accepted. In a body of literature notable for
its restraint, it is surprising to see Trott and Hartmann (2009) write in the International Journal of
Innovation Management:
There are many scholars of R&D

management and innovation
management who would argue that this
paradigm represents little more than
the repackaging and representation of
concepts and findings presented over the
past forty years within the literature on
innovation management.
Trott and Hartmann go on to attack (demolish) the notion that both thinking and practice in
innovation resemble the picture of closed innovation that OI is claiming to rescue us from. This
attack on the way OI describes closed innovation uses literature going back sometimes to the
1920s on the benefits of clustering companies in districts. It also includes literature on the role
of networks and gatekeepers in innovation and the way innovation spreads. In an example
of consciously controlling flows of knowledge, when the company Pilkington developed a
process to make glass in a continuous and smooth strip by floating it on molten tin in 1950, they
immediately licensed it to their competitors and, as a result, almost all commercial glass made
today uses this process. This fits squarely with an open innovation mode of operating.
Some argue that OI is the norm for innovation, that there are only a few aberrational examples of
closed innovation and they tend not to last very long. Today it is hard to think of sectors outside
defence and nuclear technologies that do not have a very open approach.
Where does this leave the increasingly popular idea of open innovation? The popularity of open
innovation has been attributed by some to being the result of:
Its simplicity, the texts used by Trott

and Hartmann are diverse, complex
and sometimes difficult to grasp. Many
academics and most practical innovation
experts would find it difficult to get
to grips with the scope of the bigger
innovation picture, while OI condenses
and simplifies this.
Its timely, OI was launched during a

time of outsourcing and increasingly
distributed innovation that continues
today and OI talks directly to this.
Its extendibility, OI offers a high level

framework that invites extension and
application into more specific

areas of application, for example, high
technology, medial or organizational
areas. (Huizingh, 2010)
There is also a more fundamental reason for the success of OI. Chesbrough sets up an
unrealistic straw man in the guise of closed innovation, then presents OI as a radical, cutting-
edge response transcending this old-fashioned perspective. This is attractive to most people in
business because they already identify with this revolutionary movement as it maps to some
of their day-to-day activities. Managers and innovators can cast themselves as part of the
vanguard of thinking, with all the benefits to ego and reputation that this entails.
In reality the best way to think about OI is as a palatable, neat but over-simplified description
that stands in for a much more complex and extensive set of ideas; open innovation is just
innovation. In itself, having an accessible version of innovation is not a bad thing as we have
discussed innovation and design have a complicated, overlapping and often misunderstood
position.
Open Design and Open Innovation
Things become more problematic where OI is placed in the same frame or used
interchangeably with open design. As we will see in the following chapter, in citizen-led design
there are tensions between ground up innovation and open innovation models based on
profit maximisation. There are other economies developing in the open design space where,
for example, reputation or social capital may be in conflict with conventional financial metrics.
Open design should be celebrating the spill-overs from PARC and maximising the wider
benefits of the emergence of new ecosystems in the future, rather than seeing OI as a model to
monetise them.
The next chapter examines models of design and innovation that are outside the
traditional business methods used by OI. These include models based on giving things away
(free revealing), mass participation in design, co-creation and a range of other approaches
that seek to develop new open methods of creativity. Unlike open innovation these are not
necessarily based on conventional business models and a market economy, but similarly we will
see that under the surface there are incredible opportunities for open design.
Chapter 3
Mass Creativity: Design Beyond
the Design Profession
This chapter describes how people with no design training can be highly
innovative and creative. Using ideas from innovation, it explores why this
is important for open design and how people not trained in design can be
effective designers. The chapter concludes by challenging accepted wisdom
on the value of democratised innovation as a replacement for design, instead
arguing for active participation of professional design in open design.
Introduction
This chapter looks at the potential (and limitations) of the innate creativity within us all and
how this relates to open design. Throughout history non-professional design has resulted
in new products and services independent of design or innovation professionals. This
activity is being amplified by digital platforms that allow (for example) for someone working
from their bedroom access to a global audience, something that would have required an
international marketing campaign ten years ago. These digital platforms are expanding
possibilities on two fronts. Firstly, anyone can now easily design and sell products such
as t-shirts, photos or illustrations to a global audience. Consumers can now customise or
create completely new products such as shoes, clothes and other personal items for their
own use. Secondly, it is becoming increasingly easier for distributed groups of individuals to
work together on collaborative projects without ever meeting. As we will see in the following
chapter, this mass individual creativity (in the first case) and masses creating together
(in the second) are having profound implications for the design profession, in addition to
energising open design.
The ecosystem that supports online design and customisation is still very much in its infancy,
with many pioneering companies launching and then disappearing, often in the wake of
ambitious claims that cannot be met. For example, MES custom footwear offered a model
where not only could you add photos (or any other images) to a wide range of shoes, but you
could also set up a shop on its site to sell your designs to others. Unfortunately it was not able
to attract sufficient interest to make it profitable and went into liquidation in late 2012. MES is an
example of business models that need a critical mass of customers to make a self-sustaining
community and to break even financially. Before this is achieved, the companies are burning
money, and the temptation is to over-promise to attract a community to enable viability.
Despite the volatility and risk involved in bespoke online product design, this is becoming
established in mainstream design and consumer behaviour with its own sustainable business
models. For example, it is not extraordinary to create your own unique greeting card using
online services, or to create your own calendars or photo albums. In the UK, Moonpig has been
offering a customisable greeting card service that has been profitable since 2005 and in 2010
had an annual turnover of over 30 million (Hanson, 2010).
Mass Creativity
Greeting cards are easy to customise and have an established market. Beyond this though,
there are some profound new possibilities that are enabled by the contribution of tens,
thousands or even hundreds of thousands of participants. One of the most widely reported
and successful examples of group collaboration and creativity is Wikipedia. This grew out of
Nupedia, a conventional online interpretation of the traditional encyclopaedia. The intention
for Nupedia was to have groups of experts post entries to form an online resource. It proved
impossible to create a critical mass of entries that would attract people to the site. In January
2001 the creators of Nupedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sagner, launched Wikipedia, an open
source approach to an encyclopaedia.
The concept of a Wiki (what I know is ) is that anyone can edit or create any part of a website
resulting in a collectively generated and moderated source of information. There are many wikis
online, ranging from academic publishing to pornography. Wikipedia is by far the most popular
of these wikis, with over 25 million articles in 280 languages.
The accuracy of Wikipedia is contentious; there have been formal comparisons with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica that resulted in Wikipedia gaining a lower error count (Leadbeater.
2008). Equally as the number of entries grew and its use became more mainstream, it became a
target for malicious postings, pranks and inaccurate information. The fact remains though that
as a free information resource that taps into the knowledge and understanding of the masses
online, it has transformed our ability to learn the basics of almost any subject. This is useful in
industrialised countries but truly transformative where books are expensive and scarce. CDs
capturing the key elements of Wikipedia have enabled children to come together on the single
village computer to learn in a way that would have been impossible without the contributions of
thousands of people who are willing to share their knowledge.
This sort of exchange is not limited to information; as we have seen in the previous chapter,
businesses such as Procter and Gamble have adopted an open strategy to enhance their
Chapter 3: Mass Creativity: Design Beyond the Design Profession 27
innovation potential. This mostly engages with professional innovators in other companies
(designers, chemists and engineers amongst others), but there is also the potential for others
to contribute to their platform.
The notion of a platform for people not working in R&D, innovation or design is evident within
the product development system Gadgeteer. This is discussed in detail in one of the case
studies in the second half of this book. It is an excellent example of how moving from a closed
to an open model of creative activity has transformed the fortunes of a product and the type
of people who use it. For many years Microsoft has been selling a software product and
programming platform called .Net. This was used in electronic devices that only had very
limited processing power available to them, for example, bar code scanners.
The conventional model for this software is that for each unit that has .Net installed on it the
company had to pay a small fee to Microsoft. This was inhibiting the use of this technology as
profit margins and price are extremely competitive in this area. Microsoft took the decision to
make this code open source, in effect to make it free to use. As we see in the Gadgeteer case
study later in this book, rather than this being the prelude to the death of .Net, the effect was to
stimulate an explosion of activity and development from a very diverse community of people,
from programmers to designers and hobbyists.
There is a great deal of interest in how the power of mass creativity can be harnessed
to make profits. This search for opportunity is evident in a rapidly expanding body of
literature, magazine articles, internet resources and journalism, as well as in books and
academic publications. Without attempting a comprehensive taxonomy, a representative
book sample would include: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki; Crowd Sourcing:
Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe; Wikinomics:
Democratizing Innovation by Erik von Hippel; How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
by Don Tapscot; Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by
Clay Shirky; and We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater.
These books have their own terms and definitions for creativity undertaken by people who
have no formal training in design or innovation; these include hyper-craft, brand fanatics,
lead-users or pro-ams. These names are the result of the arguments developed within the
books; each of these has a particular nuanced set of characteristics. For example, pro-ams
are a category put forward by Charles Leadbeater describing groups of people that are
amateurs but work at a professional standard (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004).
Leadbeater (2008) uses examples in amateur astronomy, citizen-led journalism and many more
areas to support his argument that through social networking and digital platforms we are
entering a new, post-industrial era. Eric von Hippel (2006; Thomke and Von Hippel, 2002) talks
about lead-users as individuals who have the ability to lead radical changes in a sector, even
though they are not trained designers or innovators. We will be looking more closely at lead-
users later in this chapter, but we can see that these terms are overlapping and complementary,
and all point to there being a largely untapped and unacknowledged creative resource in the
mass of people that make up the general population.
Vernacular Design and DIY
The term vernacular has been used since at least the 1850s to describe activity by amateurs
outside the professions associated with them, particularly in terms of architecture (Gilbert
Scott, 1857). Of course such vernacular activity predates the development of professions which
some see as a mechanism of control and classification rather than establishing quality and
consistency (Atkinson, 2006). An increasing amount of vernacular design is enabled by new
production and communication technologies. Understanding vernacular design is an essential
component in understanding the future of professional design, but also (and fundamentally) it is
the interplay between design and vernacular creativity that characterises open design and how
this could develop in the future.
Amongst the most prolific areas of vernacular design activity is communication, one of the most
basic activities we engage in. For some radical groups the zine (underground or non-official
magazine) is almost the only record of its existence, such as The Misery of Football, considered
in all its forms, and a few remedies offered. This 1995 photocopied pamphlet by Kicker and Hat
Trick Productions mixes scandal and political comment. These discussions range from Eric
Cantonas wife-swapping activities, to an analysis of how QPR are playing, to ridiculing the New
Statesman for bemoaning the fact that the situationists were not around to attack the Tories.
Other examples of these low cost productions include Squall, Claremont Rd and Aufheben
this is a German word with both negative (to annul) and positive (to supersede) connotations
(McKay, 1998: 101). These political or just entertaining productions are the antecedents of the
blog and show a long history of design without designer.
The explosion of accessible digital technology for both the production and distribution of
communication has transformed the production of the zine from a niche subculture activity into
the blog and an activity that anyone with access to the internet can engage with and relatively
easily communicate with thousands of people every day, rather than a few hundred people
every time a physical copy can be made and sold. The ratings agency Neilson claims there are
over 180 million blogs in the world.
There are groups that have been considering the social and creative implications of this
freeing up of the means of production of communication for a long time for example, design
group Archizoom, with their promotion of the non-Stop city, and Peter Cooks system for a
distributed university in 1968 using the info-Gonk headset (Sadler, 1998), but also by Raoul
Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1994) where he writes that if cybernetics were
taken from its masters it might be able to free human groups from labour and social alienation.
Electronic distribution is also replacing some forms of conventional paper-based communication.

This worldwide distribution of information is most often in PDF format; it is compact, easy to view,
cannot easily be altered by the recipient and is finally bringing about the realisation of desktop
printing, not only for niche groups and political activists but also for everyday users including
businesses. This is a clear example of the gatekeepers of graphic communication (designer,
typesetter and printer) losing their position of control as anyone with access to a computer can
create and widely distribute documents that in the past would have required a whole professional
infrastructure.
The opening of access to the means of digital production is prompting new relationships
between active creators and designers. The emergence of new opportunities for professional
design is evident in the development of the blog. There are over 65 million users of the free blog
service Wordpress; to accompany this there are many designers that sell templates to help
people making a blog change the look of it. Here we see designers creating frameworks that
can be selected, replaced or modified at will and at little cost in terms of time or currency by
blog creators.
In practice, an example of this phenomenon was the blog of someone writing under the
pseudonym of Salaman Plax. He kept a daily, sometimes hourly, update of conditions in
Baghdad leading up to, during and after the occupation of the country by US and allied forces.
This provided a human, individual, funny, microcosmic view of Baghdad before, during and after
the US invasion, inaccessible in a three-minute TV slot or even an extended news article.
It is not just in communication design that this revolution is evident. While punk music is
often seen as the starting point for the rejection of traditional professional infrastructures and
professional music, DIY music does not have to be predicated on these values. As Andrew
Marcus points out, in the austerity of the post-war years music was made with improvised
instruments by non-professional performers. In 1956 there were an estimated 1,000 skiffle
groups in London (McKay, 1998). Charles Leadbeater charts the emergence of rap from the
midwest of America as a new creative form rejecting the studio system and a direct mode of
expression of the concerns of teenagers who did not feel represented by mainstream media.
One common element that we can see in ground up or vernacular innovation is that it tends
to flourish in areas where the requirements for machinery and physical infrastructure tend
to be low. This is not surprising; it is much easier to make a website than it is to make, say, a
boat, and it is easier to gradually improve a website until it functions, while when working with
physical materials, this can be costly and sometimes dangerous. While this remains true, the
emergence of practical and inexpensive manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing and
the possibilities of sharing ideas via social media means that more and more physical objects
are now able to be produced without the need for professional designers help. In the next
chapter we look directly at how the design profession is responding to this challenge.
Before looking at the design profession and how it could develop in the future, there is a
completely different group of people who have been looking at vernacular or non-professional
design for many years. We discussed open innovation in the previous chapter as a business
model that recognises the connections and collaborations we all have that extend beyond our
particular institutions. In the following section we will be looking at other concepts in innovation
studies that explore non-professional design. These propose new business and creativity
models that seek to exploit mass creativity activities such as crowd sourcing. We also go on
to challenge some of the evangelism in these arguments, making the case for recognising the
value of professional design contributions.
Innovation and Lead-Users
This section looks at an area of thinking and activity that overlaps very significantly with design
and open design, but interestingly seldom addresses these two areas directly. This parallel
track of thinking has the potential to have a huge impact on how people think about open
design. Innovation studies tends to look at mass creativity from an empirical, business science
perspective. This is significant for open design because much open design activity does not
actually involve designers at all, but rather is driven by entrepreneurs that see an opportunity
to take advantage of new production possibilities and consumption of products and services.
These pioneers are looking for new business models that are not predicated on traditional
design norms. Looking at these new models and how the design profession is responding to
them is essential in establishing the contribution that professional design can play in open
design.
The designer and design is very much on the periphery of innovation studies. Without these
hang-ups on the role of the designer, the special quality and rarity of creativity, it is no surprise
that some of the key works relevant to open design are to be found in innovation studies.
Leading these is the seminal book Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel (2006); this has
sent ripples of influence well beyond innovation studies into design, creativity studies, open
source, open innovation and mass creativity.
Von Hippels central argument is that professional innovators (he does not mention designers at
all) find it very difficult to access the sticky information found in individuals that have an intimate,
embedded experience of a particular context. More precisely, he argues that accessing sticky
information is very costly; for example, it may require many weeks of interviews and transcription
with a large number of people to get a good understanding of the real day-to-day challenges
that a group of workers faces. He goes on to argue that this leaves individuals who already have
access to this sticky information in a strong position to be innovative.
Von Hippel makes the case that this advantage is amplified in a particular type of user to an
extent that they are better able to innovate than professional innovators in R&D departments
or new product development teams. He calls this group lead-users and for him they have
very specific characteristics. Firstly, lead-users experience the needs felt by a general
population of users in a specific context more strongly and, crucially, a long time before the
general population. Secondly, lead-users have a strong motivation to modify their situation;
they will benefit directly from changing things (Von Hippel, 2006). There is an interesting
example of this within the cycling industry. In California in the 1980s, a group of friends
used to take their bicycles into the mountains and ride them down trails and rough paths.
They experienced challenges many off-road cyclists would face in the years to come and
there was a strong motivation for them to innovate, to develop more advanced and effective
clunkers, as they called them. The result was that from this small group of enthusiasts grew
the Specialised, Trek, Marin and Gary Fisher brands that drove the new multi-billion sector of
mountain biking.
These two factors, first for experiencing problems before they affect the mass population, and
second, the perception of benefit of innovation, have driven significant ground up innovation that
is completely independent of the relevant company and is based in empirical, evidenced-based
research. This research has substantiated lead-user innovation in areas as diverse as CAD tool
production, library systems, software engineering, medial device design and kite surfing.
This last example is interesting because the collaborative exchange of digital files and the easy
translation of these files into physical prototypes via computer-controlled cutting and sewing
machines fits squarely within the activity we would call open design.
Crowd Sourcing
The notion of people outside the company constituting a creative resource is exemplified by the
crowd sourcing approach; coined by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine in 2006 (Howe, 2006), this
has developed into a business model defined as
an online distributed problem solving

and production model whereby an
organization leverages the collective

intelligence of an online community for a
specific purpose. (Brabham 2012)
Howe goes beyond this in his book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving
the Future of Business, insisting that crowd sourcing should also result in mass production
by a company. The fundamental idea that informs the crowd sourcing approach is that some
problems can be solved more effectively by mass engagement of heterogeneous groups rather
than smaller specialist interventions, for example, by designers. There are a number of case
studies that crop up repeatedly in the literature in this area.
Threadless (www.threadless.com) is a portal that invites designs for t-shirts; these are voted on
by the community and the most popular are manufactured and distributed via an online shop for
a limited period of time.
iStock (www.istockphoto.com) is a website that allows individuals to submit photos, illustrations

and animations that can then be purchased and used royalty free by others.
InnoCentre (www.innocentre.org.hk) is a challenge-based portal that offers cash prizes for the
solution of technical/scientific problems by garage scientists.
Participation in these platforms is characterised by a low rate of return for the time and effort
contributed by each person involved in the crowd of participants. The intention is to appeal
to a very wide range and number of people who will make large or small design contributions
facilitated by an online community. While there are strong proponents of this approach (Satullo,
2008; Howe, 2006) in terms of offering an alternative to traditional professional production and
firm operation, there is a significant underlying problem.
Setting aside the heavy reliance on a relatively small pool of viable examples, an analysis of the
participants contributing to the examples cited above reveals a particular profile (Satullo, 2008).
Most of the people contributing to Threadless, and almost all of the successful contributions,
are either design professionals or students in the design professions. This challenges the
open design credentials of Threadless; it acts more like a showcase platform for design
professionals. A similar pattern of not really having non-professional participation is evident in
the other examples of crowd sourcing.
Rather than seeing the crowd as a meeting point of people with very different perspectives,
these portals are in reality a global stage for professionals drawn from a relatively similar
background and education. While there is some evidence for the willingness of people
to contribute high-level thinking for little or no return, the evidence for a more egalitarian,
vernacular approach is just not there. Dan Wood in Forbes magazine goes further, declaring:
There is no crowd in crowdsourcing.

There are only virtuosos, usually
uniquely talented, highly trained people
who have worked for decades in a
field. (Wood, 2009)
Here we see platforms developed for mass creativity being co-opted by designers who are
extracting value from the possibilities these platforms offer but not earning a living wage from
such activities. This hints at one-way in which design professionals may contribute to open
design activities in the future; they may act as super-users who contribute their expertise and
experience, but in the same way as any other participant.
Apple: Challenging Democratised Innovation
There is also an interesting relationship between designers and non-designers when

looking at democratised innovation. This can be illustrated by looking at Apple, which has
been criticised for maintaining an old-fashioned, closed innovation approach. Many key
commentators, from Malcolm Gladwell to Jimmy Wales to Scott Bleksey, feel that open
design is the route to innovation in the twenty-first century, but they all also cite Apple as one
of the most innovative companies operating at the moment (www.flandersdc.be/en/events/
cwf11).
While there is ample evidence of specialists untrained in design being intensely creative,
there is a fundamental challenge to this as a general system of innovation. Looking closely at
democratised innovation but also at the ideas of people like Charles Leadbeater in his book
We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production: The Power of Mass Creativity, we see that
most ground up innovation is incremental in nature. In this literature we do see exceptional
examples of radical invention (for example, a heartlung machine created by a team of
surgeons, or kite surfing equipment created by enthusiasts); day-to-day most examples offer
modest improvements on established practices and products. This could be because radical or
disruptive innovations are hard; most designers do not make these sorts of suggestions either,
but the reasons behind this have interesting implications for open design.
One of the principal reasons for a lack of radical ideas in ground up innovation is the
requirement for trial and error in creative invention. To explain, we need to think about
what gives lead-users an advantage over designers. The situational experience (sticky
information) gives an advantage to non-professional innovators based in a specific context
for example, where someone works. This narrow focus limits the number of innovation
challenges that lead-users can usefully contribute to, remembering that lead-users have
to be experiencing challenges that are similar to the general population but considerably
before them.
The relatively small number of opportunities for lead-users to exploit their advantage in sticky
information is highly significant. There is a great deal of research, from neurologists of creativity
like Vinod Goel (1995), to design researchers (Lawson, 1999; Dorst, 2006), to educational
researchers (Schon, 1987), that the only way to become skilled in developing really new ideas is
through long practice and trial and error. This means responding to a wide variety of challenges,
taking lots of time and making lots of mistakes. These are the guiding principles of traditional
design education, where studio teaching and constant peer review encourage iterative
prototyping and a freedom to explore many ideas, with a very low cost for unsuccessful ideas
as part of the process.
Being able to make lots of mistakes (and learning from these) is hard for people practically
and cognitively if they are not trained in this. While individuals (such as nurses working in a
hospital unit) have an advantage because they can use awareness and life experiences, they
also have significant challenges when it comes to innovation, especially non-incremental
innovation, because they are less likely to have time and opportunity to practise innovation
and to be able to fail repeatedly without adverse consequences as part of this process.
This is where professional innovators and designers have the advantage; they have many
opportunities to learn how to innovate across a wide range of contrasting challenges and
contexts so that, while they may be disadvantaged in some contexts, they also have an
inherent advantage that their innovation abilities can be more easily developed. The same
applies to conceptual leaps that mark disruptive innovation; the mental agility developed
through the practice of making many conceptual leaps is more likely to be available for
someone while being trained in innovation than someone developing more specialist skills
(this is an argument for universal design training).
The difficulty customers have with conceptual leaps in product development is supported
within innovation research from another direction. Clayton Christensen undertook a project
in the 1990s that yielded some remarkable insights on the nature of disruptive or game
changing innovations. This adds a further dimension to the debate concerning the ability of
open design approaches to provide radical new ideas rather than incremental innovation.
Christensen undertook a task that on the face of it could hardly be less interesting; he
compared the technical characteristics (capacity, speed, dimensions and a few others) of all
the computer hard drives produced commercially between 1950 and 1992 and compared this
information with the fortunes of the companies that made them.
The results of this research were published in the book The Innovators Dilemma: When
New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Christensen, 1997). This challenged the
assumption that companies failed because they either did not keep up with new technology
or failed to listen to their customers. The evidence presented by Christensen is that in four
separate waves of disruptive innovation companies in fact listened very carefully to their
customers, invested heavily in R&D and had a very good knowledge of the technology used
in the devices that would ultimately make their products obsolete and their companies
bankrupt. In an example outside Christensens study, the first digital camera was made as
an experiment by now defunct Kodak. For Kodak, the compromised picture quality, storage
(the original used an audio cassette tape for storing data) and lack of portability led them to
discount digital photography as an area to pursue in the future.
Repeatedly we see companies dismiss avenues of innovation because, by the criteria

determined by their own customers, the company and target sector, the new offering
performs poorly. These companies were undone because larger strategic or societal
changes resulted in new parameters being used to judge the desirability of a product.
Christensen shows how makers of 12-inch hard drives for room-sized computers ignored
7-inch drives because their data capacity was too small. For manufacturers of desk-sized
micro-computers, physical size was the critical issue, not capacity. This was not a one-off
phenomenon; Christensen shows the change of criteria wiping out whole sectors focused
on old criteria happening again and again. In a contemporary example, RIM and their
Blackberry phone concentrated on business users and effective email writing far beyond
the time when this was critical for purchase decision making; as a result they are struggling
in the face of more integrated, multi-functional offerings from Apple, Samsung, HTC and
others.
This has important implications for mass creativity and open design. The tidal forces that
influence innovation are beyond the scale of an individual company or even community.
Engaging in game changing innovation requires either a strategic overview that
encompasses many dimensions or for an innovator to have the good fortune to be developing
something that happens to chime with the zeitgeist at that particular time. Successful ground
up innovations that have changed the game, such as mountain biking, rap music or kite
surfing, fit very much into the latter category rather than representing an overall advantage
in radical innovation. There needs to be a way for open design to get this strategic view in
addition to individual tactical interventions if it is to reach its full innovative potential.
The analysis of both lead-users and Christensens work above makes a strong argument for
open design to include both non-designers and professional design. The best designers bring
with them the ability to make more and more successful creative leaps through long practice.
The challenge, as we will see in the case studies that make up the second half of this book, is
that it is difficult to include designers in open design processes without them dominating the
creative process. As we see in the case study on creative facilitation at TU Delft, this is being
addressed in some institutions in the education of designers.
This brings us back to Apple, a notoriously closed, secretive company that in many ways
exemplifies this requirement to have both a strategic vision not shared by others and at the
same time a human-led focus. This is achieved by concentrating on the intersection between
product, systems and people and waiting for the balance of these to be right (by their own
measures) before intervening. This focus means that Apple do not develop new blue sky
technology (unlike, for example, Google, Microsoft or Hewlett Packard), neither are they first
to market in exploiting new technological advances; iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad all had
precursors on the market for a long period of time before Apple intervened. The reason for their
pre-eminent position is that they wait until they understand what factors are going to determine
if there is a disruptive potential and focus on that from a technical, service and human
perspective.
This integration is extremely difficult, requiring a constant shifting between fine detail and
grand(iose) vision, and crucially requires a coherent intervention across both detailed and
strategic scales at the same time. This is very difficult to achieve in a collective, distributed or
non-hierarchical manner. In particular there is a strong contrast between this integrated focus-
shifting approach and the modular approach that open source software development uses.
In fact open source software production has flourished because it is exactly the opposite; it is
eminently suitable for modular production and improvement by a diverse range of people who
do not need to have the big picture.
Overview
In this chapter we have looked at some of the motivating issues that drive mass creativity
and how these constitute a creative network that operates beyond the reach of professional
design. This highlights some important concepts for open design, in particular the necessary
motivations and opportunities needed for open design to flourish (through von Hippels work
on lead-users). We also explored the likely limitations of non-designers to produce radical or
disruptive innovations.
Finally we looked at Apple in the context of Christensens work and the dangers of relying on
the opinions of customers, suppliers and common sense. Apple has chosen to concentrate on
a closed approach to design; its new product development and design efforts are focused on
a search for new emerging success criteria and developing products and services specifically
to take advantage of these emerging issues. This is what lies behind the success of the iPod,
iPhone and iPad, rather than new technology. This is, however, a risky strategy it depends on
Apple betting on future, unacknowledged and unpredicted needs and for these to be successful
more or less every time. The question is how long will their luck last?
In the next chapter we will look at how the design profession is responding to the rise of mass
creativity and how this is necessitating a rethink of how we consider design, designers and the
role of the non-professional designer in open design.
Chapter 4
Design Responses to
Mass Creativity
This chapter explores how the design profession formed and came to
recognise the value of mass creativity and non-professional design. This
includes the anti-design and low culture experiments of radical Italian design.
It also includes more formal design methods that involve non-designers in the
design process through user-centred and participatory processes. Finally we
look at the development of co-authorship processes where proto-products are
created by designers for completion by consumers, raising this as a possible
model for professional design engagement in open design.
Introduction
In this chapter we establish how design emerged into the professions we know today; the
separation of design from wider society is part of this process. We go on to describe attempts
to close this gap and include non-design sensibilities in the creative process. This recognition
of the potential for non-professional creativity has produced a wide variety of responses.
Some designers have attempted to simulate (fake) non-designerly products, drawing on low
culture and kitsch aesthetics. This represents a transition period from the modernist designer
as genius who is key to the creative process to the designer becoming part of an innovation
ecosystem where many people can be creative and this may or may not involve a designer.
These approaches are formalised in methods such as user-centred design and participatory
design and welcome non-designers to a greater or lesser extent into the design process itself.
Outside these well-established methods there are a number of interesting experiments and
initiatives that explore the opening up of the creative process. These include avant garde
proposals for inflatable architecture and nomadic living, but also more applicable solutions for
sale now that require equal contributions from designer and non-designer to make the product
viable, with the designer giving up their traditional role of creative director. Such interactions
might be an example of the simplest possible instance of designers making a positive
contribution to an open design process; they represent non-designers driving a design with
support from design frameworks.
The Professionalisation of Design
The traditional role of professional design is the mediator between consumer needs,
entrepreneurial possibility and production technology. Designers acted as gatekeepers to the
means of production (for example, printing presses, factories or servers). To understand the
implications for the design profession of the move away from being gatekeepers, we firstly need
to understand how this came into being.
We have already discussed how design as a profession was established as a result of the
industrial revolution in the UK. This was prompted by the requirement for individuals who could
plan and create the patterns or templates for mass production, resulting in design schools
in major industrialised cities including Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. These design
schools represented a shift away from traditional craft training; they had a strong emphasis on
creating products that exploited the production techniques available rather than being based on
traditional forms.
Reflecting this focus on creating products that exploited manufacturing technology, the
design profession sits between production processes and the needs of society. Historically
designers have seen their role as to understand the possibilities of manufacturing
processes and to shape their products to take advantage of these while meeting the needs
of the masses. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, this resulted in modernist design and the
adoption of a highly rationalist approach. Designers and architects positioned themselves
as the person who knew best how people should live. The famous quote from the architect
Le Corbusier is:
The house was a machine for living.

This machine was to be created by a small band of design-scientists. This was the era of office
blocks not having opening windows because the environment was designed to perfection, and
then being able to literally fry eggs on the (inside) windowsills of the Chicago Seagram building
in summertime.
This is the antithesis of open design and indeed any dialogue between designer and the people
affected by their work. It took people like Nigel Cross in the late 1970s to really attack this
position in mainstream design education.
While many architects of the modern movement were also designers (and this crossover
continues), the design profession is much weaker and less coherent than architecture.
There are professional bodies for design, such as the trade institutions like the Chartered
Society of Designers (CSD) and the BDI (Business Design Institute). However, unlike the
Chapter 4: Design Responses to Mass Creativity 41
professional bodies of architecture and engineering, the CSD does not have a strong
standing in the industry or education of design. This is partly because design does not have
the legal protection of architecture: you are only allowed to call yourself an architect if you
are recognised by the ARB (Architects Registration Board), while almost all architects also
choose to register with the RIBA (Royal Institution of British Architects). Anyone can call
themselves a designer, so the only practical way to define who is a professional designer
and who is not is: if you are paid to do design work, you are a professional designer,
irrespective of whether you have any training or qualifications. This lack of a professional
foundation makes design as a discipline unstable and has allowed mass creativity activities
(and open design) to fundamentally challenge the position of the designer as the person
who knows best what we need and want.
The role of the professional designer as a gatekeeper standing between consumer and
technology is starting to disappear. Some commentators such as Paul Atkinson see us entering
a post-professional era where
the boundaries between professional and

amateur become so warped as to be
indefinable and indeterminate. (Atkinson, 2010)
What is clear is that the role of the designer as a gatekeeper for manufacturing technology
such as printing presses is eroding. The means of production for online and physical
communication, and increasingly the creation of physical objects, are within the hands of
anyone with access to the internet. These new potentials are explored in some detail in the
following chapter on the future of design. A brief visit to the Shapeways online platform
(www.shapeways.com) will demonstrate the range of possibilities for individuals to create
and sell their own products without needing designers to act as mediators. One of the
key strands running throughout this book is what implications this move from controller
to facilitator will have for the design profession what new types of design practice will
emerge?
This is the front line for open design activity right now. The relationship between the
design profession and other design activity will determine the character of open design
in the future. This book argues that design professionals have a critical role to play in the
development and improvement of open design practices, methods and approaches. To
meet this potential, though, new non-hierarchical ways of designers working with non-
designers are needed.
The Role of Users in Professional Design Processes
There is a rich tradition of designers working with the people who use the products and
services they devise; not all designers seek to impose solutions in a hierarchical manner. Even
though design defines itself through a mastery of problem solving and design professionals
as people with a special creative gift (Julier, 2000), there are many instances where users or
customers are part of this design process. In this section we focus on the two key categories of
design process that include the general public: user-centred design and participatory design.
These processes are relevant here because they show the role non-designers play in
conventional processes. This establishes a baseline for the new, open design processes
described in detail in the extended case studies in this book. These case studies show very
different practices and methods to either user-centred or participatory design processes.
The term user-centred is used throughout mainstream design and design education. Examples
of this include Frascaras book, User-Centred Graphic Design (1997), and business mission
statements of corporations such as IBM adopt the terminology user-centred directly. This
is also evident in papers such as Understanding the user experience: tools for user-centred
design of interactive media (Knight and Jefsioutine, 2002), and in such books as Nielsens
Usability Engineering (1993) and Brink, Gergle and Woods Usability for the Web (2002). The
phrase is also common in less academic sources such as Creative Review and Design Week;
working designers are conversant with user-centred approaches and perspectives.
The convention of describing non-designers involved in design processes as users is problematic

for some. The term has negative connotations of passivity and also drug use. A better word would
be participant, citizen or even simply person. However, it is impossible to talk sensibly about
user-centred design and not use the term user, so we will keep with this convention here.
User-centred design is defined by its prioritisation of the users needs as an important part of
the design process. This approach sits comfortably with the traditions of design established
at least in the inter-war periods of the Bauhaus with Walter Gropius, the first director of the
Bauhaus, and his call for
architects to be both servants as well as

leaders. (Busignani, 1973)
This desire for a relationship between designer and user was advanced at the New Bauhaus in
Chicago (later becoming the Illinois Institute for Technology (IIT)) under Lszl Moholy-Nagy.
He believed that, rather than rational, universal solutions, the basis of a new society had to be
individuality, in stark contrast to the ideas of Mies van de Rohe, working at IIT at the same time,
who presents a very different strand of Bauhaus thinking focusing on the machine aesthetic.
As part of this belief in the value of the individual, Moholy-Nagy promoted the idea that
quality of design is dependent not

alone on function, science and technical
processes but also upon social
consciousness. (Findelli, 1998)
This laid the groundwork for a more active consideration of the user in the design process. This is
key to understanding the relationship between open design and the design profession. One end
of this spectrum has the designer considering the users needs as they sit in a studio more or less
divorced from the outside world. This would fit into a weak definition of user-centred design; most
designers are more connected to their users than this, but primary research in this area shows that
in professional practice engagement with non-designers in the creative processes is often very
limited (Cruickshank and Evans, 2012). At the other end of this spectrum lies open design where the
designer is very much not the leader, and in fact it is very likely that there is no leader (or followers).
User-centred design often prioritises the needs of users by treating them as a source of
information that is then interpreted by the designer when they undertake the idea generation
and synthesising part of the process. This is not a problem in its own right; indeed it can be a
very effective design strategy. An example of this prioritisation of the user is evident in a design
project undertaken by the CRIA (Communication Research Institute of Australia) to redesign
some pharmaceutical packaging. CRIA were invited to redesign the labels warning of side effects
of a medicine. The result of this design intervention led not to new packaging but instead to the
reformulation of the medication itself. The design team came to understand that in whatever
form the information was presented, the side effects were inevitable. Rather than a change in
information design, what was required was a change in the pharmacology (Sless, 2002).
David Sless, the director of CRIA, states one of the key principles of user-centred design to be
politeness, the courtesy of entering into a dialogue with users. This is significant in that he is
acknowledging the importance of the user, not solely in functional terms of using their input to
make the design better, but in social/political terms.
In contemporary design practice, the importance of the needs of the user is nearly universally
accepted. However, there is a great deal of variation in the type of accommodation given to users
needs by the designer. In user-centred design, this is controlled, mediated, nuanced and framed
by the designer. It is also the case that in user-centred design it is the designer who undertakes
the creative development and synthesis of these ideas into solutions. This is quite different to
open design where designers are not setting the agenda and controlling the creative process.
User-centred design is the orthodoxy that designers have to transcend if they are to play a
meaningful role in open design.
Participatory Design
Participatory design (PD) operates in parallel to the more general user-centred design
approaches. This is further along the spectrum of openness than user-centred design but is less
commonly used in the design profession, with a concentration in information technology and a
particular focus on the implementation of computer systems in workplaces. PD is also a paradox;
ideologically it places workers very close to the creative idea generation and synthesis part of the
process, making it more open than user-centred design approaches. In contrast to this there are
other aspects of PD that are much more structured, hierarchical and imposed from the outside;
for example, having rigid and standardised methods and programmes imposed on a workforce
by external researchers. This is good for rigorous research but assumes that the researchers
know what is best for the particular people involved on the ground. This is quite an imposition of
values that are quite alien to open design and is edging close to cultural imperialism.
This paradox of openness and imposition of rigid structures stems from the roots of PD. PD
was conceived in research institutes looking at humancomputer interaction in Scandinavia
in the 1970s. The primary concern of PD was understanding the impact of the introduction of
computer systems on industrial relations and the neglect of workers interests. Kensing and
Blomberg articulate this overtly political position further:
The main assumption guiding collaborations

between researchers and workers was
that if workers and their local trade unions
built up knowledge about the relations
between technology and work, formulated
their goals, and developed local and
national strategies for giving voice to
their interests, workers would be able to
assert greater control over their working
conditions. (Kensing and Blomberg, 1998)
The research perspective informing PD and the explicit support for workers against a
management imposition of computer systems results in approaches and methods that
are formal and paternalistic. For example, a method could include researchers developing
courses, giving lectures on good design, and supervised project work where technology and
organisational issues were explored. A range of PD methods have been developed including
CESD (Cooperative Experimental System Development), contextual design, focusing on early
design activity, as does the process called MUST (Kensing, Simonsen and Bdker, 1996);
without going into detail for each of these, they all have strictly defined methods and processes
to follow in the design process.
This formal methodological approach fits well with some digital systems development as these
are often driven by a method or approach agreed with the development team, for example,
adopting an Agile programming approach. It is also true that the sentiments of PD are close
to open design in the context of involving all stakeholders in the creative process. Tensions
arise, though, with the necessity for a formal process; the type of openness in PD is actually
very controlled, structured and imposed from the outside. It is something that has to be taught
to workers and in this respect it is very different from the non-hierarchical, human, natural
processes that characterise open design. In open design a much more playful, ad hoc and
unpredictable tone is established because there is no imposed method of structure, or at
least this structure is as unobtrusive as possible. As such PD remains an oddity, wanting to be
open but in fact being controlling through rigid processes and externally imposed values. This
paradox chimes with the following section where designers recognise the value of the creative
potential of the everyday person without being willing or able to relinquish control of the creative
process.
It is worth noting here that another approach in design circles to non-hierarchical design is
co-design. This offers a different perspective on participatory approaches; here the political
dimension is largely absent. We look in detail at a radical application of co-design as a type of
open design in the PROUD: Beyond the Castle case study in Chapter 6.
Design-Led Vernacular: Designs Attempt to Be Both

Open and Controlling
For many decades there have also been small groups of designers who have wanted to
include non-designers in the creative process. This section illustrates how these pioneering
designers strived to include non-design perspectives in their creative processes, but also
how this was limited by the professional norms and perspectives. The section shows how
they fractured these limiting frames but did not quite manage to go beyond them. Design-led
vernacular represents a stepping-stone that enables designers working today to engage in
open design projects.
From the 1960s onwards there have been groups of designers that were looking to include
non-designers in their work. Taking their inspiration from pop art and later postmodern
movements, this group sought to introduce low culture and non-design sensibilities into
their work. This illustrates the first steps from traditional design processes into open design
activity. It also shows that the first of these attempts were in fact mis-steps coloured by
previous practice. Without this process of research, experimentation and propositional
design it would be difficult to even conceive of open design. As we will see, some of the
most interesting approaches in open design now grow directly from these first experiments.
In the 1960s, radical Italian design groups, mostly based in the industrial north of the
country, started to emerge. These included UFO, Global Tools, Superstudio, Studio
Alchimia and many others. Collectively they were developing a critique of modernist design
that they thought was dominated by rationalism, minimalism and the machine aesthetic.
In response to this they developed design interventions collectively known as anti-design.
There were a number of techniques employed in this challenging of the design orthodoxy.
These included a surreal playing with scale a baseball glove becomes enlarged to form
a chair or objects are taken out of context, so a (simulated) cactus becomes a coat stand.
These proposals echoed the anti-art explorations of Duchamps ready-made art in a design
context. Radical design groups also produced kits for people to design their own objects
and for the creation of designs from scrap wood and other objects found on the street.
Studio Alchimia created an inflatable house that could be carried around in a backpack. In
theory this allowed the general population to collectively control and modify urban planning.
Archizoom created a concept called habitable cupboard where the contents of houses
were contained in movable wardrobe-sized boxes on wheels; these would be modified,
arranged and moved at the whim of the user. Archizoom postulated that we would be living
in large, multi-storey warehouse-like structures with lots of space but without natural light
(Branzi, 1984).
These conceptual designs are the seeds of designers exploring design activity without
designers. For example, a change of scale to alter the function of an object (glove to seat) does
not need a designer. These experiments also show a desire to use the tastes of the everyday
rather than the high design that was prevalent at the time.
This challenge to traditional design values, especially in terms of aesthetics and materials, was
taken up in a more commercial context by the 1980s design group, Memphis. This loose grouping
of architects and designers, centred around Ettore Sottsass, was a more commercial incarnation
of more radical Italian design groups (Branzi, 1984). Memphis had financial backing from the
Italian furniture industry for its design of (amongst other things) furniture, tableware and ceramics.
Through this financial support and with their promotion in exhibitions in Milan, London and New
York, Memphis became a major force in design practice and design education and
the worlds most popular Avant Garde

movement. (Ramakers and Bakker, 1998: 33)
As a group, Memphis rejected mass production and the associated design-for-the-masses

approach as the only way to think about contemporary design production, in favour of
a hybrid industrial/craft approach. They pioneered the use of low culture materials such
as laminated chipboard (formica) in false colour leopard print patterns. This approach
to design was adopted as part of a wider philosophy of specifically trying to undermine
hierarchies in the creative industries. Memphis sought to value low culture and the creativity
of the masses, something that is core to the motivations behind designers involved in
open design.
From radical Italian design we see a welcoming in of non-design influences. This was
through the results of creative processes outside the control of design, for example, the
aesthetics of the nightclub taken up by Memphis for inspiration and imitation. The position
adopted by Memphis is significant for enabling the design profession to engage openly
with open design. It represents a step away from a rigid ideology or controlling theory; this
rejection of dogmatism, and indeed all isms, is essential if designers are going to be able
to negotiate new ways of working with people in open design contexts who do not share
their ideological positions. These could have very practical implications; if a designer thinks
generally that less is more is a good guiding rule, they will find it difficult to collaborate
freely with someone who really likes decoration. The opening up of theory is mirrored by an
openness in anti-design to the different tastes and aesthetic values held by non-designers.
Critically what Memphis and anti-design failed to do was actually involve non-designers in
their own creative processes.
Opening Up the Designers Creative Process:

Co-Authoring New Products
Adopting the visual style of non-designed products and abandoning dogmatic theoretical
positions are only the first steps in opening up the creative process. A further stage in this
opening of processes is an exploration of how designers and non-designers can create
together. The notion here is not to jointly collaborate with individuals; this is an age-old practice
but is resource-limited it is expensive to collaborate with a designer to make something just
for you. One response to this is to design and produce proto-products, which are distributed
and the individuals who purchase them adapt, add to or change them in other ways to meet
their own needs and tastes.
Ron Arads 1990s Transformer Chair is an excellent example of this approach. Transformer is
a large bean-bag with an airtight cover. This allows it to be moulded around a person and then
locked in position by sucking the air out of the bag with a domestic vacuum cleaner. With the
air removed, the polystyrene beads lock together in much the same way as a vacuum-packed
brick of filter coffee. This is a literal example of the designer creating the means for customers
to design their own furniture that is unique to them, within the restrictions imposed by the
designer. These restrictions include, for example, the size and colour of the bag, and the need
for the form to be a lump, rather than having elegant legs.
Transformer is significant because, previous to this, designers (for example, Memphis) tried to
bring users into the process by attempting to co-opt the values, materials and aesthetics of low
culture, but very much under the tight control of the designer adopting what I have called here a
design-led vernacular. Transformer is different because it starts to move some creative control
from designers to non-designers. This proto-design approach could also be useful in a more
explicit open design context. The creation of structures, components of flexible forms for others
to make their own, could be a way for designers to contribute to creative processes without
dominating them.
Apart from Transformer, much of Ron Arads work fits into a Memphis-like fake vernacular
approach; he made beautiful beds out of scaffolding tube, a living room chair from an old Rover
car seat (explicitly referencing Duchamps ready-mades) and a sound system cast in rough
concrete. All these used the materials of the everyday but made them into very much design-led
products.
Transformer demonstrates a new dimension of engagement with non-designers. Here Arad is

giving up some of the control and allowing the people using the chair to partly determine its
form. This is a step towards open design; for open design, as in Transformer, we see design
constraints shaping creative possibilities. For Transformer, a constraint is that the starting point
is a predetermined and common size and shape. In open design, when creating your own t-shirt
online, you have to work with a basic template with two arms. This gives freedom within a set of
designed constraints, but one could imagine an interesting garment with a row of 20 arms in a
ring around the t-shirt that would allow you to change the front of the t shirt at will.
Building on this idea of co-authored products, there is a design collaboration based in the
Netherlands that took this idea forward. The activities of the Droog collective have in time
resulted in the development of really explicitly open design approaches as the implications
of this line of reasoning played out within the collective. Droog is discussed in detail in the
following chapter but in this context of emerging from design-led vernacular into a more
genuinely open design approach, Droog spans this progression perfectly. Droog was also
for a few years a superstar of the design world, with dedicated shows in London and Milan
and a landmark show in the Museum of Modern Art New York. As a result this challenging of
traditional designuser relationships gained a huge amount of publicity and introduced these
concepts to many developing designers dissatisfied with both modernism and the kitsch of
postmodern approaches such as Memphis.
The maturing of Droogs approach from a designer-controlled vision of the vernacular to a much
more free, open design approach is evident when comparing two Droog designs. In 1994 Richard
Hutton (a member of Droog) created a bench for an exhibition funded by Invar Kamperard (founder
of IKEA). Hutton used Kamperards past Nazi connections as the inspiration for the bench, titled
s(h)it on it. The bench took the form of a swastika that sits four people. During the exhibition of
this piece of work someone scratched never again into its seat. The designer retained this graffiti
as part of the piece but essentially this was very much formed and controlled by the designer.
This is contrasted by the Droog project do create, which consisted of a whole raft of products
that were only half finished and had to be completed after purchase. This included a metal
cube that had to be beaten into a chair with a sledgehammer (provided by Droog) and plastic
tableware that had to be cut from large plastic sheets. These are playful proto-products, where
the final outcome is determined by both designer and the customer, with neither group truly in
control of the final outcome.
do create involves the direct manipulation of material to make new products cutting things
out of panels, bashing a metal chair into shape, scraping black paint away to make a backlit
sign. There is, however, another approach; rather than taking away material, a contrasting
approach is to provide building blocks for people to construct with. Ettore Sottsass modular
house design is an example of this freedom provided by selection of components. This
approach was revisited by Droog designers Mark Wamble and Dawn Finley in the Klip Binder
house. Both projects propose personal spaces constructed from modular wardrobe-sized units
joined together to form tunnels that the participant would live in. These continually expandable
spaces are reminiscent of a cross between Archizooms habitable cupboard and Constants
New Babylon projects. The difference here is that Sottsass and, later, Wamble and Finley are
proposing a product/system rather than a thought experiment and it would allow anyone to buy
a house from connect together components off the shelf, forming long, thin, branching homes
that could be easily reconfigured, added to or even combined with other homes.
Again we see designers proposing a structure or scaffolding for users to create their own
products, services or, in this case, dwelling. This has been facilitated by designers creating
components but with the outcomes how these components are used beyond their control.
This contribution but not domination model is critical to finding a way for design as a
profession to respond in a positive way to the challenges represented by open design and the
easy access of anyone to the means of production traditionally managed by designers.
Opening Creative Processes: Moving Towards Open Design
For open design the danger with modular approaches is that the modules, and the systems they
use to connect them, create an unduly controlling frame that predetermines the outcomes. It
is worth returning here to the anecdotal criteria for open processes. With a modular system it
must still be possible for participants to create something that the original designer would hate.
This is still possible with a sufficient degree of flexibility of modularity and a large number of
modules to select from. A better solution, though, could be to enable the creation of modules
themselves as an activity that non-designers can participate in. This capability is explored in
much more depth in the Gadgeteer case study later in this book. This is a system that allows
non-experts to design their own electronic products, but also to create their own modules for
others to use in their own products.
In this section we have seen how the design professions initial responses to opening up the
creative process have been restricted by the norms of the design profession and practice. We
have also seen that this stepping-stone has led to new practice and design interventions, where
the authorship of a product is shared between designer and user. This is an important step for
design and how it might be able to respond to, and play a role in, open design. The notion of
shared or distributed responsibility for the creation of new products and services is essential for
open design.
In the following chapter we look at how the design profession and a wider creative community
are responding to the challenges and opportunities of open design and in the process shaping
its development.
Chapter 5
Open Design Futures
In this chapter we look at some of the strategic responses to open design

emerging from the design profession. These include customisation, distributed
design and the creation of problem-solving platforms. We go on to look at
open design initiatives that are independent of the design profession. This
leads us into a discussion of the implications when open design starts to tackle
problems that have life-changing consequences, arguing for an active role for
the design profession in these kinds of projects.
Introduction
In the previous chapters we explored the changing landscape of mass creativity, innovation
and the way that the design profession has responded to the opportunities of mass creativity.
Here we look at the different strategic responses to the possibilities of open design. Specifically
we look at the idea of the rhizome, a theoretical framework to help understand open design
activities. We go on to look at four different types of open design initiative:
1. Customisation: giving consumers the ability to modify objects that are then produced in
a central facility and shipped to the consumer. We discuss the degree to which this can
be open design rather than simply greater choice for consumers.
2. Distributed design: having systems of design where creative contributions after the point
of sale are essential to complete the product.
3. Open structures: the design of platforms, tools or methods that help non-professional
designers create their own products (and potentially services), independent of the
professional designers who helped create the system.
4. Open access: this goes beyond design input and is based on the premise that all that is
required for open design is to make the means of production accessible to a wide variety
of people.
The chapter concludes with an examination of how open product development is enabling new
forms of entrepreneurship and new product development. This points to the need for design
expertise once open design addresses important rather than trivial design challenges such as
personal jewellery or decoration.
Responding to Open Design
Different sectors of the design profession (and the creative industries in general) are
encountering the challenges of mass creativity at different times, with sectors that have the
lowest infrastructure requirements having to respond first. So, for example, graphic and web
design are very much at the heart of debates around authorship, mass creativity and citizen-led
design because the means of production are within the reach of the average computer user.
Product design is just starting to respond to these issues, while open design is not yet seriously
on the horizon for sectors such as automotive design.
As we have discussed, the designers position as gatekeeper between users and the means
of production is becoming less secure. Photography has led the way in this redefinition of the
role of the professional creative. Similarly services that were traditionally the purview of graphic
designers are now marketed to a mass audience in TV adverts, for example, in designing your
own websites or custom greeting cards.
In addition to new digital platforms enabling non-professional design, we now also have the
ability to share the results of these design activities with a very large audience at very little cost.
This ability to share ideas is transforming collaboration and knowledge sharing, and makes non-
professional design much easier.
In the short term this is prompting tactical responses from companies. For example, Dare
Digital, a digital design agency, is developing new ways to work in collaboration with users. Dare
is attempting to harness its audiences energy and enthusiasm for a particular brand, rather
than just selling it to them (Cruickshank and Evans, 2012). More significantly we will also see
more strategic business responses and it is these that form the central focus of this chapter.
Strategic Responses to Mass Creativity
There is a strategic change in the way designers are interacting with citizens (or users). In
particular Peter Troxler, one of the leading authors of the excellent book Open Design Now, and
Paul Atkinson, a prolific publisher on DIY and open design, see a more fundamental shift in
designeruser relationships. Both put forward the view that the changes occurring in the design
field are mandating a re-evaluation of what it means to be a professional designer. This includes
the merging (in certain circumstances) of amateur and professional design. These changes
also point to the development of product in an open source mode, with multiple, ongoing and
distributed authorship.
This potential blurring is contentious many designers and design commentators have a
problem with the narrowing of the distinction between professional and amateur design. This is
Chapter 5: Open Design Futures 53
vividly shown in the response to E. Luptons publication of a graphic design book for everyone
(Lupton, 2006). This extract, quoted from Beegan and Atkinson (2008), shows the response of
some in the design profession to this:
By making our work so easy to do, we are

devaluing our profession. I like democracy
as much as the next person, but because
of new technologies, the definition of
amateur in fields like graphic design,
photography, film and music, among
others, is being redefined. With everything
so democratic, we can lose the elite
status that gives us credibility.
Luptons response perfectly captures the rupture between traditional professional design and
those accepting that open design is already with us and is not going away any time soon:
Perhaps our credibility shouldnt come

from designs elite status, but rather
from its universal relevance to daily life.
Not everyone is a design professional,
a person dedicated to solving complex
problems and carrying out large, capital-
intensive projects. But everyone can
design elements of their own life, from
their personal business cards or letter-
heads to their own flyers and wedding
invitations. (AIGA, 2006)
This rejection of the elite designer and a recognition of the validity of the creativity and judgment
of non-professional design draws on a very well-developed strand of design theory and
philosophy. These ideas underpinning a challenging of hierarchies are often not recognised in
open design discussions.
In contemporary design theory, authors such as Richard Coyne and Adrian Snodgrass
attempt to destabilise the design professions Ptolemaic view of itself as the centre of the
creative universe. Drawing on hermeneutical philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, they
challenge what they call the systematisers, for example, Herbert Simon, the father of design
science (Snodgrass and Coyne, 1997). They argue that the systematisers see design as a
science to be mastered and applied by an elite. This is the briefest outline of a major, long-
running debate between modernist and post-structuralist designers and theorists. While this
debate is fascinating, it is beyond the scope of this book to explore it fully here.
The theorists Deleuze and Guattari offer a useful and challenging perspective on how structures
(for example, the hierarchical command structure or the position of an elite designer) can be
reformulated. They propose a number of concepts that help to move away from the designer
as the leader of a process into a more cross-connected ecology of creativity where designers
(or anyone) do not dominate. The most accessible of their concepts is the rhizome. Inspired by
biology, this is an interconnected structure with multiple entry and exit points that is generally
non-linear, but can also spontaneously form traditional branching hierarchies and just as
spontaneously become non-linear again.
The largest living organism is a rhizome it is a honey mushroom (or Armillaria ostoyae);
most of its 8.8 km2 consists of strands of interconnected filament spreading up to one metre
below the ground in an Oregon forest in the US. This huge mat is only visible when it forms
more hierarchical structures, the honey mushrooms that break the surface to spread spores.
Similarly strawberry plants left unchecked form a rhizome; they create networks of plants that
are not linear or organised but also contain traditional branching forms. The rhizome is an
excellent metaphor for open design; there are many interconnected activities that are often not
apparent on the surface. It is only when there is a strong dissemination activity a book, a new
initiative or an evangelist that these activities come to wider attention. More fundamentally
this demonstrates an alternative structure to the binary logic of the designeruser relationship,
offering new, more nuanced and complicated possibilities.
In contrast to centered (even polycentric)

systems with hierarchical modes of
communication and pre-established
paths, the rhizome is an a-centred

nonhierarchical, no signifying system
without a General and without an
organizing memory or central automaton.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 21)
For open design this is an attractive starting point to describe processes and relationships.
The rhizome offers a metaphor for mass engagement and participation but without a central
organising power or authority. It also offers entry points and relationships with other more
conventional tree or hierarchical structures. This is useful for connecting with the more
structured and traditional user-centred design approaches and also issues such as supply
chains and logistics. This openness to engagement with conventional structures is important if
ones aim is to have a wider influence. As we will see, the balance between free, unstructured
activity and curated, organised frameworks is a key element in the success of open design
projects.
One of the most important issues for open design is how much support and guidance is
required to enable people to reach their maximum creative potential. The danger is that with
too much structure the outcomes are controlled by the hidden hand of the designer and people
are simply selecting from a range of options laid down by them. Too little support and many
potential creative contributions are lost because starting from a blank page is difficult, even for
experienced designers.
Design Responses
In this chapter we have seen a broad spectrum of professionals, from jobbing designers to
theorists, wrestling with the implications of a more active, creative but less hierarchical society.
The remainder of this chapter will look at some of the ways the design profession is responding
to the changes. Finally we will explore how these design responses fit into a wider open design
landscape. Paradoxically the design profession often has a very weak influence in this broader
sphere of activity, if it is represented at all.
This section will examine three distinct types of strategy for developing relationships between
designers and new, open creative processes. We also go on to look at a strategy that is
outside design. The first of these strategies looks at enabling the personalisation of goods (and
sometimes services) by consumers. This enables consumers to tailor their experiences in a
way most appropriate to them. The second approach, distributed design, is distinguished by
the sale or sharing of artefacts or plans for completion by non-designers for example, a wall
light that only functions once the customer scrapes away black paint in the areas they want
light to shine from. Thirdly, we look at open structures, the creation of platforms, structures and
guidance by designers that facilitates creativity by non-designers. This leads from platforms
created in a designerly way (by designers) into a wider landscape of open design possibilities.
Finally we look at an approach founded on offering to the general public the capability to make
things as a strategy for promoting open design.
1 Design and Customisation
Customisation in this context is the centralised tailoring of products and services that fit a
particular individuals wants or needs. This is something usually undertaken by a manufacturer
before the product is shipped to a customer. This is distinct from the modification of products
by people after they have been purchased. We touched on this briefly in the preceding chapter
and go on to discuss it in more detail below in the section on distributed design. When
thinking about open design, it is easy to forget that both mass production and consumption
are really phenomena of post-war industrialisation and standardisation. Even now a great deal
of design is actually an active dialogue between client and creator. This bespoke approach is
still prevalent today in creative industries, from architecture to fashion to jewellery. While this
approach is undoubtedly undergoing a resurgence, the time cost of working one-to-one with a
designer is prohibitively expensive for most products.
Customisation provides a broad middle ground between mass production and bespoke design.
Modest or superficial customisation has become a workable option for companies wanting
to appeal to the individuality in their customers without having to change their processes too
much. Even something as utilitarian as a Ford Transit van has over a million possible variants to
select from.
Companies respond to the possibilities of customisation in a variety of different ways. In the

section below we focus on the shoe sector as a case study of these different responses.
Equally we could have looked at the car industry, custom computer design, kitchen design or
any number of other sectors.
Companies such as Nike and Vans occupy the mainstream in shoe customisation. They offer
selection from a limited range of options and trade on being able to modify, in a modest way, a
wide range of pre-existing models of shoe. They also introduce restrictions so that, for instance,
while you can add 12 embroidered letters to the heels of your new Nikes, these cannot spell out
slave labour. Overall these options for mainstream customisation are limited, mostly allowing
changes in colour.
More interesting are the independent shoe developers who, without the brand recognition of
Nike, are forced to be more innovative to make their mark. One of the pioneers of this space
and still the benchmark for the extreme range of customisation possible was the now defunct
Customatix. Formed by Adidas executives Dave Ward, Irmi Kreuzer, Mikal Peveto and David
Solk, Customatix offered some shoes where customers could select from three billion trillion
variations (Peterson, 2003), enough to cover the Earths surface three times over.
Formed in 2000, the companys website set new standards with an exceptionally usable
online shoe design process. For around 90 anyone could create their own footwear using
the Customatix website and three weeks later the shoes were delivered from the factory.
This very much meets the informal requirement for open systems of allowing customers to
create something that the designers, or indeed right-thinking people, would hate. It was quite
possible to have, for example, desert boots with each of the leather components of the boots
alternating between high-gloss pink and silver coloring, with contrasting black soles and
magenta laces. I still wear my Customatix trainers after ten years; they have a faux-giraffe-skin
sole and are asymmetrically red and purple with a penguin motif stitched onto the tongue. Of
course many would consider these in as poor taste as the pink and silver shoes. This is the
essence of customisation the solution space offered by systems has to be large enough for
real personal expression.
Customatix only traded for a few years; the costs of keeping components in stock or making
them to order were prohibitive. Today Customatix might have been more sustainable, as
made-to-order manufacturing systems mature. There is still a criticism that customisation
merely offers a range of objects rather than really opening up the creative process. There is a
contrasting approach for the open design of footwear.
Companies such as MES custom footwear brought a new dimension to shoe customisation that
went beyond offering a large number of variations determined by a company. It allowed you to
add your own images to shoes designed on its website. This would allow any pattern, logo or
design to be printed on the fabric used to make the shoes. This was a radical departure; rather
than a very big set of options, as seen in Customatix, this allowed for an infinite number of
designs. It also allowed you to set up a stall on the website selling your designs to customers,
offering you a commission on sales of your designs. This incentivised people with stalls to
promote the service; this is an interesting attempt to propagate a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Basing a business model around community engagement (and word-of-mouth advertising)

means that a high degree of start-ups do not reach viability and fail. Inevitably the companies
proposing the most interesting approaches are amongst the new start-ups. So while iTailor
supplies custom jeans with personalised fit and details, custom stitching and monogram well
within the delivery time, MES went out of business before production could really get started.
An interesting (if slightly disturbing) example of services not yet based in reality but
advertising and taking orders is the Rayfishshoe Company (http://rayfish.com/). This
company is offering a service where you can combine the distinctive markings of a range of
stingray fish and then genetically manipulate a stingray embryo to match these markings, as
they say on their website:
Our patented process of bio-

customization allows you to design your
own living, transgenic stingray. Using
our genetic library, you can select and
combine skin patterns and colorations
from dozens of species, producing a
nearly infinite variety of shoe designs.
First came mass production, then mass
customization. Bio-customization is the
next step. (http://rayfish.com/index.php?chapter=faq)
This is rather extraordinary and highlights some of the potential ethical issues around open
design. In this case, what happens to the fish that do not match the specified colours? There
is bound to be a high degree of variability in results to begin with are those fish released? Is
there a cheaper seconds option or are they destroyed? In addition to this, it will take many
months for your $1,800 shoes to be engineered, gestate and be made for you. In fact, rayfish
footwear was an elaborate hoax by the Dutch activist group Nature Next to highlight the
implications of new technology and to stimulate debate on the role that animals play in our
manufacture of goods (www.nextnature.net/events/rayfish/).
Customisation represents the intersection between conventional business practices, where

customer choice has always been part of the picture, and something more radical, where there
is a joint responsibility and authorship of the products or services. There is a fuzzy line between
these two positions at what point do the number of options available become so large that
selecting between them becomes a creative act rather than just selection? The next section on
distributed design shifts the focus from manufacturers being told what an individual wants (for
example, through a website) and making it, to a model where the manufacturer has much less
control over the form of the final product (or, in theory, service).
2 Distributed Design
Distributed design is distinct from personalisation in that the design and final manufacturing
process takes place at the point of use rather than before purchase. This shifts many of the
decisions and restraints of the design process beyond the control of the companies and
designers that initiated the product in question. For example, the shape or colour could be
modified beyond the control of the designer by the person who will end up living with the
product.
There is a degree of crossover between distributed design and DIY do-it-yourself, with a
range of kits, guides and instruction books that help educate and shape DIY products. An
extreme example of this is the DIY manual that Philippe Starck developed called House in
a box that enabled the purchaser to build their own wooden house (http://mocoloco.com/
archives//003036.php).
DIY has received some attention from design thinkers in recent years, especially through the
work of Paul Atkinson (2006; 2010). DIY still represents an area of creative activity that by its
nature is difficult to study. The political aspects of DIY have been touched on already in this
book but most DIY is not a statement against commodification; it is driven by the pleasure of
making, the prohibitive costs of paying someone else to do the making or having unique needs
that the market cannot easily meet. The combined effect of these issues is to act as a driver for
hidden design in the home.
Distributed design approaches often try to tap into the motivations that drive DIY activity. We
have already discussed one of these approaches; proto-designs are products that are sold
unfinished, inviting purchasers to complete the design and manufacturing work themselves.
In some ways this is a very old approach with a history of mail order kits for the production
of clothes and craftwork going back at least into the 1890s. There is a key distinction to be
made here: while many of us will remember painting by numbers, this is quite different from
distributed design. In the former (and in many kits) there was an ideal to follow and deviation
from this was a subversive act, in a sense contradicting the original designer. With distributed
design there is a deliberate space left in the creative process by the designer that requires
creative input by the purchaser for the product to come into existence.
The Dutch design collective Droog pioneered the exploration of this distributed approach
of creating collaborative designs with customers without requiring face-to-face interaction.
This was an explicit rejection of modernist ideas of the perfect design and the designer as
scientist. As the leader of Droog states: The grand narrative has fallen silent. It is now time
for lesser tales they are not moralizing tales nor do they preach universal truths, they
are modest tales that everyone can understand (Ramakers Van der Zanden, 2000). Here
we see Ramakers, the head of the Droog collective, drawing explicitly on a post-structural
perspective that directly informs the notion of the rhizome introduced by Deleuze and
Guattari. Ramakers is offering an alternative to the modernist grand narratives. The modest
tales are woven around individuals and their own desires. This accessible approach to design
is exemplified by the do campaign: do is an ever-changing brand that depends on what
you do (www.dosurf.com). It is an initiative set up in collaboration with the Dutch advertising
agency Kestle Kramer. do is a brand with a series of brand values, though without a fixed
set of artefacts or content attached to that brand. These values can be applied by anyone to
enhance their own products.
The do website articulates these brand values:
do is all about being active and involved

in the way the world works. This means
social responsibility, concern for the
planet, ideas for change, and a willingness
to take action. It also means that you want
to have fun and are maybe a little tired of
the way things are usually done. Why do
we drive cars with only four doors, when
it might be fun to drive with 20? Why cant
we make recycling profitable? Why cant
washing powders change the colors of
our shirts each time we wash them so that
we have instantly new wardrobes? The
possibilities are endless. All we have to do
is do something.
do is an incitement to everyone to
challenge conventions and assumptions
through proactive engagement. As their

promotional material goes on to say, do is
a brand that depends on the actions, ideas
and initiatives of you and do works with
many people around the world to create
products, services and ideas within the
mentality of do. (www.dosurf.com/index2.htm)
In practice, do is a series of initiatives that populate the do brand, these include a promotion
of do FC a promotion of real football, in parks with a few mates. In another guise, do change
offers a forum for people to swap jobs (do swap) for a set period of time (from one day to one
year).
Looking specifically at distributed design, these initiatives include do shirt. This is a

conventional white cotton T-shirt but ten times bigger than normal. Users are invited to apply
a product that is useless as an item of clothing to other user-led applications. These initiatives
direct users towards a playful engagement with our environment. One of the suggestions for do
shirt is do affair, inviting participants to form a tent in the back seat of a car for illicit liaisons.
This factsheet also points out that it takes 12 people to make a do-shirt, the same as it takes to
tame a wild grizzly bear (www.dosurf.com/index2.htm).
All the do initiatives are provocational but in a way that opens up horizons for users, without
restrictions by do. Here Droog are trying to stimulate user activity without a predetermined aim
or goal. The most commercial of these initiatives to promote user interaction is a collaboration
between Droog and do, called do create.
do create
Discussed briefly in the previous chapter, do create was a major extension of the do concept.
It included the design and promotion of a range of products in addition to an international
exhibition. Examples of the contents of do create, almost all of which are available to buy on
the do website, show a variation in the approach to user-led tactics. do hit and do scratch
use the approach of providing a base and inviting the user to mark their territory and make this
base product their own by bashing the metal cube into the desired shape or scratching the
plastic covering back to create the backlit pattern desired.
The final example of do create included here is even more open-ended. This was a range of
do-branded raw materials, such as plywood or fabric, with the encouragement to get on and
make something without any guidance concerning the outcome of the users actions.
As Ramakers comments on the outcomes of the do create collaboration:
They only come to life when the user

activates them. It is the experience of
completing, of ones own creative input
Rather than being tacked on, the
experience lies in the products intrinsic
quality . (Ramakers, 2002)
Droogs work and do create is a direct precursor to open design. As such it links the world
of the Fab Lab to experimental design theory groups such as Archizoom in their quest for No
single Utopia but an infinity of utopias, as many as there are listeners. Not a single culture
but one for each individual (Ambasz, 1972: 323), and that for us the problem is no longer that
of trying to understand what kind of freedom man is seeking, or perhaps trying to foresee it in
terms of current reality. The problem instead, is to give man the kind of freedom that will enable
him to obtain it for himself (Ambasz, 1972: 238).
do create was a landmark experiment in distributed design; the problem is that in commercial
terms do-create was a failure, as the leader of Droog, Renny Ramakers, says:
One of the projects was do scratch by

Mart Guix, a lamp thats covered in
black paint. People were supposed to
scrape patterns in the paint to create
their own drawing. This lamp has been
sitting around in the shop for seven, eight
years, and nobody has ever bought one.
People are too scared to add their own

contribution to a lamp they bought for
about 100 euros. Even when we added
sample drawings that people could copy
onto the lamp themselves, nobody would
buy it. We only started selling the lamp
when we had artists do the drawings.
After that experience, we decided not
to continue this product. This type of
interactive design did not seem to work.
(http://opendesignnow.org/index.php/article/do-it-with-
droog-roel-klaassen-peter-troxler/)
Of course Droog has a profile and status that may be affecting the perceptions of people who
buy this lamp, and really 100 is quite expensive for a black box not very much bigger than a
long shoe-box. Perhaps there would be more incentive to interact with products if they were
more disposable or forgiving of errors. It is also possible that the interaction component of this
project was not well developed, from the shop, to the brand, to the price point to the customer.
Finally it could be that people want lamps that really provide some useful light and that is why
the scratch-off lamp failed.
Droog and do create are very well publicised and documented interventions; from one
perspective they are a contemporary echo of Memphis a generation earlier. Their work is the
public, not-too-radical face of a much more fragmented, non-commercial, more disparate
community of designers.
Distributed design is dependent on an equal contribution between designers and the recipients
of the half-formed solutions they produce. This means that, even if designers work in isolation
themselves, overall there is an opening up of the creative process and an interesting contribution
to open design and the discussion on how professional designers can contribute to this without
dominating the creative process. It is not enough, though, for designers to produce something
they think is cool or quirky and assume that people will take it up and build on the foundation they
have laid. As Droog has found out, these proto-products still need to engage and excite people.
3 Open Structures
Open structures are interventions where designers create structures, frameworks or platforms
that facilitate creativity without requiring direct contact with professional designers. This
could be an online portal, a set of principles, a toolkit or a process. This approach has some
advantages; the designer is less able to dominate the creative process. It can help to avoid what
sociologists describe as an authority context of participants trying to please the professional
(in this case, designer) rather than following their own desires. More pragmatically this offers
the potential of many people using systems at the same time, allowing for economies of scale
and economic viability to be a realistic objective. There is a downside to this approach as well;
such proposals can appear to be utopian as they often need a critical mass of activity to reach
sustainability. Initiatives such as Wikipedia are helping in this respect to demonstrate that,
with a strong rationale and demand, communities can develop and make amazing things in a
distributed manner.
While many contemporary examples of open structures use digital technology, our examination
starts very much in the analogue world with the work of the Dutch artist and architect, Constant
Nieuwenhuys. From the 1950s to the 1970s he worked on a proposal describing the creation of
physical structures for mass creativity communities. His idea of New Babylon was a series of
proposals for a new type of emancipatory geography in which people would create their own
products and environment (Constant, 1951).
New Babylon is a series of modular architectural blocks that form a city environment which can
be extended infinitely across planes of the post-revolutionary landscape. Constant declares
that the environment must first of all be flexible, changeable, open to any movement, change
of place or mode and any mode of behaviour (Constant, 2001: 14). Constants work has
wider significance through his association with and founding membership of the Situationist
International (SI). The group, operating between 1951 and 1972, explicitly rejects hierarchy
throughout its writings. This includes the hierarchy of placing the designer as gatekeeper or
arbiter of taste.
The SI wanted to enable people to directly create their own experiences, environments and
situations, a sentiment common in open design. As Asger Jorn, one of the founders of the SI,
puts it: the sleeping creator must be awakened, and its waking state can be termed situationist
(Sadler, 1998: 36). He saw this sleeping creator in everyone, and he, like Constant Nieuwenhuys,
idealised the free artist as a professional amateur (Sadler, 1998: 46).
The SI frowned on the actual creation of artistic material, products or designs by its members
and frequently purged people who made things. They wanted creative production to emerge
from everyone without anyone occupying a hierarchical position and establishing a model for
good practice. They argued that examples collapse the envelope of possibility into one or a
few instances that carry a tacit approval of the originator, when the point is to enable responses
that are not predictable by the originators of the structure.
While laudable in theory, the refusal to provide concrete examples presents a problem when
describing creative structures to others; without examples it is hard to see what the proposal
is, but with examples an implicit model of expected response is established. These issues are
precisely the ones faced in open design now in terms of offering open systems for creativity, but
if you include an example, the first people will respond to that mode of engagement and without
care whole branches of potential application can be unexplored because of the particular
examples used in the first instance.
The structural responses presented so far in this section have concentrated on guiding citizens
to control of the means of production, the tools of media production, websites, modular houses.
There is, however, a more fundamental response. The question is who was going to design
these structures to enable new open creative processes? This led to the conception of the
design of problem-solving approaches, techniques, mechanisms and structures that facilitate
citizen creativity and innovation. The design of facilitation or the interactions between people to
enable creativity is proposed in the case studies below as a new form of interaction design.
Generative design tools
Generative design tools (GDT) is a proposal suggesting the design of creative tools to form
an open creative platform. This was a project I developed in the 1990s at the University of the
West of England (UK). It took a very different approach to Constants New Babylon. Rather
than proposing physical spaces to free up artistic or creative activity, GDT looked to undermine
conventional designeruser relationships by promoting new types of creative processes. This
is analogous to providing scaffolding to support non-designers creative practice rather than an
empty physical structure for such people to live in. GDT takes the creation of typographic fonts
as a model for creative tools that are both highly designed and facilitate great creativity in non-
designers through their use (Cruickshank, 1999). This is a proposal for an open design toolkit.
The essence of GDT is that designers can create problem-solving approaches or methods that
others can use to help them design their own products or services in their own way. Further in
time non-designers would develop and disseminate their own approaches to solving design
problems. An example of one of these tools could be called form guide. This would allow
participants to indicate a picture, any picture, that they considered to have beautiful shapes in
it. The tool would then help participants extract these shapes and use them as inspiration in
the thing they were designing. This could be quite different to the picture selected, so a skyline
could be the inspiration for a chest of drawers. The tool would not design the product, but
rather it would support the participant in their actions and decisions. A contrasting tool could be
called Swiss graphics where a designer codifies the principles of Swiss graphic design as they
understand them. This would include support for participants in creating a strong grid to guide
composition and it would direct participants to sans-serif typefaces.
There would be a multitude of these different tools; each would be designed and, much like
typefaces, participants would select the tools they liked the best, had used before or stumbled
across and wanted to try. Corporate clients would pay for expensive, bespoke tools while there
would be a rash of standard tools some produced by designers, some by students and others
by non-designers freely available online.
The GDT proposal has the following characteristics:
Allow the person using it to have the ability to control the creative process. They must
initiate the process with some original input (a practical as well as conceptual necessity).
Have methods that are made up of elements that can be re-arranged by users, allowing
different methods to be combined into hybrids, blending problem-solving approaches.
Have methods that are open to the possibility of application in any media and for many
different functions by the user.
Have an infrastructure that would allow for the recording (and subsequent use) of new
design methods. This was an important aspect of a conclusion of the GDT project. It can
be seen as the final step in the diffusion of the designeruser hierarchy as the production
of methods, as well as their use, becomes open to all.
Allow professional and non-professional designers to feel equally comfortable
producing, exchanging, using and modifying methods.
This requires designers to treat the design of problem-solving approaches as a creative act in
its own right. In a different form this is developed further through the notion of the design of
facilitation in the case studies on creative facilitation and the PROUD project later in this book.
GDT is an expansion of design practice into areas that are increasingly becoming outside
the realm of the professional designer, for example, internal office communication or website
production. In this sense the GDT project in the 1990s prefigured the current debates on open
design. The success of GDT was predicated on there being a community of designers who were
interested in thinking creatively about creating new processes for others and on there being a
market for these processes with non-designers who want to be creative. These conditions are
just starting to emerge in the areas of design education and, more broadly, open design.
Downloadable design
Our final example of an open structure takes us back to Droog and what contemporary
design practice is doing to engage with open design issues. Rather than supplying unfinished
products for customers as in the do initiative, the latest proposal from the Dutch group is
called downloadable design. Launched at the 2011 Milan furniture fair, Droog is proposing
an online platform that allows people to exchange design specifications and to modify these
plans before manufacturing them locally. The quality of the designs uploaded to the platform
would be controlled by Droog, so it is offering some of its credibility to the designs. The people
behind Droog are also arguing that this downloadable design will require a different approach to
designing:
Challenging the creativity of designers

is yet another reason [for downloadable
design], and a very important one.
Designers have to adapt their design
process to the platform. They have
to figure out which parameters of the
product can vary, while still earning a
profit. What we did here was not just to
ask the designers to design a product
and have the consumer choose a colour
or a pattern; thats already been done. We
asked them to be creative and think of
completely different ways for consumers
to interact with the design. We also
challenged designers to consider how
they would make money on their design.
We asked them to be creative in what they
would offer for free and what they could
be offering for an added fee. What if there
could be layers in a design? For example,

a product could be more expensive if
it bears the designers signature. The
business model requires creativity, too,
and it is the most challenging part. As I
said, we were inspired by laser cutting
and digital technology, but our focus is not
limited to digital technology; we also want
to revitalize craftsmanship.
(http://opendesignnow.org/index.php/article/do-it-with-
droog-roel-klaassen-peter-troxler/)
This was a very exciting proposal in 2011 but now it is starting to look more aspirational than
a serious proposition. The web portal that would enable the download of designs is still in
development and not active publicly in late 2013. As we will see in the section below there are
already platforms in place that have somewhat superseded this approach but without the need
for approval by designers. The presumption that a signature or curating of a design by Droog is
valuable is symptomatic of the gap between the cutting edge of design practice and the open
design mainstream. Those involved in open design do not need validation from professional
design.
This open structures section describes proposals to design platforms that actively facilitate
open design. While the tactics of this approach vary, from urban planning, to curated platforms,
to problem-solving methods, the aim is the same: to guide and support the creative activities
of non-designers using the platform and so contribute to open design activity. GDT is the most
explicit of the platforms described here in offering a range of structures to support participants
to be creative in their own way. This range of platform solutions is representative of the ways
professional design is attempting to interact with open design.
There is a different approach to enabling open design that is not based on design. This is
focused on giving people opportunities to make, without offering guidance and relying on
human ingenuity and motivation to make the most of this opportunity. We explore this approach
in more detail in the following section on open access.
4 Opening Access
So far the practical interventions described in this chapter have been mediated by designers,
from the design of a range of options in Customatix to the proposed quality control of Droog
for downloadable design. In contrast to this design focus, there are an increasing number of
initiatives and services that are focused on allowing creative people (whether they are designers
or not) to get their ideas manufactured as a one-off example in a cost-efficient manner. Simply
put, many people are working on making the means of manufacturing available to the general
public.
Blogging as open design
While some of the platforms described above have not progressed beyond the prototype stage,
other services offer creative platforms that are already used by millions of people every day. The
blogging services such as Wordpress and Blogger (and even Facebook) have established the
demand for structures that help the creation of websites in a very straightforward, non-technical
way.
Many blogs are of niche interest and fulfil the function of fanzines and local news sheets. In
contrast some blogs have become very successful: the blog The Huffington Post was sold for
$315 million in 2011 and blogs such as The Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com/) in the US
and Guido Fawkes (http://order-order.com/) in the UK are having a real political impact.
It is easy to be blas about blogs but, like Wikipedia, it is a service that 10 to 15 years ago
would have been very costly and so restricted. Now anyone, with no technical knowledge, can
produce a perfectly serviceable website for free.
In some ways the role of making support used to be played by technical colleges and night
school in the UK where people could sign up to learn a skill, then go on to make their
own ceramics, furniture or other products. Computer-controlled manufacturing and rapid
prototyping have transformed the possibilities of local manufacture. In the past a plastic
component, say a mug, would require a mould to be made by experts costing tens of thousands
of pounds, to be used in a machine costing many hundreds of thousands of pounds, to make
thousands of copies of the mug at a low price. Now it is possible to make a (good enough)
version of the mug using an additive manufacture, 3D printing process on a machine that
could cost as little as 1,000, with a cost per mug only a little more than a mass-produced one.
Fab Lab
One of the most popular models for using this sort of 3D printing technology (as well as
technologies such as laser cutting and Arduino electronics kits) came out of MITs Center for
Bits and Atoms and the Grassroots Invention Group. They proposed the Fab Lab (short for
Fabrication Laboratory) concept where digital manufacturing equipment is made available to the
general public at little or no cost. The principles that underpin Fab Labs are open access, peer-
to-peer learning (rather than experts and beginners) and sharing outcomes in the community.
This sharing includes both photographing and displaying the things that have been made, but
also sharing the digital files that were used to make these objects.
While Fab Labs focus on the possibilities of rapid manufacturing and digital technology, the
University of Berkeley has a network of public access innovation centres that have a much
broader remit. There are currently six TechShops in a network across California. The thing
that distinguishes TechShop from Fab Lab is the range of services provided and also the
degree to which they offer classes to teach people skills. In the first few months of 2013
the TechShop in Raleigh-Durham was offering around 50 classes that anyone could sign
up for (upon payment of a small fee); the range of these classes is quite extraordinary, from
Autodesk Inventor (a 3D modelling and simulation software) to Maker Bot 3D printing, but
also from plasma cutter use, screen printing, blacksmithing, TIG welding, and wooden bowl
turning to the wonderfully titled Sewing Workshop American Girl Pajama Party! This
points to an extraordinarily rich making community and a ground up innovation culture. It
also speaks to the large investment in infrastructure and equipment that makes this range of
activities possible.
At the other end of the spectrum, with considerably less investment, is the Mens Sheds (or
Mens Dens in the US) initiative. These are centres for men who have retired or are close to
retirement to come together to make things, mostly using traditional wood and metal-working
facilities. Starting in Australia, this initiative has spread to New Zealand, Canada, the US and the
UK. The aim is to help build communities for men who are disconnected from the camaraderie
of the workplace. The individual groups decide what they want to do but often this includes
making things for the wider local community or for other charitable purposes.
An interesting middle point between Fab Lab and Mens Sheds is a project called Access
Space in Sheffield, UK (http://access-space.org). Here they take in old computers that are often
gathering dust in storerooms or on their way to landfill and refurbish them with FOSS (free open
source software). These computers are then made available to anyone who wants to drop into
their centre in Sheffield. Like Fab Lab, the ethos is for there to be a strong element of peer-to-
peer learning and free access. There is also a very open approach to what people who drop in
do in the centre; it could be typing a letter or email or creating a website, or something more
adventurous like electronics or coding an iPhone app.
From the trendy, high profile of Fab Labs to the working class Mens Sheds, there is an
expansion of facilities helping people make their own things. For the most part the intention is
that these are for personal use and if it becomes a commercial activity, there starts to be a more
substantial cost levied to use the equipment.
There is an alternative approach to giving people the physical means to make their own
products. Digital networks can be used to connect people to the means of production without
having to physically operate the machines. This allows many people to contribute (and
benefit) from the potentials of rapid manufacturing. These networks allow for the prototyping,
financing/investment, production and marketing of new products, all without needing to
employ a professional designer. These services and tools are widespread and freely available
online right now.
Making a digital description of your product is essential for exploiting new computerised
manufacturing technology. While professional CAD (computer-aided design) software is both
fiendishly complicated and very expensive, increasingly there are free alternatives aimed at
everyday people rather than engineers and designers. These tools include Google Sketchup,
Blender and, most interesting of all, 123Design and 123Make (www.123dapp.com/design).
The 123 software are brother and sister applications made by one of the giants of computer
modelling, Autodesk, and are especially interesting as they are powerful but also fairly easy to
use, and run on almost any platform, from a desktop computer to an iPad.
There is an online community emerging that allows people to share and create new versions
of their models within 123Design. In conjunction with an easy modelling experience, Autodesk
have created a sister package called 123Make; this is interesting because it translates the digital
models created in 123Design into a format that can be easily realised physically. This can be
achieved in a few different ways: designs can be sent to a commercial 3D printing bureau and
they will send a physical version of your model to you in a few days. It is also easy to connect
directly to your own 3D printer if you have one. There are two further options: one creates a
series of cross-sections through a model so they can be cut out in layers and stuck together to
make the physical version of the model. The other option will create the shape of a design as if it
were taken apart and folded flat (designers call this a net). This is useful as you can print this out
and fold it to create the original shape with nothing more than an ordinary printer and some glue
and scissors.
Open Design in the Real World: Opportunities and Implications
While there are a growing number of people making things for themselves, there are also
growing communities that are interested in sharing and profiting from their designs. This could
be through the sale of the physical products or by selling the digital models that can then
be either created as they are or modified. There are a number of platforms that facilitate this
kind of exchange of products and models for products; examples include Shapeways (www.
shapeways.com), Thingiverse (www.thingiverse.com), Quirky (www.Quirky.com) and Ponoko
(www.ponoko.com/).
These platforms are creating a new and highly energised, interconnected set of communities
around new product design, particularly for the design of objects or components of less than
around 25cm3. This is the average size a 3D printer can produce, although this and the quality of
production are rapidly changing.
To a designers eyes, some (many) of the designs available on sites such as Quirky and
Shapeways are not great. 3D printed handcuffs are not robust enough to really act as a
restraint (perhaps this is a good thing). More seriously, Shapeways has recently removed any
gun components from its download database. In America this is a hot topic with 3D printing
seen by some citizens as a way to sidestep the real or imaginary threat to their ability to buy
guns via normal means. Groups like Defense Distributed (www.defensedistributed.com) have
set up an online repository of models that can be used to create gun components (www.
wikiweps.org).
The issue of the 3D printing of guns puts the spotlight on the ethical implications of citizen-led
design and manufacture. The open, free creativity and optimism of the proponents of Fab Lab
is facing a challenge by people taking openness seriously and using technology for their own
agendas that are challenging to mainstream or liberal sensibilities. This is going to be one of the
major issues within rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing in the coming years. It is also
critical to activities in the open design space; the controls, responsibility and accountability for
products (or services such as the ray fish shoe) are simply not in place.
This is not a new debate; it closely echoes the concerns raised in K Eric Drexlers seminal book
on nanotechnology, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, way back in 1986.
Drexlers solution was to make the means of design free to all but to make the means of making
those designs closely controlled. This will not work for open design; the means of production
are already available to anyone with a web connection. Paul Atkinson (a long-time and vigorous
advocate for the dissolution of the barrier between professional and amateur) is finding that,
when applied to non-trivial design problems, open design approaches are problematic ethically,
and certainly a simple free-for-all in terms of design and design quality is actually highly
problematic.
In a real-world example, Paul and his PhD student are working on an open design project
with a community of people with cystic fibrosis. This group is interested in designing aids
and non-medical devices for their own day-to-day use. These products, especially custom-
made furniture, could be quite costly and would be close to a once in a lifetime purchase that
individuals would use for many years. The ethical question is: does this community really, really
know more than a design expert in this area? It is easy to be confident of this in the abstract
sense, citing von Hippel and others; it is also easy to be relaxed about this in the design of
relatively ephemeral products such as mugs or t-shirts. When a project has life-changing
implications for an individual, is the most open interpretation of open design, where there is no
recognition of expert knowledge at all, really appropriate?
If there is any uncertainty at all in the response to these questions, the issue becomes: how
do we involve designers and other experts in a professional and productive manner while still
keeping the creative process open and inclusive? Open design and the design profession have
to find a way to work together productively.
Next Steps
In this chapter we have explored some of the key responses of the design profession to the
potential of open design. This ranges from new proto-products from Droog to customisation
in the shoe sector. We have also seen in the final section of the chapter that there is a thriving
ecology of new product innovation that uses online platforms but no formal design input. In
terms of open design, the design profession is at best lagging behind open design practice and
at worst is irrelevant.
Overall this chapter paints a broad canvas of activity with a multitude of pioneers, both inside
and outside design, constantly launching new initiatives, companies, products and ideas.
This is the sprawling landscape of open design. We also see in the final section of this chapter
that, while open design can flourish independent of professional design in the playful space
of ephemeral products and services, when it engages with real problems things get serious.
There needs to be a more nuanced, active connection between open design and the design
profession. This needs to preserve the free spirit and creative openness of open design while
valuing and enabling the skills and expertise of the design profession. The case studies that
follow build a proposal for a new relationship between the design profession and open design.
Part 2:
Open
Design
Case
Studies
Chapter 6
Introduction to Case Studies
This section concentrates on five case studies that connect to the central
themes of this book: the diversity of open design; the problems designers have
with open design; education for open design; and finally new open design
professionals. Rather than replicating examples of the outcomes of open
design already in the literature, the focus here is on the processes, techniques
and tools that enable open design that have not been previously published.
Open design is emergent, turbulent and still a highly contested area of activity; beneath this
there are fundamental issues that will be a guiding force on open design in the long term. The
case studies in this section draw out these fundamental issues by focusing on the processes
and tools that facilitate open design. There are a few reasons for adopting this approach;
pragmatically the products or outcomes of open design projects are likely to be transitory and
ephemeral. Novel approaches to new product development will inevitably be risky and many
of these commercial enterprises will fail. For example, during the writing of this book four
companies offering interesting solutions in the open design space have gone into liquidation
while new companies and services are constantly spawning.
This high rate of change is also reflected in the technology exploited in open design. The
proliferation of personal manufacturing technology and services promoting designersless
manufacture means that selecting this as the key focus of these case studies would quickly
become obsolete. In the place of a technology or product focus, here we will be building on the
landscape of open design, innovation and mass creativity established in the previous pages to
focus on the following themes:
The diversity of open design approaches

The problems traditional designers face when operating in an open creative process
Strategies in design education to develop a new type of open designer
New open designers in action and the benefits they bring to open design initiatives.
This approach accommodates the transitory nature of both technological and business
development; these case studies focus on the structures that underpin and support open
design activity and that will inform its development in the future, irrespective of the technologies
or business models that implement them. The evolution and dissemination of these processes
is what will help open design develop in the future. In fact the concentration on particular
78 Part 2: Open Design Case Studies
outputs or examples of open design products risks the celebrification of individuals or

products that is alien to the more distributed, non-hierarchical ethos of open design as a whole,
something Droog discovered with do create and downloadable design.
The final reason for focusing on processes and interaction is that the literature to date
looking specifically at open design is surprisingly traditional in concentrating on designers as
individuals, on how they are responding to the challenges of open design and to the products
they are producing. Currently there is very little writing on processes and tools for facilitating
open design as part of a wider ecology of creative practice.
Of course this is not to say that there is a blank canvas and that professional design has made
no contribution to open design processes; often these processes are helped by tools and
techniques that have been developed (designed) by someone or a group of people. Through
the creation of these tools, the final open design solutions are shaped by design sensibilities.
In most of the case studies described here there is a design input in the tools used in the open
design process, although in one case these tools themselves are the subject of open design
process.
The projects described in the case studies here are all actively developing tools and
approaches to facilitate creative input from a broad range of people where designers are not
in control of that process, so prompting open design thinking and activity. The specifics of the
case studies vary enormously and this variety is explicitly drawn out in the first two. The first
of these looks at Gadgeteer, an open source softwarehardware system that allows interested
individuals without professional training to essentially make their own electronic products,
including cases for either prototyping or just to use. This is contrasted with the second case
study where La Region 27 undertakes the open design of urban policy through a range of
service design-inspired activities and interventions. This case study really presents a different
way of conceiving the need and opportunity for open design.
The third case study explores the challenges that everyday designers face when attempting
to adopt an open approach. This documents the tensions within very good designers trained
in the traditional art school manner when they are invited to make their creative processes
open. This is followed by the final two case studies. The first of these focuses on changing the
education of design students in TU Delfts Product Design courses in the Netherlands to help
them act as facilitators of creativity in others. Later we look at other projects that specifically
design facilitation approaches as a method for designers to have a proactive (but not dominant)
contribution to open design projects.
The final case study looks at approaches where designers work with a range of stakeholders to
have a real impact on a specific environment, in a way that goes beyond co-design in the role
Chapter 6: Introduction to Case Studies 79
non-designers play in setting agendas and framing the brief for collaborative design processes,
where all parties have the opportunity (and responsibility) for creative input.
These case studies build on the landscape established in the previous chapters. They describe
real-world instances of both the variety of open design activity and the challenges that
traditional designers face in opening up their creative practices to engage with this new mode of
open design.
Finally we show how this traditional design orthodoxy is starting to change through the
promotion and extension of ideas around facilitation. In TU Delft we see this in their programme
on creative facilitation and in Lancaster we see the design of facilitation as a method of
professional designers contributing to but not dominating open design projects. This journey
takes us to the conclusion and a proposal for a new type of open designer, one that both
respects the value of open creativity and is also able to bring to bear professional design and
experience into open design processes.
Case Study 1:
The .NET Gadgeteer: Open Design Platform
This case study traces the development of .NET Gadgeteer, one of the most
exciting approaches to open design that exploits open source software and
digital technology. This platform enables non-specialist people to design,
exchange and construct new cameras, robots or almost any other product
using electronics. The case study goes on to explore the role of design within
Gadgeteer and the wider implications for open design.
Open design is defined by some as the collaborative creation of artifacts by a dispersed

group of otherwise unrelated individuals and of individualised production and the direct digital
manufacture of goods at the point of use (Atkinson, 2011). This fits with the approach taken
in this book, with one important difference. The argument here is that digital technology is not
an essential component in open design. There are many examples of open design that do not
require digital technologies, for example, iron foundry development in the eighteenth century to
the global tools catalogue in the 1960s. This is important because it opens up a wider range of
open design activities, approaches and tools for analysis and cross-fertilisation. It removes the
requirement for digital technology to mediate non-hierarchical creativity and makes for a more
people-led response.
This is not to say that digital approaches are not important in open design, but rather that
there is a very broad range of activity that can inform open design development including
digital technology. Gadgeteer was selected as a case study to show an innovative and exciting
technology-led example of an open design platform. This is contrasted in the following case
study by almost the polar opposite in terms of technology. Here Region 27 devises tools and
approaches that enable the collaborative design of social policy without relying on digital
technology at all. The growth and development of open design as a whole will come from the
cross-pollination of ideas, tools and approaches across the spectrum of open design activity,
rather than making digital technology a defining characteristic.
Open Source Tensions with Open Design
We have explored the relationships between open design, open source and open innovation
in previous chapters. Open source deserves closer attention in this case study as much of
the software used in Gadgeteer is open source. Open source is one of the key connections
between open design and the digital arena. Bruce Perens, the treasurer of the Open Source
Initiative, characterises open source software by three key qualities. In open source anyone has
the right to:
1. Make copies of the program, and distribute those copies;

2. Have access to the softwares source code, a necessary preliminary before you can
change it;
3. Make improvements to the program. (Perens, 2008)
In reality this translates to publicly available repositories (for example, websites such as code
forge: www.codeforge.com). These contain both components of programs and also whole open
source programs. It is possible for these programs to become very well developed, robust and
useful software products. Examples include open source operating systems such as Linux
(and 20 or so other, less well-known operating systems), to mobile phone apps on the Android
platform, to the Blender 3D modelling software mentioned earlier.
The open source model is based on the constant updating and improvement of sections of
computer code by individuals; once tested these modules can then be integrated seamlessly
into the program as a whole and shared with the world. This can be achieved without cost;
users can simply refresh their software to get the improvements. This exploits the particular
properties of computer code, true modularity and cost-free distribution and adoption of new
versions. Beyond digital media, a lack of modularity and critically logistical and material costs
to sharing and adopting new versions make a direct translation of open source to open design
impossible; we need alternatives for open design beyond open source.
Going beyond logistics, software is for the most part a highly rational activity with clear criteria
(for example, to perform a specific operation). These criteria can be easily communicated
and assessed, making possible the evaluation and integration of individual contributions,
in the same way as open source, into a bigger project. Design seldom has these types of
unambiguous criteria; the subjective engagement with ill-defined (wicked) problems makes
the integration of multiple contributions almost impossible. For example, the crowd-sourced
version of Star Wars is interesting, but even with very tightly defined content (a few seconds
selected from the film) the results are not something that anyone would want to sit through from
beginning to end.
This takes us to the second area of tension between open source and open design. Writing
code for open source is a very specialised activity requiring deep professional skills.
Programming for open source is not something that a casual computer user could do
successfully. This is fundamentally different to open design where the challenge is to help a
very broad spectrum of people to be able to contribute to open design in a way that plays to
their personal strengths, rather than requiring that they become a shadow of a professional
Chapter 6: Case Study 1 83
designer. Open source is about having a very well-defined technical language and allowing
many people to work together on this. Open design is about helping people contribute in their
own creative languages.
Gadgeteer was selected as a case study because it is a digital platform with an open source
approach, but also directly addresses the two key problems with translating open source
approaches to open design. Gadgeteer actively encourages non-specialist participation and
facilitates contributions from groups such as schoolchildren, hobbyists and designers. It is
also notable that it has a focus on not just programming but the close integration between
programming and the challenges of the physical production of products by everyday users.
There is also an active dialogue between manufacturers of the hardware (for example, electronic
circuit boards, sensors, actuators, motors) and the people building things with Gadgeteer.
Companies will create new hardware if there is a perception of demand from the community;
often this starts with a person having an idea for something new and floating the idea with the
company and the Gadgeteer community. This model allows for the community-driven growth of
the capability of Gadgeteer that is financially sustainable but not controlled by any structures or
hierarchy.
What is .NET Gadgeteer?
Gadgeteer (or, more formally, .NET Gadgeteer) is a hardware/software/product system

developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. The system allows for a small computer
(smaller than a packet of Post-its) to be easily connected to a wide range of other devices
such as cameras, storage devices or even motors and actuators, without the need to solder
components or a high degree of skill in programming or hardware design; the components
are connected by plug-in ribbon cables that allow for the flexible arrangement of these
components. In practice the system allows beginners to create a functional MP3 player in under
25 minutes using around ten lines of computer code. A little more time will allow for projects
such as a digital camera to be made relatively easily.
While there are other systems that allow for the non-expert creation of electronics projects (and
indeed the first Apple computer was sold in such a kit form in the 1970s), a more contemporary
model for this would be Arduino. This is a relatively user-friendly electronics kit based around
sensors and other components that can be connected using base boards to allow people
with only a rudimentary knowledge of electronics to create working projects. Gadgeteer is
distinguished from Arduino by two key characteristics.
Firstly, with both Gadgeteer and Arduino the barriers to entry are low (it is easy to make simple
things quickly); but unlike Arduino, the ceiling of possible creation with Gadgeteer is very high.
Because .NET is a very well-developed programming language, it can use relatively powerful
hardware; users can make very complicated and advanced artefacts, for example, robots that
can find their own way around a house.
The second characteristic of Gadgeteer that is especially relevant for open design is that
in addition to hardware (for example, circuit boards, sensors, hard drives) and software,
Gadgeteer also has a series of CAD computer files that describe enclosures designed to house
or package the circuit boards and other hardware. In some cases this is a plan to print out and
fold a box out of cardboard, or there could be a digital file that can be sent to a 3D printer to
create plastic cases and so something more recognisable as a conventional product.
The files supplied for the creation of product cases allow the Gadgeteer hardware to be held
securely in place, allowing day-to-day use. The files also allow users to modify them using a
2D or 3D authoring package, changing the operation and appearance to suit the particular
needs of the project. These files can then be sent to one of the numerous 3D printing bureaux
that are available online, or taken to a facility like a Fab Lab, resulting in a rigid plastic case to
accommodate the hardware needed for the project. Gadgeteer helps people make electronic
products.
Gadgeteer as an Open Design Platform
Gadgeteer has profound implications for how we think about new product development and
design. It is the first example where people can easily create their own electronic products that
resemble (and potentially surpass) traditionally designed appliances such as cameras, security
systems or toys. This sidesteps the traditional new product development process with R&D,
designers, engineers and factories, and the role of the designer is radically challenged here.
There has been almost no professional design input in the development of physical aspects
of Gadgeteer with the focus very much on software and electronics. As we will see this has
affected the level of support for the product design side of Gadgeteer development, both in
terms of the platform but also in the support for people using the platform to make products.
To understand why design has such limited input in the development of Gadgeteer and in
supporting good design using the Gadgeteer platform, the genesis of the platform needs to
be understood. Drawing from an interview with Dr Nick Villas, one of the leading developers of
Gadgeteer, the roots of this project lie in his PhD studies at Lancaster University, in particular
his project called VoodooIO; this:
adopts a vision of the physical interface as

a malleable material that can be shaped
and adapted, rather than a device with a

predetermined form or prescribed use. The
intention is to overcome the obstacles that
prevent hardware interfaces from being as
easily appropriable by users as graphical
user interfaces (and software applications
in general) have become, blurring the
boundaries between interface developers,
interaction designers and end-users.
(http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk/?id=11/)
When he moved to Cambridge to work as part of Microsofts Sensors and Devices Group, part
of the Computer Mediated Living Group research group, Nick Villas found that people working
there were often building software, electronic/physical prototypes for their projects. Even with a
high level of expertise, this was a time-consuming task with a great deal of repeat learning, as
researchers wrestled with the same problems of sourcing the required electronic components
and getting them to communicate with each other.
Building on VoodoIO and the collective experience in their research lab, Gadgeteer came into
existence. Initially it was developed as an internal research tool, but as people outside Microsoft
saw this tool, there was increasing demand to get copies of the software, the templates and
hardware specification. This occurred at an opportune moment as the platform that Gadgeteer
used, .NET Micro, had just undergone a transformation in Microsoft with surprising results.
.NET is a fairly old software platform that was designed for resource-constrained devices
such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and it has a large developer base across the world;
Gadgeteer uses a rather obscure subset of this called .NET Micro; this can run on very, very
low-powered devices in terms of computing power.
The larger .NET platform had not been performing well commercially and the decision was made
effectively to give up on the commercial side (where companies would pay a small licence fee for
every device that had .NET installed on it) and make it open source. In Nick Villas words: at first
we thought Oh no! this is terrible. I was counting on this to be around and now its been put out
to pasture. In fact the change of business model and removal of licence fees gave this software a
new lease of life. As an open platform that is free to use, the .NET platform is thriving.
In light of this it seemed obvious to explore the possibilities of making Gadgeteer open source
and available to everyone. This was fortuitous as the research lab was aware that this was
never going to be something Microsoft sales would be interested in supporting. For their
part the research lab had no interest in manufacturing kits for other people. The result is that
there is a very healthy community developing around Gadgeteer with some forums receiving
around 18,000 posts a year. Nick identifies broadly three different types of people who use the
Gadgeteer system, in addition to companies that develop and promote the technology and even
help users develop and commercialise their own modules.
Firstly, there are the hobbyists, the Arduino crowd. They dabble in the software side of things
but are less experienced in developing hardware. For them the key thing is that there are a
sufficient number and variety of modules available for them to use to make their projects.
Reflecting the Arduino model of sensors and actuators, these projects are often things like
intelligent burglar alarms or tweet printers. There are about 80 modules available commercially
at the moment, including cameras, buttons, joysticks, actuators, USB and Ethernet connectors,
GPS, Compass and RFID readers.
The second group of participants is more serious about the fundamentals of software and
hardware creation. They are interested in stretching the limits of possibilities of current
technology and developing their own modules that extend what can be achieved by the
platform. Examples of projects from this group are much more advanced in terms of the
technology employed and in pursuing new hardware and software to be developed, either by
themselves or by others. Such projects include wirelessly controlled robots or a web-based
oximeter (a device for measuring the levels of oxygen in the blood). It is mostly this group that
has a strong relationship with the manufacturers of the circuit boards and other hardware that
extend the possibilities of Gadgeteer.
The third group is more interested in creative exploration, and its members are often designers.
They are interested in how the Gadgeteer system can give them the flexibility to create new
prototypes for designs that also really work. As Nick says:
Just by changing how the modules are

arranged, like where the cameras pointing
in the same direction as the display or in
the opposite direction, you can completely
change the experience of that object, its
either out there or a digital camera and its
either for you or taking pictures of other

people. So just being able to play with
the arrangement and the combination of
sensors and swap a button for a switch
and things like that, they seemed to get a
lot out of that.
This group is interested in the relationship between products and the people that would use
them and further in challenging the normal modes of operation, using Gadgeteer as a way of
making working prototypes of these challenges.
Clearly an interesting outcome would be for these groups to start to collaborate and over time
become Gadgeteer natives that are working comfortably across hardware, software and form
factors, either individually or in groups.
Physical Design and Gadgeteer
Gadgeteer is exceptional in really engaging with the physical production of products using
hardware and software. However, the status of the physical packaging and enclosure
design is not at the same level as the technical side of things. This is clear in the supporting
documentation for Gadgeteer. These documents are freely available at Gadgeteer.codeplex.
com. There are two particularly key documents, as Nick Villas explains:
One of them is the module builders

guidelines and the other one is the main
software guidelines. And they basically
say if you are making either a module
with a processor or some software, this
is what you should think about. Use these
particular connectors, label them in this
particular way, wire up the slots on your
processor to these sockets in this way,

provide this software libraries based
in these templates and then if its done
correctly, then these networks should be
compatible with the majority of modules
that are already out there.
With the module builders guide if you want

to make modules that no one else has
made and you want to make it compatible
with Gadgeteer, make the board either
this or this size, have holes of this size
in the corners, label them in this way, so
that people know its compatible with
Gadgeteer and then wire up in such a way
that people will just be able to connect it.
There is not a corresponding guidance note for the physical design and CAD models for the
enclosures for the Gadgeteer projects. When Nick Villas was asked if there were corresponding
documents for the physical design of enclosures or cases for Gadgeteer, or a specification for
what the CAD models need to be to be compatible, his response was:
Thats perhaps the trickiest thing, in terms

of standardisation, because that world is
not a natural part of what the people that
currently make and sell the hardware do,
they didnt have that in mind as part of
the business model. So we were able to

talk to them very easily about these are
the mechanical and also we were able
to communicate, this is what the drivers
should look like. But the design part was
the hardest to communicate, like the
value of it. So theres basically not very
firm guidelines around that. Most of the
guidelines for the 3-D aspect of it are
already encoded in the mechanical design
aspect. So basically, once you design a
circuit board, youre having all the things
we think are useful for integrating it into
our 3-D print object are already part of
that specification. Things like having
mounting holes and all the sizes. Then
through whichever means necessary, just
provide a 3-D model of that circuit board.
Nick went on to explain that they have experimented with writing extensions for Solid Works, a
professional 3D modelling package. Their aim was to produce cases automatically that could
either be screwed together or would snap-fit. This was a significant challenge for them, as he
says:
But when it actually comes time to

assemble the thing, you find you cant
actually get that component in that
position, or you cant get a screwdriver if

a lot of these things are assembled with
little screws, and there was just no way
to access that screw to mount it in that
position.
This is the sort of well-defined problem that seems eminently solvable by a designer (and in
manufacturing systems design, these problems are the main area of activity), but without a
background in three-dimensional design, addressing these problems proved too difficult for the
group. As Nick says:
Its still an open research question and one

that I feel like weve got all the bits together
with Gadgeteer to do that, but now theres
about 80 different modules and most of
them had a 3-D model associated with
them and all the software drivers and still
the one thing thats lagged behind is the
tool to bring them all together.
This reflects the computer science and technical research roots of the project but also raises
bigger questions about the creation of design specifications. The specification document for
building new modules is 45 pages in total and presents the requirements for new modules if
they are to work with the larger Gadgeteer system of hardware and software. These guidelines
range from tables to ensure the right connectors are used to enable a USB interface to
be included on the module, to more general advice that would be common practice for a
professional hardware developer. Often these are very simple things, such as how to label
components: use rather than a plain 0 (zero) as it is easily confused with the letter o.
It is interesting to speculate what a corresponding guidance document on the creation of CAD

drawings for enclosures would include. It would have technical requirements for the supports
needed to fit the modules inside the enclosures and would offer advice on the use of modelling
packages such as Solid Works, 123Design, Blender or Google Sketchup. It would also include
advice on the design of the enclosures, not just in terms of material properties and prototyping
but also on how to create interesting, elegant or innovative enclosures that did more than just
protect the components in the rather subsidiary way that this aspect of Gadgeteer is treated now.
The low-status physical design that Gadgeteer has is reflected in the way Microsoft are taking
the problem of enclosure forward. Rather than trying to help people think in an innovative way
about the case components of Gadgeteer, the developers are in effect trying to engineer the
problem out of existence. This approach includes the development of expert systems that
would (in the future) automatically create enclosures for users.
The work of Manfred Lau is a good example of this sort of automation. His SketchChair
software is freely downloadable (http://www.designinterface.jp/en/projects/sketchchair/). This is
an online tool that will transform a freehand line drawn by someone using this software into the
side profile of a chair and then generate a whole chair that incorporates this profile, adding legs;
and through the addition of sectional parts (like the joists on a roof or the ribs on an aeroplane
wing) it gives the chair a shape that can be made either by printing the components on paper
and cutting them out manually or through a laser cutter.
In use this is quite compelling; it is extremely easy to use and the results look good. It is even
possible to test if your chair is stable by getting a virtual person to sit on it.
Beyond Gadgeteer
The aim here is not to criticise the approach of the Gadgeteer team or the automatic generation
work of people like Manfred Lau; quite the reverse in fact. The issue is, however, to notice a
divergence of approaches between hardware and software and the CAD/enclosure components
in the system. In the former there is a focus on fundamentals and specifications that provide a
structure that encourages exploration and innovation while retaining interchangeability with the
rest of the Gadgeteer universe. The enclosures (or the files to make these) are regarded quite
differently and seen more or less as an afterthought; the aim is to solve the problem rather than
define the problem space in a way that promotes innovation. The evidence so far from exemplar
projects (http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/) is that this is to the detriment of the projects. For
the most part these could charitably be classified as functional rather than beautiful, but more
importantly there is a missed opportunity here for the non-digital components of the Gadgeteer
system to be more than just a container for the electronic components.
This tension regarding design being taken seriously in a wider open design system is
symptomatic of some wider issues with open design. Gadgeteer was selected as a case study
because it is in many ways the perfect practical exposition of open design:
It is an open evolving system that participants can contribute to as well as use.

It offers support frameworks while retaining creative freedom.
It offers a creative innovative system that is self-sustaining and decentralised in its
management.
The contribution of professional design in Gadgeteer is negligible and the need for professional
design input is being reduced as the system develops (actually it is being designed out). This
is not a problem or to the detriment of Gadgeteer but it poses the question: is there a role for
professional design beyond a very technical contribution to open design? This is still very much
an open question but the answer is almost certainly it depends. There will be no single open
design approach, process or ecosystem, but a multitude of processes, approaches and phases
that are emergent, dynamic and highly contingent on local contexts. This is an issue we will
return to across most of the case studies in this book: how can professional designers engage
in open creative processes without dominating them?
Going beyond this idea of the mixed creative economy, there is a tension even within the
designers interested in open design. While they think that open design is a looser kind of design
with the profession still in a key position, Gadgeteer demonstrates that paradoxically design
is not well represented (or regarded) in open design. This is to the detriment of the wider open
design community (and Gadgeteer in particular). The onus is on design and designers to more
actively engage with projects such as Gadgeteer and to make the case for the value they bring,
rather than assuming that open design would not be viable without design input.
Gadgeteer is an excellent example of an open design platform that exploits the potential of
open source software and digital technology. The following case studies explore the wide range
of approaches beyond techno-centric perspectives to open design. They take a more human-
centred approach. They look at the creative processes and interactions between people, within,
beyond and between professional designers and non-designers. Innovation theory is replete
with examples where technology-led approaches have stalled because the human component
was not ready (for example, the 15-year delay of the widespread introduction of keyhole
surgery), so this makes sense, but also the creative processes that are developed to facilitate
and promote open design are the things that bridge between new social and technological
possibilities.
Case Study 2:
La Region 27 and the Open
Design of Public Services
Successful open design is not dependent on digital technology. Region 27

shows this and also presents a very different way of thinking about open
design. As part of this exploration, Region 27 has developed a method used to
co-design public policy. It is also developing a series of centres for the design
of public policy using open creative processes. Facilitated by Region 27, the
design of these centres and the tools and techniques used are led by the civil
servants themselves and exchanged between centres.
In the previous case study we looked at one of the most interesting systems to enable open
design of products. Gadgeteer is a technology-led platform that makes the creation of digital
physical products possible for people with hobbyist-level technical knowledge of programming
or hardware skills. The La Region 27 (the 27th Region) case study described here explores
a completely different dimension of the open design universe. As a truly different frame in
the Khunian sense, it is not possible to describe this approach in a manner that is easily
comparable to the other case studies presented here. Instead you are invited to reflect on the
approach Region 27 adopts and how this has led to:
1. The development of open design processes where designers contribute but do not
dominate in the collaborative design of public policy
2. A process where civil servants are designing their own open design tools to help them
work creatively with the people in their region.
These are very difficult challenges to address in open design; the approach taken by Region 27
and the way this is presented by their leader, Stephane Vincent, reflect this innovation and the
unique perspective it adopts to the open design of regional policy.
The 27th Region was created in 2007 as one of numerous projects within a programme
called Next Generation Internet Foundation. This focused on the transformation of society by
information technology. In January 2012, Region 27 became an NGO. It employs seven people,
including a number of service designers, but also works with around 40 professionals on an ad
hoc basis. Some of these are service designers or social designers, but the roster also includes
sociologists or anthropologists, participative architects, journalists and comedians.
Region 27 is now funded by the National Association of the French Regions representing the
26 regions of France, a public bank called Caisse des Dpts and finally a European Union
programme called EuropAct. The motivation for this funding is the perception within the EU
Commission that French regions are much too focused on technical innovation rather than other
models including social innovation and organisational innovation.
The director of Region 27 is Stephane Vincent. For Stephane the collaborative design of policy
means not thinking about intervening in specific urban spaces but co-designing policies
and interventions that would apply to a number of cities in a region. Region 27 is very highly
regarded throughout continental Europe but it works only in France and seldom disseminates
its activities in English. Its work certainly demands more attention in the English-speaking world.
The interventions that Region 27 undertakes are interesting and highly relevant to open design
for a number of reasons. Stephane Vincent offers a perspective on collaborative engagement
and open creative processes that is a strong complement to open design. More broadly,
Region 27 is pioneering a shift in the role of the citizen from reception mode to more active
collaboration. This is achieved in part through the adoption of the role of service designers and
others in their team as friendly hackers. These three activities have strong parallels with open
design and the design of facilitation discussed in the final two case studies.
This connection to open design is made more explicit in the projects described below,
particularly in the establishment of labs (physical spaces) to enable civil servants in regional
governments to be more creative in the way they interact with their regional populations. Going
beyond this, civil servants in these spaces are starting to create their own tools and processes
for increasing their creative potential independently of design. This is non-professional design
creativity the autonomous improvement of creativity and innovation that is a fundamental
component of open design.
There is also an element of playfulness in placing this case study directly adjacent to the much
more straightforward Gadgeteer. They are very far apart on the spectrum of open design activity;
readers comfortable or aware of either one of these case studies is unlikely to be familiar with
the other. The result could be a degree of uncertainty or destabilisation. It is clear, looking across
this book as a whole, that an element of destabilisation is essential for successful new thinking to
emerge, so the juxtaposition of these case studies plays a strategic role, in addition to presenting
an alternative to techno-centric innovation as a model for open design development.
Region 27 Methods
The search for models of innovation not framed by technology leads Region 27 into some very
interesting approaches for engagement with participants. As Stephane explains:
We work for instance with a company

that plays forum theatre. Its a tradition
in theatre that was created in South
America, as the theatre of the oppressed.
This kind of theatre emphasises the
situation of the oppressed, and was born
during the time of dictators. But now its
the oppressed by the administration,
the oppressed by the system. Its a very
useful way of acting, of playing rogue, of
being comedian. And there is no public
in this theatre, the attendees are both
comedian and public. At the moment we
try to work on a project where the idea is
to change the relationships, the image, the
perception between the institution and the
youth and we use theatre to change this.
This human-centred approach to prompt creative responses is very different from traditional
design methods. At its heart this shift in approach in France grows from a changing political and
cultural landscape. Stephane places this in context in a way that one would not expect to find in
a UK analysis of the public sector:
We are at the end with an old fashioned

culture in the public sector, which was
the new public management, born with
Thatcher and Reagan and which is still
a very quantified, accountancy vision of

public sector, which is absolutely normal
and we need this vision, but there is no
balance with qualitative long-term vision
of what is public sector. You cannot
manage the public sector only through
money, doing more and doing better with
less money, youve got to explore how
to improve real quality, how to engage
different relations with people and the
problem we have is that most of the vision
is focused on new public management.
And this vision, in our hypothesis, has
spread away in every part of the public
sector.
Region 27 adopts a particular approach in the translation of these aspirations into practical
change. This is very designerly in that it relies on prototyping, experiential learning and
demonstration. Stephane says:
The vision of the 27th Region is how could

we change the culture of management, the
way of running public sector? So, our goal,
the way we do it is not publishing a report
like a think tank, its to consider that whats
important is not visible, whats important is
in the hidden process of public sector.
In fact Stephane describes Region 27 as a do tank rather than a think tank.
This approach echoes the work of Michel de Certeau, a sociologist working in the poor areas
of Paris in the 1970s and 1980s. In books such as The Practice of Everyday Life and Living and
Cooking, de Certeaus group sought to escape the tyranny of statistics imposed by modernist
(structuralist) approaches to look for relationships that are not visible. In the terms of Region 27,
Stephane describes this more fully:
The idea is lets work on whats not

visible, thats whats interesting. Whats
not visible is ways that decisions are
taken, how do all these people meet
together? What happens in between two
meetings? What are the tools they use?
So this is the how, its not the what, its
the how, how do they work.
This echoes the notion of the rhizome and the move away from rationalist hierarchies to more
human and less elitist exploration of the issues.
Challenges for Region 27
In response to these issues Stephane Vincent identified some challenges The interesting
thing for this case study is that, although these are framed around policy creation, beneath
the surface they are all highly relevant for the design profession in open design activities. For
example, one of the issues is: Recognising and challenging the homogeneity of actors in public
services. Stephane is talking about the elite and highly conformist French universities dedicated
to producing the next generation of civil servants.
We have seen that this uniformity also applies to a degree to professional designers, even
those who are sensitive to open design issues, such as Droog. Many are still locked into
thinking of designers as the locus of creativity in a project and that the designers signature
is a valuable commodity. We will see in a subsequent case study how this homogeneity is
being challenged in practice through new initiatives in design education at Delft Technical
University.
The five challenges identified by Region 27 are:
1. Shifting from study to research action

2. Changing the relationship between policy and people
3. Rejection of best practice and embracing the power of learning from mistakes
4. Recognising and challenging the homogeneity of actors in public services
5. Subverting the traditional consultancy approach through friendly hacking.
1Shifting from study to research action. Public services are full of people undertaking
research and producing reports, but there is a big question mark over the effectiveness of these
reports. As Stephane says:
The first thing we said was well, we dont

learn any more off studies, surveys. We
need it, but we need to shift to action
research process. Do, test, prototype and
then improve. Weve got problem with
delivery of reports, of paper that nobody
reads, why dont we do prototype, why
dont we do tests.
To achieve this, Region 27 has an underlying approach of pilot-testing policy tools through
practical prototyping that involves policy makers in this co-design process and through this
having larger scale impacts.
One of the most notable things when studying open design is how much of the thinking in this
area, especially coming from designers, is actually propositional or aspirational rather than
practical. Very little of the published activity on open design involves real people using tools or
approaches in the wild. Droogs downloadable design is a perfect example of this and hints at
two issues in open design activity. Firstly, it is much easier to have an idea about open systems
and processes than it is to implement them; this requires a different set of skills and aptitudes
that (for the most part) are not present in design. The second issue is the desire of designers to
present finished things rather than emergent, unfinished solutions. Designers need to have the
courage to allow prototypes into the wild even if these do not work as intended (this is a great
outcome!), but also be happy if things do not work. It is impossible to really test open design
prototypes in private but designers insist on doing so.
2 More productive relationships between citizens. Stephane describes this challenge as:
In the public sector everybody talks about

people, users, but nobody really works
in this way. So when I was a consultant
I could spend two hours with a user,
and some of the users, not all users, if I
want to be serious I need to spend one
or two days with him. So the idea is not
to spend little time with people, but to be
with people, to promote an ethnographic
approach in the process.
3 Rejection of best practice. The problem with looking at best practice is that it is generally
hard to be sure exactly why things are successful; success also tends to concentrate on good
outcomes but transferable understanding is more often concerned with the processes involved.
In response to this, Region 27 consciously tries to explore where things go wrong, both in its
own activity but also in others.
We are anti-best practice, we need to

know the dark side of the project, but also
we need to know the process, and not
only the end of the story. What happened?
How did they begin? What did they do two
years ago when they began the process?
How did they do at the different steps of
the process?
Looking at worst practice and learning from it requires a degree of reflection and also being
strong enough to look closely at the painful parts of a project rather than the joyful bits. This
resonates strongly with traditional design processes and especially design education; here
the tradition of the critique includes a strong element of peer-to-peer examination of the
weaknesses of a project while setting aside the strong elements. With Region 27s policy of
being open about failure, the question is: what are its failures? In response to this, Stephane
Vincent provides a few examples of where things went wrong:
Firstly low involvement of elected officials.

We have generally failed to involve
elected officials at a significant level in
the process. Maybe it is because many of
them are focused on finding solutions
while we promote reframing problems.
We could improve their involvement
by creating new kinds of meetings, for
instance war room sessions entirely
dedicated to one challenge that one
official could submit to a cross-disciplinary
team during three to four hours.
Secondly underestimation of the system

of actors. In 2010, we have run an
experimentation in a school with the
regional government of Champagne
Ardenne. The director of the school was
secretly convinced that our role was to
assess the strategy of the school on behalf
of the regional government. So he began
the experience with low trust towards us.

In the end, he admitted that he was wrong,
but it was too late and the result of the
project was poor. We always fail when we
neglect the existing relationships between
all the protagonists
Thirdly neglecting the complexity of

cross-disciplinarity. In a project we have
run in Southern France, it appears that
there was a conflict in our team between
designers and sociologists. We had
underestimated the alchemy required by
cross-disciplinarity and the time it takes to
build it.
These are highly relevant when thinking about the orchestration or curation of open design
processes: make real connections with the participants and respond to their agendas. There is
a key requirement in open design: to be open in the scope and range of those that would like to
be involved and devote a significant proportion of resources to the facilitation of developing a
common understanding between actors with very different worldviews.
4The homogeneity of actors in public services, especially in France. From Stephanes

perspective:
They all look the same, the consultant

looks like the civil servant, they all come
from the same school, high school, public
school, commerce school. There are many
experts in the public sector, but theyve all

got the same culture. We try to bring new
culture in the public sector, sociologists,
designers, but there is also the culture of
the people themselves, so how to take
more into account the knowledge of users
in front of the knowledge of experts?
In medicine a doctor cannot do his job

now if he doesnt understand the way his
patient used a website on medical or auto-
medication. How to take into account this
kind of knowledge, and to get all these
cultures to work together? No culture is
higher than the others, these people work
together, they are around the table and
they compare, they combine their different
culture. Getting sociologists, designers,
and civil servants to work together is very
difficult, but I think this is one key of the
success is to get these people working
together.
5 Region 27 tries to shift the traditional consultancy approach. The aim is to build new,
more dynamic, surprising and productive relationships between people in the process. This
is like friendly hacking, where interventions play with their permission and authority to work
on the project. Is it better being inside or outside the organisation? Our suggestion is to find
an intermediate way, something that could be a bit inside, a bit outside, says Stephane. He
continues:
We try to apply these principles through

the research projects that we build with
the regions. The first research programme
we have launched was called Territoires
en Rsidences from 2009 to 2010. The
idea was to test the protocol and the
method. We did it twelve times in different
places just to see if it was robust, if it was
solid, in a rural place, in an urban place, in
low-tech projects, in high-tech projects, in
the core business of the organisation or in
the rural places.
Friendly hacking is a really powerful metaphor for one of the ways design professionals can
play a productive role in open design. It speaks to immersion in a new area and a support of
relevant systems, but also of the friendly disruption of those systems and the assumptions that
underpin them.
Translating Ideas into Action
In the first major series of interventions for Region 27, the protocol was quite simple:
A disciplinary team with four people;

the ground, the school, a village, a local
authority, district, a hospital, something
that was involved in the original
policies; a topic, but a very simple one,

for instance medical exodus in rural
place, opening the school, very short
duration; three ethnographic weeks in
order to spend time within the project,
sleeping in the school for instance.
There is a contract between us and
all the stakeholders. In this contract
weve got engagement to apply the
method, but theyve got engagement
in the space, to welcome a four-people
team in the place, to allow them to go
where they want in the school, they can
come in the classrooms, if they want
to test something in the whole of the
school they can do it, if we need to make
pictures, photos of other people, there is
a contract with the young people that we
get them to sign it, its possible.
While the content of these projects is specific to the individual activities, the processes involved
are more transferable and are made available in an ongoing manner (largely in French) through
creative commons. The intention is that these interventions act as a micro-lab for wider issues.
The intention is not to work specifically with one school (for example) to improve the food within
it, but rather to prototype policies around food in schools that can be applied across hundreds
of schools in a region. This has shaped the types of projects that Region 27 undertakes. While
it is involved in some urban projects, the focus is on the rural areas of the regions. For example,
Stephane describes a project on health in the countryside:
This is a very interesting project where

the Region Auvergne, which is a region
in the centre of France, which is a very
rural region. They had the programme
that they have launched a call to help a
local health house project, and they did
not understand why the projects they did
were not working. So we started a project,
and after a few days we understood that it
was the doctor that wrote the project, and
when the doctor thinks hes an architect
or a designer, it doesnt work, because he
has a very medical vision of the house, so
this is a problem we have with experts, so
we get the doctors work with patients, we
help them to have a richer vision of their
project, so that was an interesting project.
This is an example of a project when being completely open and inviting professionals to cross
into design areas met with limited success. Here designers, sociologists and other specialists
worked in collaboration with medical experts to develop a new frame, rather than asking
someone to design from their medical frame.
Region 27 is also involved with digital projects; in particular Stephane describes a project in
south-western France, near Bordeaux:
The Mayor realised that he turned on

his TV one morning and he saw a guy
singing, he was in the best place in the

chart, and he was a guy from the city
and he didnt know him, and he didnt
understand why he didnt know him.
He realised that this guy was famous
because of his website, because he has
a blog and he put his songs. And he said
well, something is happening here, that
we dont see. So our role was to make
visible the digital life of the surroundings,
and the team worked on tools to make
the invisible visible and the second step,
to try and use all this content, all these
things happening on the blogs to do
something else with it, so it was a very
interesting project.
The practical realisation of this was the construction of furniture, as Stephane goes on to say,
where you can take information on whats happening on blogs in this place, they tried to build a
mediation between the web, blogs, invisible things and the real place, it was a really interesting
project.
In a contrasting project near Toulon, the eagerness of Region 27 to subvert expectations is

evident. Toulon has 42 per cent unemployment, and there was a project proposal to build
something called the IT House where 20 people can access the internet. As Stephane indicates,
this was not really an innovative proposal:
In France there are already four thousand

places like this. Its very interesting,
because I think it was developed because

the employment office was not working.
The thinking is the employment office is a
mess and mostly they cannot help you to
make your curriculum vitae, they cannot
help you to use the internet to find jobs.
The issue now is that the digital divide is not really important in France. The challenge to Region
27 was to develop a role for the IT House in the future. The regional government:
wanted to explore what could be the

future of this place, so we work in a place
in one of them and we work with the
people, they produced four scenarios. One
scenario was that they became the new
job office bureau, instead of the official
one. One other was very interesting, it
was the people say yeah but in ten years
people will be fed up with digital stuff,
so we need to transform this place into
a digital health office, where you can see
a psychologist. It was very interesting,
because it transformed this place that
was dedicated to IT because youve got
computers everywhere, to a place where
you learn to manage without them.
These projects (and many others) were used to test the method, teams and processes involved
in the interventions. They have also been evaluated six months after the end of the projects. The
overarching outcome of this project was a guide book or toolkit. This is dedicated to people
that want to take part in Residences or to build their own Residences.
As we will see in the final case study, the notion of toolkits for collaborative design approaches
is a very important method for helping designers to contribute to open design processes
without dominating them. Actually toolbox is probably a better way of describing this method.
A toolbox is a collection of different tools, mostly accumulated over time and from disparate
sources. The design of tools to go into open design toolboxes enables the users of the toolbox
to grow their own collection of tools and to become proficient in the use of their tools. Rather
than thinking of a toolkit as a cure-all method, the toolbox metaphor is the facilitation of open
design through the creation of tools, then appropriated by individuals beyond the control or
knowledge of the designer.
Regional Open Design Laboratories
While the Residences project is continuing, the form and process have been well proved and
the focus of new development has shifted to a programme called La Transfer; this has the
goal of getting bodies involved in regional development to create their own resources and
tools for participatory innovation. The change in tactic from running events directly to helping
policy makers create their own events is highly significant. It represents a shift towards design
creating the scaffolding for open design processes, rather than having to be at the centre
of each of these processes, and really marks an unusual but relevant crossover between
Gadgeteer and prototyping rural policy. Each of these labs for innovation has a particular
focus, with one in Burgundy looking at the future of the village, another in Champagne
DArdennes looking at youth policy and Pays de la Loire working on the future of the region.
The practical role of these centres is really to help policy makers make decisions; for example,
Stephane describes:
One issue being explored in this

programme is employment; for instance
theyve got funding for experimentation
in employment and were going to
use this funding, about 5 million, for
experimentation in employment, so I
think our role will be to stimulate with this

money and to make sure that its really
experimental and interesting stuff.
In a complementary approach, centres are also going to be addressing issues around
citizenship participation. Public policy makers try and involve people in planning and
development processes but often participants feel either that they are being consulted at or
that consultation consists of the question: this is what we have decided, what do you think?
This is not to criticise the policy makers; as Stephane remarks:
They try to innovate in terms of methods

and concept [but] because they are very
formal projects, they organise meetings
with experts always in the same way with
people around the table, there is a lack of
methodology, so we think maybe another
way, a laboratory, a living lab is another
possible way for this kind of project.
A major component of these labs will be to support the civil servants themselves; many respond
to the activities of La Transfer by saying it creates sense in my job, seeing the user which I dont
see any more. Regional policy makers are in a difficult position; as Stephane remarks:
They are at the regional level and the

regional level is not the front office of
people, its more of the strategies, more
of the small local government, like the
State at strategy level but he doesnt
know where he is exactly. He has built his
culture from the State, he did not invent

a very typical vision or culture so hes
looking for a new way of doing stuff.
The regional partners for La Transfer are keen to create physical spaces to help develop their
own ways of doing things. This raises both cultural and practical questions. Will designers
still be included in processes run by the local councils themselves or will they be regarded as
superfluous? In terms of the physical environment, research on innovation spaces has shown
that it needs to have some physical qualities such as light and a feeling of openness and
abundance, but also it needs to be a place to escape the day-to-day. This raises significant
problems because the space might not be used every week. Having this space idle is expensive
but equally, if the space is used for other things such as meetings, it loses this sense of other
that promotes creativity and innovation.
On the more positive side, there is the possibility of a cascade of tool design and testing that
enables others to develop or use their own tools. Stephane Vincent reinforces the desire to
develop these sorts of ecosystem spaces:
I understood this with the Mindlab [in

Copenhagen], it makes sure that this place
is not a place of private intelligence, its
not the new place to be or the new place
that will invent, they make training, they
help civil servants to use the methodology,
they are not the only people who can use
the methodology. This lab is not the only
place where there will be creativity, it will
spread and promote and train people to
work like this. So its very important to be
seen as the new place where creativity
can flourish, because the idea is that civil

servants are creative, but they need tools
and places and moments to use it.
It is particularly interesting that Region 27 is developing tools specifically for other people to use
and that the intention is that these tools spread throughout the regions it is working with and
further. Further than this is the idea that these tools are in turn the subject of modification and
redesign, either in one of La Transfers labs or outside them. The idea is that civil servants can
say:
Okay, weve been using this toolkit and its

really good, but what we want to do is, we
want to try something a bit new with it,
and being able to come in to a particular
space and say so this is going to be new,
so were going to go to this new space
and new mind-set and were going to
As Stephane articulates:
When you enter this place you have a new

mind-set and you are supposed to change
when youre out, but when you come here,
for instance, Im wondering if we have to
create a kind of protocol saying when you
are a politician and you enter this place
you are no more a politician. When youre
a young civil servant that just entered the
bureaucracy, youre someone that will

be involved in the process. You lose your
status or you will get a new status which
is I dont know if we need to create a
protocol around this, but I guess weve
got something to do.
Entering a new mind space is the perfect point to pause this case study. It is clear that the areas
of exploration for Stephane and the team of Region 27, particularly developing new methods
and processes, is something that open design should be paying particular attention to, and
often fails to do so.
This case study could hardly be more different to Gadgeteer in presenting new perspectives
on open design. It demands reflection and, in the best French traditions, the key issues extend
below the surface in addition to explicit relevance. In explicit terms we see a group which has
extensive experience of running collaborative prototyping projects for new regional policy that
are founded on open creative processes that involve designers, politicians, businesses and
many other people. We also see an organisation helping civil servants design their own creative
facilitation spaces and their own open design tools. As will see in the final two case studies,
creative facilitation and the design of facilitation are very important in rethinking the role of the
designer within open design.
Below the surface we see activity framed in a way that is quite different to the normal
discussions of open design. This difference and the reflection needed to understand this
new frame and how it relates to other writing on open design is one of the strengths of the
approach that Region 27 adopts.
Case Study 3:
Silver=Gold: Professional Designers Working
in Open Creative Processes
This case study focuses on a commercial co-design project funded by

Eindhoven City Council. The Silver=Gold project employed six professional
designers to undertake a co-design project focusing on the wellbeing
of recently retired residents. Working directly with designers during this
process, the case study concentrates on the relationship between the city
council and the designers, and also on how the designers regard open
creative processes. The results draw out the tensions that professional
designers feel in opening up the creative process, and also a mismatch
between where they feel they add value and the perceptions of the
commissioners of the project.
Introduction
Case studies often offer a retrospective, sometimes sanitised or rose-tinted view of a

project. Looking at the Silver=Gold project was a great opportunity to be part of the
discussions about something that was very much alive and current. The project had just
come to the end of one phase and was moving on to another. This was perfect; there
were completed outcomes and objectives but it was very much in progress. This helped
to draw out more natural, intuitive responses and perspectives from the process. It was
very fortuitous that the participants of the process were so generous in being open and
frank in their discussions. The results are a very interesting snapshot of the thinking of the
group, very much in that time and place. To look at this snapshot directly, the words of the
designers are often included here.
Silver=Gold is a co-design project; this fits well with a study of the role of professional design
in open design. Co-design processes involve both designers and non-designers in the idea
generation part of the process, not just supplying information or data for designers to interpret.
This open creative process is a good match for open design approaches.
Silver=Gold was undertaken by six young design professionals in Eindhoven, a mid-sized city
in the south of the Netherlands. The city has had to cope with the move of Philips out of the
city, with over 25,000 job losses in the last ten years, and design has played an important
part in the regeneration of the city along with thriving design and technical universities.
Silver=Gold was initiated by the City of Eindhoven (the local government) and BrainPort (now
called Capital D), a private sector regional development agency with a strong focus on design
and the creative industries.
With the first phase of this ongoing two-year project running from 2010 to 2012, Silver=Gold was
aimed at helping the recently retired active old members of communities to keep active, with
benefits not only to their own wellbeing, but also the wider community. There was 200,000
funding for this co-design project to recruit the designers to work in three teams on projects
across three communities in Eindhoven.
While Silver=Gold is explicitly a co-design project, Capital D made the decision to not
define what they, or the council, meant by co-design. This unresolved definition of co-
design was also a motivating factor for selecting this project for inclusion as a case study.
Without a standard model to follow, the divergences of interpretation and real practices
of the professional designers were evident and provide an interesting microcosm of the
wider design profession. These different perspectives range from a strong commitment to
collaboration and new forms of creative practice at one end, to the openly opportunistic
exploitation of funding with the belief that clients should not even be given options to select
from at the other. These differences are analysed both in terms of design politics and
process later in the case study.
Finally, the role of Eindhoven City Council is significant here. It is an example of the move
from a strongly hierarchical structure built to provide for communities, that moves to
consultation and then to relinquishing some control and inviting citizens into the creative
and planning process. This change is discussed in more detail in the following PROUD case
study, where in the UK there is a requirement for local government to consult with local
residents if they want to change the environment.
But Eindhoven City Council is also a good example of this. This change is also evident
in a move to a more inclusive process, and marks the shift from a focus on the physical
requirements of urban infrastructure (signs, roads, street furniture) into social infrastructure
(community, interactions, wellbeing).
In this case study there is a focus on the perceptions and approaches of the individuals
involved in the process and how these differ between the participants in that process. In
light of this, it is important to read the voices of the people involved rather than synthesising
these voices into a more conventional narrative.
Eindhoven City Council Perspective
Antoinette Kripps is the Programme Manager for public space in Eindhoven City and here she
outlines the significance of Silver=Gold and the role the city played in the project. Also present
was Ingrid van de Wecht, employed as Project Manager for Silver=Gold by BrainPort.
Antoinette Kripps (AK): Im a Programme Manager of the public space of the government
of Eindhoven and my job is to think of what we need to do in a year to make the public space
better.
We have several points that are very important for us; one of them is to talk and to use the
inhabitants in our plans, not to think whats good for them and have it [given to them], but to
involve them. And the other important thing is design, to think about how you have to design it,
that the use of it is good and that everyone likes it and wants to use it and feels comfortable in
the public space.
Leon Cruickshank (LC): So Silver=Gold is part of your activities?
AK: Silver=Gold is a very good one which fits in it, because we think its important to use design
to solve social problems in the public space, and one of the things we see happen is that we get
more and more older people and we think its important that the older people still use the public
space. That they can meet each other and that they walk there for their vitality important. So
we asked them to think for us in which way we could do that the best. And it was very open; we
didnt have a sight on what the results would be.
The only thing what was important, it had to be for older people and the public space. In the
beginning it was a little bit directed to accessibility, but in the process we saw that other things
were more important, so we focused on that and they had four different groups, had their own
way of searching what was important and making their own solution for it.
Thats very difficult because people from 60 are not the people from 60 who they were 20
years ago, when 20 years ago they were very old and they had flower dresses and they were
grandmas and grandpas, when you were 60. Nowadays, when youre 60, youre young and
youre vital, so theres a big difference between 60 and 90, and both of those groups were in the
process and the designers thought about that in their own way.
LC: How was this process different to the other projects that you run in your programme, or was
it different?
AK: Mainly because we didnt know what the end result would be. Normally we know, we have
to have a design for a new street or something physical and we know what we want and this
time we, even the problem, the description of the problem wasnt clear. So it was a real open
process, in which you search for a problem and solutions. And thats very different from the
normal way we work.
LC: So was there maybe an assumption at the beginning that it would be about accessibility
and then it, the project, shifted?
AK: We do a lot with accessibility, so our own feeling was also is that the most important thing
in a public space? And the designers talked to the people in the street and the neighbourhoods
and they also found out that that wasnt the problem; the problem more was that the shops
were not nearby, that the meetings on the street didnt happen and that kind of stuff.
Normally we work on projects with very physical results, the bench, the pavement, the bricks,
and this was more social and sometimes, one group had a solution to make a healthy walk with
little signs, so the signs for us are physical, so thats something that fits in our normal pattern;
but the website or the little supermarket which comes to the neighbourhood, thats a whole
other way of thinking.
LC: Has that presented challenges to your organisation if youre thinking about taking things
forward and if youre used to buying physical things or having physical interventions, but if
youre thinking about services, is that a challenge to the culture in the council?
AK: That could be, but one of the important things we said to the designers that was important
that what the solution should be, that the government shouldnt be responsible to maintain
it, because we have a lot of problems with the finance nowadays, so the money gets less and
less and also the people who work here. So it was very important that the solutions we thought
about that we could bring them somewhere in which the government isnt responsible to
maintain it. The designers did a very good job on it, because the things they invented, they all
have another way of organisation, not the government is responsible for it, but they found a way
to make other people responsible; and its not only simple for us because we dont have to really
work at it, but it also makes it more a solution for the neighbourhood and not something what
we do; its from them, its their thing.
Ingrid van de Wecht (IW): How do you call it again, the slogan? Less about authority and more
citizenship, thats what its all about nowadays.
AK: So letting the process free by putting it somewhere else, that was very important for us.
And so our role was not so big in the process, but we were at all the workshops, more to advise
the designers in which direction they go, to give input, not to say its not good, or this is not
what we want, but more of a oh, if you think about that, then think also about Lets say they
designed something for the public space that we say oh, think also about the maintenance,
and that kind of stuff. So we were there. And of course we followed the process to see if it
was still for the public space, because that was the important thing for us and that it was for
all the people. So the most important role was to check if it still fits that, the solutions fits by
the question we asked in the beginning. And although what I thought the question was in the
beginning was different from where the process went to, but because we were there ourselves,
and because we understand why, there was no problem.
We notice that its a different way of thinking and we notice too that when we are a part of such
a group [of designers], we suddenly also have other thoughts and ideas. So, where you normally
think oh, normal stuff, you are a part of this process, you notice that your own way of thinking
changes too; that you get yourself more creative and thats a very positive thing about it.
Its not always, we had some of those projects before, one of them was on a square which is
dark and not many people come there and no one likes it. The designers had a few ideas and
they were good, but they were not so good that youd say oh, thats one thing well do. There
was a very good thing, but it was very difficult to implement, but it triggered us to come with
another idea that was easier to implement, but we noticed that through the process we could
come with the solutions ourselves. But if we didnt had that process we didnt thought of that
solution at all, so were used to doing things in your way and they do it another way and its very
good that both worlds meet each other.
When you are a designer everything is free, but the real world isnt everything free, so its very
good that we learn from each other. And you see that in those processes that that happens.
Antoinette underscores here the changing landscape that places more emphasis on personal
responsibility and engagement, mirroring the perspective of many regional councils in the UK.
This change of emphasis helps create fertile ground for approaches such as open design (and
co-design) that help realise this more active and creative engagement.
The second issue arising from the above interview strikes at the heart of the design profession.
Antoinette believes the benefits of Silver=Gold are not really in the design solutions proposed by
the design teams. She regards these as somewhat interesting but not earth-shattering or really
surprising. In contrast to some of the designers employed for the project, the value did not
come from their creative ideas. For Antoinette, the benefits were in experiencing first-hand the
creative, designerly approaches and methods used by the team.
The often implicit approaches and methods that designers use are drilled into design students
at art school, but Antoinette sees these as something that can be adapted and applied over and
over again, and here we see design (and designers) as a catalyst or facilitator of change rather
than directly leading innovation.
The Silver=Gold Designers Perspective
As part of the case study, the designers working on the Silver=Gold project took part in a group
discussion. This tension between the designers and council workers perception was evident
in the discussion undertaken; it was hosted by Ingrid van de Wecht, in her role overseeing
the project. Here it is clear that the designers saw themselves as the leaders in the creative
process, rather than adopting the less hierarchical, collaborative, nuanced position in a wider
set of innovation processes needed for successful co-design. The discussion centred around
six key questions:
1. What are the defining characteristics of the Silver=Gold project?

2. What is co-design? How is it different from normal inclusive design?
3. What was the process you employed in the project and how was this different from the
official process?
4. What were the outcomes of Silver=Gold? Were they predictable or were you surprised?
5. Is co-design emerging as a new way of working or is it just hype?
6. How do you see the design profession changing in the next few years?
The resulting discussion revealed a wide divergence within the group in terms of the intellectual
engagement with the project, with some unashamedly taking this on as a job in hard times
rather than being interested in co-design, while others were very much interested in the role of
designers in the process, as well as coming up with good solutions. The contributions in the
discussion have been anonymised here.
Politics and Power
Overall in the group there was a strong feeling that co-design approaches were reflecting
political forces in the Netherlands (but also from their experience in other countries in Europe).
INT6: I think its the position of the government itself, I mean, sorry, the city itself. I think its a
brave thing to do to take a new approach somehow and see if it works, or how it works. I think
for me thats the main characteristic of Silver=Gold, the position of government, Eindhoven City
and neighbourhoods and then using designers to be mediators.
This project is like a turning point from bottom up, emphasising locality or having the senses
in local surroundings to see what can change. Everything used to be top down, even now
politics are more or less top down and its difficult for society to grasp which directions
politicians go and its for politicians difficult to sense what neighbourhoods or society
wants. I think with these type of projects it could be a whole new way of designing, a whole
system.
INT1: I think what we are doing here is using design more as a method or a way of thinking to
combine our skills with each others skills and to just look through a certain filter to the world
and, at least thats what it is for me. Its a little bit blurry
Every government has to, when they want to do new things with public space, they have to
co-design, or participate, so its especially in projects about public space, right now, every
project has participation in it. When I design something without participation, Ill be sent back to
the drawing board. If I dont involve people who are living there or whatever, its not good. And
thats maybe the other way round.
I think we should decide it ourselves, because when the public authorities are abusing co-
design to show well were so democratic, like you had these open evenings to have the
opinions of everybody once and now this is co-design, I think then youre doing something
wrong. But if you say co-design could really help us to get well-deliberated and well-developed
solutions, then its okay, then I think it might be good, so it depends.
This perspective echoes the suspicion that those such as Rick Poynor have for innovation,
and more generally on the use of design thinking in general business activity, as promoted by
those such as Roger Martin. The concern is that design (and here co-design) is being hijacked
by non-designers, whether this is local authorities or business. The response presented by
some of the designers in the discussion is that they need to be involved to get control of these
projects and processes. This does not indicate that they were champions of approaches
such as co-design, but rather were more concerned by the potential effect this would have on
their professional position as designers, and where they were positioned in the hierarchical
structures that form user/client/designer/commissioner relationships.
This notion of power (both political and interpersonal) is a very important guiding motivation for
Stephane Vincent in Region 27, discussed in the previous case study. The challenging of rigid
hierarchies and the move to more interconnected relationships has profound implications for
the day-to-day activities of designers.
Most designers have an established method or mode of working and use this in a fairly intuitive
manner on their projects, with little reflection on the process; of course there is a great deal of
reflection on the specific challenge they are addressing, but less on the way they are addressing
it. The shifting nature of this new post-structural open design context demands both active
reflection and new adaptive processes that need to be modified to fit each new challenge.
This is driven by the need in open creative processes for negotiation between designers and
non-designers who all have different perspectives, creative languages and frames of reference.
Open creative processes in this context require active tailoring or even radical modification of a
designers methods to respond to the context of each new project.
To an extent the designers in the room recognise this and at this point there was a change
in the discussion with the designers, from talking about politics as local government, big P
Politics, to an exploration of power, responsibility and hierarchies, small p politics.
INT7: It has to do with power, because normally as the designer you have the power and now
everybody has the power, the same power, even elderly people have the same power as we
have. Because when they say thats not a good idea, the next week we couldnt come up with
the idea no more.
LC: I think its more about who has the power. Youre in this collaborative process, but actually,
do you guys have the power?
INT6: Ultimately we have, because we decide what we show, and they can only choose what
we show, and they cant choose the other things we dont show. So we make a selection of the
options, and I think within co-design, we give more options than I give when I design alone.
When I design alone and the client asks me something, I will only give one option, because
when you give two options they want to choose and Im the designer, Im the one whos
supposed to be the chooser.
But thats how a solo design project works. When I start designing, when I get the assignment, I
get ten ideas oh, Im gonna show them all and then I go to the client and he says oh, I want
this, I want this, and I sharpen my ideas, and then at the result we have a strange co-design.
But I decide no, thats not possible, he cant choose from this, this, this. Now, for the last few
years I said is this. And then when they [the client] say no, I say Ill come back next week with
this [single solution], not with this, this and this.
INT1: Its also confusing, I think, sometimes for clients, because they are not that good in
making the right choices.
In some ways this is the antithesis of co-design, not trusting clients (or users) to even
select between options in the design process. While this position was not universally held
by the group, these ideas did resonate with a number of participants in the Silver=Gold
project. This mismatch between the co-design principles of collaborative creativity with
its open creative processes and the preferred practice of (these) designers is symptomatic
of the opportunistic nature of the designers involved, but to be fair, of designers in
general. Conventional design education trains designers to be opportunistic, flexible and
entrepreneurial. In this respect, the group of designers was split between those reflecting
on the nature of design and open creative processes, and those looking for funding and
willing to mouth the words of co-design when required, but seeing it as little more than an
information-gathering technique.
INT7: Is it a method? For me its trendy method to design. You can use Google, you can use a
dictionary, you can use, yeah for me its a kind of inspiration, you can go on the street and ask
everybody, and if you say okay, this is my rule, Im only going to ask people on the street to
design this project, Im sure that you get a totally out of you another design if you lock yourself
up.
Weak Outcomes?
One of the potential reasons for the difficulty designers have with co-design (and even more
so with open design) is the perception that the results are diluted or somehow weaker than in
traditional design processes. In the discussion with Silver=Gold designers there was the notion
of averaging a solution and also, in contrast, that a design needed some sharp edges to
keep it strong and distinctive. There could be a bit of cultural influence here since, before De
Stijl, design in the Netherlands had been more likely to be angular than organic, some say in
response to the flat horizons and very much man-made environment.
INT1: I find it difficult when you talk with more people then co-design gets average? I really
dont agree with that actually.
INT10: No, me neither.
INT6: Average is the wrong word, because we use average in the negative.
INT1: Im not so sure, it does lose the sharp edges.
INT6: Well, you have to combine for the best results, so you have to keep it sharp. There are
more sharp edges and you take one sharp edge, or you combine them.
INT1: Yeah but you, as far as Im concerned, then you generate together this new sharp idea.
This touches on an issue for all collaborative design, but especially in processes that
have participants with very different perspectives. The challenge is how to avoid design
by committee. The well-worn adage that a camel is a horse designed by committee is
appropriate here, and collaborative design can often be rather average. One reason for the
failure of participative processes is that contributors often have a strong view or perspective,
and the collaborative process is focused on getting the participants to compromise and
accept a lesser or more general articulation of this original vision. If participants are willing to
accept a compromised (for them, worse) outcome, these larger solution spaces will overlap
between participants and compromised solutions will start to emerge. Of course the result
is that everyone is equally unhappy, comparing what could have been to the compromised
position.
This really is a difficult nut to crack, but there are alternatives to this averaging approach and
they stem from getting participants to step back from concrete solutions and proposals in
the process. The challenge is to get participants to concentrate on aims, motivations, effects;
that is, to think about changes in the experience for them (and other people involved), rather
than thinking about actual products and services. This stepping back from nuts and bolts
problem solving and thinking more conceptually is something designers are taught to do (often
implicitly), but, as we will see later in the PROUD: Beyond the Castle case study, it is something
that can be facilitated in non-designers. The advantage of not thinking about practical issues
for a while is that participants can more easily go beyond their starting positions. This is the
start of a collaborative process to reach solutions better (by their personal assessment) than
the ones they had individually at the start of the process. When it works well, co-design results
in solutions better than the sum of their parts, but achieving this is difficult, not well understood
and different for each group of individuals.
This transcendence of initial ideas is achievable with a well-designed process and good
facilitation. What is less clear is how this could be achieved when participants are working in a
more distributed autonomous manner that characterises some open design approaches. How
do you help someone working alone in Beijing or Trondheim or Inverness to go beyond their
initial assumptions? This is one of the interesting interaction/process design challenges where
professional designers can make a major contribution to the development of open design in
general. This challenge is currently the focus of research at Lancaster University, using new
forms of online collaborative learning to try and engender this conceptual agility in participants.
Design Process
While the working practices of the designers contributing to Silver=Gold have been described
above, there was also a discussion of the particular processes they used in Silver=Gold. The
first thing to note is that there was an absence of words such as facilitation, and collaboration
with non-designers. Some of the designers in the group thought about collaboration in terms of
co-design being an activity between designers.
INT1: Co-design is exchanging ideas with non-designers or other disciplines to generate ideas
and other solutions. So for me, its really about working together with non-designers in other
disciplines, otherwise whats the use? Otherwise I shouldnt call it co-design.
This response was not universally held in the group; for most, rather than enabling creative
contributions from non-designers, there was a much stronger emphasis on the designer having
the skills and abilities to be able to walk in the shoes of the older people, so that they could
effectively design for them without a significant input from them.
INT4: What am I actually doing? Try to be an elderly person actually. You want to know how it is
to be old now in this time actually. What are dos and donts when you are old now?
Designers thinking they can become the client is not an unusual approach; sometimes this
is helped by aids such as old people suits to help designers experience the restrictions of
movement that an old person might experience. This is at odds with the philosophy of open
and co-design where research tells us that actually the useful information from users is very
sticky and not at all easy for outsiders to acquire. An alternative approach to attempting to
become the user in the project was to discuss the possibility that the recently retired were
similar enough to the designers that good solutions for the designer almost fitted the retired
participants, and only minor modifications were required.
INT7: I think this project is about for us, for our team, is about approach and the way [Designer
M] said we want to help elderly people, but then, as a result, we want to speak to them as we
speak to each other as to young people, and in a way, in the first idea I thought elderly, I have
to do different, but we more and more come back to the idea we have to do the same, and not
different because theyre elderly. And my first idea was I have to do it different, but now I come
back to that idea, I have to do it the same as I approach young people or anyone else. That for
me is key of this project.
INT1: And the conversations we have is just like were talking right now, its just well okay their
bodies are physically eighty three or whatever age they have, but mentally theyre still if theyre
lucky they are still quite capable of having a good conversation. So actually, mainly what we
came across is that the solutions we had to come up with were not just giant WELL WERE
GOING TO DESIGN THIS, there was just very slight alterations to make sure they can still do
the small things we can do as well, but you have to facilitate those. But they were very tiny
interventions.
This modification of intuitive solutions fits with conventional day-to-day practices of designers
that in reality often have a very tenuous connection to the people who use their products and
services. This is despite the rather idealised processes that are presented when designers
are under closer scrutiny. In terms of an explicitly co-design project, though, it is a little
disappointing. Rather than seeing the engagement, intelligence and experience of participants
as a potential reservoir of creativity to be tapped into, some of the designers saw participants at
best as a data store to be used.
INT5: I think we just mentioned already what was our experience; it was just more a user-
centred process, so we just talk to a lot of people and just gather a lot of information, use all this
knowledge and experience to generate and create ideas itself.
Conclusion
The designers of the Silver=Gold project are talented, committed, passionate, good designers,
and this case study does not criticise them in any way. The intention here was to look at a
co-design project with a real budget and real designers, clients and participants, and to get
under the skin of the process. Going further, the aim was to explore some of the tensions,
apprehension and misconceptions that accompany projects with an open creative process
in a real-world context. It is greatly to the credit of both BrainPort and the designers that they
were comfortable enough to go beyond an idealised presentation of the process to get to real
feelings, opinions and conflicts.
To some extent, these tensions were invited by BrainPort by not defining their approach to
co-design or establishing a common understanding with the design teams. As it was, this lack
of clarity proved to be an excellent way of highlighting the base-line level of engagement and
understanding of co-design of the individual designers and ultimately to draw out a longer and
more fruitful creative discussion on the subject.
This book was written on the premise that the design industry is going through seismic changes
that will get more evident in the coming years. This quote from one of the Silver=Gold designers
exemplifies some of these changes and why they are making for an uncomfortable time for
young designers.
INT1: I hear the story about the Danish Railway Company that were really seen as being the
best design managed company in Europe, and the designers in the company are already also
started to train or to have other colleagues involved in design processes. And now they dont
need the designers any more, they think. So its really true that they really get rid of their design
department, because they said well, we know how to do it ourselves.
The perceived (and in some cases, very real) danger is that designers will contribute to
processes, collaborations, initiatives and creative practices that will result in their making
themselves extinct. There is also an encouraging positive side to these changes, as recognised
by the same designer who was worried about designing out designers.
INT1: I saw it [Silver=Gold] also as a way to trigger the people in the neighbourhood to maybe
actually design themselves. Because I have the feeling that we are quite passive these days,
our generation also is quite passive and with these kinds of projects we can trigger each
other.
There is no doubt that the design profession faces great challenges in the future as the means
of production for both physical and digital design become more accessible to non-designers. It
is also evident that there is a very broad range of experience, capability and interest in emerging
new ways of working with contemporary designers. We need to find ways to draw the type of
young, talented designers that participated in Silver=Gold into open creative processes in a
way that recognises their talents and abilities, without them feeling they need to dominate the
creative process.
These challenges can be met but there needs to be a fundamental shift in the processes,
methods and approaches that designers use in open and co-design projects. This shift needs
to include opening up the creative process and welcoming in others, rather than simply using
them as sources of information, or worse as a PR activity without bearing on the real design
activity. There is also a responsibility on all participants to make the outcomes of these sorts
of open processes better than if designers had worked in isolation. If this is not evident, open
design will never become well established and well regarded.
This change of culture is something that will take a long time, a few years at least, to achieve
and will ultimately grow out of changes in design education. The following case study examines
how education is responding to these new requirements; in particular we focus on new
initiatives at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
In the short term there are substantial challenges for working designers to create new tools,
processes and methods that allow both professional and non-professional designers to
contribute in the best possible way in open design processes. Returning to Silver=Gold, the
council regarded the real value as coming from experiencing the processes that the designers
were using; how much more benefit would there have been if the designers were thinking
directly about transferable processes, rather than this being (for them) a by-product of their
normal practice?
Case Study 4:
Educating Open Designers
In this case study we look at the value of facilitation in open design. Facilitation
skills are often alien to designers schooled in traditional design values of
individuality. To counter this, some leading design educators include facilitation
in their curricula. In particular we look at the role of facilitation on the Industrial
Design course at Delft Technical University. Through this a new breed of open
designers is emerging.
It is easy to see why giving non-designers a creative role can make designers nervous. The
conversion of people into designers through reading a book (or a magazine article) on design
thinking can be disastrous. There are examples of an owner-manager of a company being so
inspired by design thinking that they take over the design function of the company, with limited
success. Equally though, design cannot stand Canute-like against new forms of production
where designers do not act as gatekeepers, for example, for new websites or business cards
or many other designed objects. The opportunity then is to engage seriously with the challenge
of how to help people be creative in the way that gives them the best chance of success.
This could be working with a design agency in a traditional way, or in a co-design process
with designers and others working together symbiotically, or it could be a vernacular design
divorced from professional design altogether.
Open design offers an exciting option in the development of really new inclusive processes,
even if at the moment these approaches are still very much emerging. This resonates with
Clayton Christensens ideas about how dominant businesses and accepted wisdom are
superseded by newcomers; in telecommunications, we see this in Nokia and Research
in Motion (Blackberry). As discussed earlier in this book, Christensen argues that it is the
unacknowledged changes in success criteria and the initially small size of the market that
resulted in multiple waves of bankruptcy over a 50-year period. Could this pattern be seen to be
emerging in the design profession?
The overall market for open design activity is currently small and tends towards the non-
critical, for example, t-shirts, mugs and the like. Mirroring Christensens analysis of hard drives,
open design may have different success criteria to traditional design and has the potential to
meet new needs more effectively than traditional design. Could this be the start of a new type
of design overcoming the traditional designer? Only time will tell if this is a reality or wishful
thinking.
For the design profession to play a meaningful role in open design, designers need to change.
Not all of them, but the ones who want to contribute actively to this growing area. In some cases
this happens through personal development or chance in the natural course of professional
development, but this is despite, rather than supported by, normal design education. For a more
widespread engagement with open design processes, and to really develop and improve these
processes, there needs to be a raft of new design students moving into the profession with
different perspectives to the current design orthodoxy.
Traditional Design Education
One thing that is clear is that designers and the design profession are facing new challenges
(and of course opportunities). The traditional and still ubiquitous forms of design education
are really not too different from the Bauhaus teaching of the 1920s and early 1930s. This
marks the birth of contemporary design education, in Weimar, a small town in the east of
Germany. The Bauhaus principles are best summarised by Alfred Barr, the Director of the
Museum of Modern Art 1938, in his preface to the book Bauhaus. This book was edited by
Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer, first director and a leading light of the Bauhaus movement
respectively.
most students should face the fact that their future should be involved primarily with
industry and mass production, rather than with individual craftsmanship
teachers in schools of design should be men who are in advance of their profession rather
than safely and academically in the rearguard
the schools of design should, as the Bauhaus did, bring together the various arts of
painting, architecture, theatre, photography, weaving, typography, etc., into a modern
synthesis which disregards conventional distinctions between the fine and applied arts
it is harder to design a first rate chair than to paint a second rate painting and much more
useful
a school of design should have on its faculty the purely creative and disinterested artist
such as the easel painter as a spiritual counterpoint to the practical technician in order that
they may work and teach side by side for the benefit of the student
manual experience of materials is essential to the student of design experience at first
confined to free experiment and then extended to the practical workshop
the study of rational design in terms of techniques and materials should be only the first
step in the development of a new and modern sense of beauty
because we live in the 20th century, the student architect or designer should be offered
no refuge in the past but should be equipped for the modern world in its various aspects,
artistic, technical, social, economic, spiritual, so that he may function in society not as a
decorator but as a vital participant. (Bayer, 1938)
For its time this was revolutionary; previously designers were trained in observational
drawing from classical plaster sculptures and then worked as apprentices in companies to
pick up what skills they could as they went along. The Bauhaus model changed this into the
form of design education we see today. This spread of new thinking on design education
was accelerated by the rise of the national socialists in Germany. The radical thinking of
the Bauhaus was too much for them; they drove the lecturers (masters) out of the country
and finally closed the Bauhaus altogether. The masters took their new thinking to design
institutions where they settled in the UK, Scandinavia, the USA and Switzerland.
Even in todays new media or digital design courses, these principles are still evident,
for example, in the way they bring together theory and practice; for the twentieth century
this stood design in good stead. The question is what will be the guiding principles of the
twenty-first century and how will these principles be translated into actions that help form
new types of designer? Without subjecting the principles above to a forensic analysis
(after 75 years, they hold up extraordinarily well), the relationship between design and
mass production is becoming increasingly confused. Often mass-produced things are now
made to order (for example, cars or furniture), while for the web we almost cannot avoid
generating personalised, unique and dynamic documents through platforms such as Twitter
and Facebook. Similarly an engagement with materials that was straightforward at the
Bauhaus is now more complicated; what is a digital truth to materials? These issues, along
with the opening up of the means of production, are necessitating a rethink of traditional
design education. A search for new design education principles and approaches takes us to
TU (Technical University) Delft. This is one of the pre-eminent places in the world to study
product and industrial design.
Teaching Facilitation to Designers
The work of two academics at TU Delft, Jan Buijs and Marc Tassoul, is distinctive in exploring
the role of facilitation in design education. Working closely together, they cross between
the academic study of theories such as creative problem solving (CPS) and facilitation and
how to relate these to design education. They have published extensively in this area (Buijs,
2007; Tassoul and Buijs, 2007). Worthy of special attention is Marc Tassouls book, Creative
Facilitation (2009).
Creative Facilitation presents a fascinating window into a hybrid space that connects the
prodigious literature and activity around CPS (mostly in the field of management and often
quite alien in form and conclusions to the fields of design) and the practical activities that
go into the act of designing. In fact this is an excellent place to start to understand the
act of designing. The book does this by instructing readers how to facilitate creativity in
others and acts as a textbook for a course (or module) on creative facilitation delivered to
design students in TU Delft. Marc Tassoul teaches this course on creative facilitation to help
the students draw other non-designers into creative processes. Marc was educated as a
designer at TU Delft and also has his own agency specialising in facilitation in a multitude
of contexts; for example, promoting creative exchanges between companies, ministries and
smallmedium-sized enterprises, a recent event saw him working with ESA (the European
Space Agency) to explore how their research and activities can have a wider impact.
Over a series of meetings with Marc Tassoul, we discussed the interface between design
educator, design itself and the role facilitation can play in this. Our starting point was
that design students are conventionally taught that they should talk to users (as they
are called) and try to understand their problems, and then they go away and are very
clever and get their Magic Markers out and design something. Facilitation is in contrast
to this; it is not about the facilitator being creative; it is about creating in a context in
which everyone can be creative. Marcs response was that: Its not contributing within
a set area. If youre able to build an atmosphere in which you can help people suspend
judgment and consider more contributions than one system up to that moment, then that
is valid for any problem.
This draws out the idea that the facilitator needs to not care about content, or rather they
need to not judge the ideas. My experience with professional designers is that they can find
it quite difficult to not get in there and try to control things. People such as Guy Jullier argue
that designers are trained to see themselves as special, rather heroic figures. This caricature
certainly resonates with the authors fairly extensive experience of working with (and being) a
designer.
Again Marc responds:
I agree immediately. With architects its

even worse, they tend to be stubborn.
They come really macho and they want
to take over the whole thing, the whole
session. So there is a tension there with
experienced designers who are used to be
leading the process.
I see three kinds of design. One is user-

oriented, or user-centred, another one
is design driven, and the third one is
pragmatic. Now some designers might
be in one of these three, if theyre very
design-driven like Philippe Starck or
those people, the designer comes with
the proposal, the designer comes with a
synthesis. In user-centred design, youre
already more a servant of the user. In
pragmatic design you dont really have
a big answer, you just step into the
workshop and you make it. So thats
what happens often in the case of perfect
circumstances. In design-driven design
then the designer is God, the designer
defines what end should be etcetera,
etcetera.
This need to dominate can be a serious problem when working in an open manner. Here
collaboration, welcoming external ideas and no centralised authority are the watchwords.
Marc addresses these issues in his students by drawing the assumptions his design students
have about hierarchies into the open and examining them directly. This is accompanied by
discussions about group dynamics and how there is a kind of alchemy in a group that, if it is
just right, offers more than the sum of its parts.
The increased sensitivity to others and their ability to contribute has the potential for a wider
impact on the designers activities as professionals beyond the direct interaction with external
participants in a process.
As Marc explains:
Its a leadership style. Its one particular

style of leading people and there are many
leadership styles and this was one we
explore in leadership styles and they can
use this in other situations. In meetings,
if youre project leader, you have
become familiar with a particular kind of
leadership.
What I think, in the case of facilitation,

were not changing people, it might be that
they are initiating understanding that they
dont know in themselves yet, and they
might discover it later on, but now it works
to accelerate the brain. Another thing
that Im only speculating now might be
they get to know that theres not just one
leadership style, or one style of making
things happen, and that might stick with
them or not, but Im speculating.
It seems clear that, while we will always have the star designers (as celebrities), this is not
necessarily a status we should all aspire to achieve and other types of design may ultimately be
more impactful, if less visible. The designer taking a facilitating approach looks to encourage
a wide range of people to have the maximum possible positive impact in a process. Following
this there will be a greater range of different people involved in creative processes. This in
turn makes creative facilitation to connect these people a much more important skill. The
engagement with the skills of facilitation proves seductive to a handful of Marcs design
students each year. They make the transition to professional facilitators, leaving the world of
industrial design behind.
Facilitation
Looking more directly at facilitation, there seem to be two broad approaches. The first one is
based around structures and planning, while the other is much more reliant on improvisation
and is closer to performance and theatre. The interesting thing in terms of open design is
when and how to use improvised processes and how one gets to a point where you are good
at improvising, even though, in a theatre context, the notion of judging improvisation is alien.
Marcs response is also interesting in redefining these issues in terms of process and space,
but also introducing the need for experience to work effectively in an improvised manner.
Let me first make the distinction between

process and space. So you could be more
preoccupied by process, but also provide
a space in which people can be creative
and then in process, you will see people
are very conscious about designing a very
detailed, explicit process and executing
that process; so you can have more or
less explicitly controlled process. When
you use the word improvisation, Im very
spontaneous and intuitive and if Im really
feeling good and Im not too stressed
then Ive got a wonderful intuition, I dont
know what Im doing and Im doing the
right things and part of that is mastering,
part of it also has to be intuitive and I dont

think one is better than the other. So Ive
great appreciation for people who are
able to do a beautiful explicit plan, written
down if they want, with some modification
and some variations here and there, but
I think improvisation depends on the
person; it also depends on mastery, that
you already master your craft, youve got
ten or 15 years experience. And students
do a little bit of both, only occasionally
overlap, but students should start in a
more explicit way, a more written down
and controlled point, controlling yourself is
more important.
What I tell the students is give them some

of the experience, talk about somebody
who has 15 years of experience and more,
and then you might think that that person
is not prepared themselves. But theyve
got so much to use at the back of their
minds, so its not really improvisation.
But if I see students do it [improvised
facilitation] as novices, then I think its
completely wrong, because they dont

have this level, they dont have this
experience and then improvisation might
be just lazy about preparing your session
and it becomes also often a stupid
session, very superficial and frustrating.
People up to say intermediate level must
have a very thorough preparation and then
during the session you know enough at
the start so you can turn with variations
and you can depend on the situation.
This effortless improvisation of facilitation drawing on long experience is not so dissimilar to
the flow of ideas that experienced designers can generate. They use the same type of flexible,
practised but never quite repeated routines established as cognitive tools over time to generate
new concepts. This is one of the motivations to explore whether design and facilitation have the
potential to be more closely connected in a mutually supportive manner.
Designing Facilitation
To undertake the module in creative facilitation, the students at TU Delft have to step outside
their role as industrial designers to engage with groups of people as facilitators. They have
to become agnostic to the content of discussions and non-judgmental of ideas; they are also
led by the group dynamics. In doing this they have to put away many of the skills and abilities
that help define them as individuals and emerging professionals. For example, they are great
communicators (graphic and verbal). They are also adept at the evaluation and combination of
disparate concepts and can think in abstract terms practically at the same time.
The question is: can designers act in an open, facilitator capacity but still exploit their designerly
skills, either during the session or in the development (in fact, design) of the sessions in which
they are facilitating? The potential benefit of this is that, rather than having to change thinking
and doing practices into facilitator mode, designers may be able to build on the things they
excel at and so introduce new innovative possibilities for effective facilitation.
This is something that Marc has touched upon in his own practice:
One day we did a session in a zoo, and

we had a space where we would do our
session, but every 45 minutes people
would be sent out into the zoo with
different tasks.
Actually in our course as well, students

have to plan a session and one of the
criteria is that the whole plan is a one-
story session. And a one-story session is
really about synthesis. Every step in your
plan, or every detail in your plan should
help build the idea of your session, and
preferably also have some kind of analogy
with the subject that youre working on,
or sources of inspiration. So I dont like
just some stupid game as an icebreaker,
or trying to make it work as an analogy for
the whole event.
In the session we develop new beds in

which one can wash patients in hospital.
With wet skin, the big problem is youre
lying in bed weeks after weeks, its
horrible, very painful, etcetera.

So theres a big attention also to drying
the skin properly, and we start the
session with asking for a volunteer
and two or three people are pretending
that they are washing this patient, and
we have some sales people in and
they were completely flabbergasted
by the experience, because we also
asked people who played the patients
and really imagined that they are the
patient. They didnt have to take their
clothes off, but just imagine in that place
the process. So as an icebreaker this
really works nice and then when you do
idea generation you really go to more
essential stuff than your initial ideas.
Here Marc equates designing a facilitation session with a planning process. Creating session
plans can be an effective tool for analysing and role-playing through an event; in effect this can
be a type of conceptual prototyping, especially with an experienced group of people running
through the activities planned and the implications of these, as can role-playing in events. There
is, however, a more creative and, in a sense, traditional way to design facilitation. This involves
really thinking creatively, of going through an ideation process that includes the synthesis
of crazy ideas into interesting sensible practical ones. This is not something the students at
TU Delft do, so really the facilitated sessions they run are conceived or devised rather than
designed using their normal processes. They do sometimes make things to assist in the
facilitation of sessions. As Marc says:
If its something for handicapped people

they start in the evening [before the event]
already choosing their handicap. For
example, they will have the whole evening
and night til the next morning, one will
choose to be blind, another one will not
be able to use their leg, or their hand, or
anything, and then theyll go and do a
session. Now if you go into the session
with a particular element of new product
development, we might have example
products there personally I would put
posters up that can be used as analogies
or metaphors or sources of inspiration
so those kind of props, yes. And then Ive
got sweets and Ive got lots of props, Ive
got big cases full of props, little animals,
beanie bags, Lego, anything, and its a
random collection of toys. If they can use
it, they use it.
This response is interesting in showing the flickering between planning and the starting point
of designed events, getting people to simulate the challenges of a disability, then moving into a
mode where objects are assigned a meaning and function spontaneously in the moment during
an improvised facilitation session.
There is a resonance with a more overtly design-of-facilitation approach here but they are not
quite the same thing. For example, there might be the need to pitch an idea to a group as part
of the session; this could be done by standing up and each person talking, but if there are too
many people, this takes a long time and can be boring. One response to this was to design
a fun framework to help presentations move along at speed and for people to remember the
names and faces of the people associated with each idea that was being pitched. People wrote
their idea on sheets of paper cut to look like a t-shirt with a comically enlarged and pixelated
picture of their head stuck on it. The short presentations were then associated with the
individual, helping people follow up in the later discussions. Here a little design creativity helped
along rapid presentations.
An alternative approach to this sort of presentation challenge was adopted by a project where
100 people had to create a short presentation and share these within 40 minutes. The design
team (led by the author at Lancaster University) developed an iPad application that allowed
individuals to respond to a key question and create a short audio-visual presentation, and for
this to be presented and discussed in groups of four, with the most interesting of these to be
shared with other groups across the large room. After further voting, the eight most interesting
responses were presented to the whole group. Here the design of the interaction between
groups (and the technological solutions that enabled this) allowed for facilitated discussions that
would be impossible in a purely improvised form.
These examples prompted Marc to remember more designed activities that he had developed
in the past, for example:
I have done sessions, for example, with

300 inhabitants of the city of Rotterdam.
We said that all the different problems
people had were all part of one bigger
problem, and so we made giant puzzle
pieces and at the end presentation all
the pieces of the puzzle could be fitted
together, and they had to present their
idea on one piece of the puzzle. And then
we could show symbolically that all these
solutions could come together again,
even if they were in sub-groups during

the day. We use some of the props or
the group dynamics, the flow of people,
or the flow of organisation, lets call it
the logistics of people, you use it as a
metaphor for process, which is beautiful.
And I also think that its because of an
idea that you get ideas, so your story of
the picture, the portrait and the t-shirt is
beautiful, its really about empowering
people and to feel free.
In terms of facilitation, there is a trade-off between highly prepared approaches and the
flexibility of improvisation, and each activity is in a different place on that spectrum. Also there
are some people who are just not cut out to be improvisers who need a strong structure.
Similarly there are also people who are inherently reacting to the emotional fields in a room, and
to give them a structure is not going to be productive; they will just ignore it it is not in their
nature to follow a plan. There seems to be an opportunity in facilitation to design tools that help
other people develop their own facilitated events, or their own knowledge-exchange events. The
interesting challenge is to develop tools that are not in the form of a recipe that people feel they
have to follow blindly. As Marc says:
Yeah, that fits also with preparation. If

youve got a good preparation, its a good
session plan; its like the bass player and
the drummer staying in the tune that
youre playing and then the soloists getting
freedom to take risks, but the bass player
is still there, you know, bringing you back
into the melody or bringing you back to the

actual tune. So Miles Davis, for example,
when he was playing with his soloists, he
would always push them to the edge or
over the edge, really take risks every time
again and again. And in the end he would
take very large risks that would transcend
the whole structure of that song. But okay,
one thing we havent talked about and
that is the person who is in the role of the
facilitator. I look at learning to facilitate as
three different categories of competences.
One is tools and techniques, things you

can look at in books, you can also do an
exam on that, etcetera, and the answer is
right or wrong.
The other side, there is a personality of

the facilitator, which is just as important
a criteria, and those can only develop
with practice and through conversation
together. So theres no way that a book
can help you to learn this. The third is
tactics or practices used, but its about
groups generating of ideas; they need the

memory of being in an experience.
What is explicitly taught at TU [Delft], very

honestly put it could be that teaching
students in creative facilitation helps them
to become more conscious of a process
that can be designed; its not just some
improvised activity its something very
substantial in the whole timeline that got
the result.
The Benefits of Facilitation in Open Design
There are a number of things to draw from these interviews that are significant for the wider
development of open design practices, both within design education, but also in the context of
professional design activity. The first thing to recognise is the innovative nature of this initiative
in Delft and the benefits this gives students in an open design context. Many design courses
talk about engaging users in the design processes but this almost always only extends as far
as designers treating users as an information source. Conventionally in design, users supply
feed data that is fed into a closed creative process where the designers come up with solutions.
The course at Delft places participants inside the creative process; this is a difficult thing for
traditional designers to accept but giving non-designers the opportunity to be creative is a
key, perhaps the key, component of open design. This flipping between normal designing
and stopping being a designer to help others be creative is very difficult. This is critical to the
creative facilitation process and also an indicator of the mental agility skills required in the open
design arena.
Looking in more depth at the teaching of creative facilitation, the improvised approach that
Marc Tassoul uses in his own personal creative practice is not recommended for design
students; they need much more experience before this improvised approach is likely to be
successful. This mirrors how we think about the acquisition of design skills and expertise. This
process is well described by people such as Donald Schn, Brian Lawson and Kees Dorst,
who all recognise a process of consciously acquiring design expertise until practitioners reach
a point where they are able to act intuitively. In the ten weeks of the creative facilitation course
it is impossible to give students the experience to develop this improvisational approach to
facilitation, but latent abilities and interests can be awakened and the journey to becoming a
skilled facilitator can be started.
The Future of Facilitation in Design
To grow and develop, open design needs to harness some of the experience and collective
wisdom within the design professions. To achieve this, we need to develop a new breed of
designer not tied up in the cult of personality often imbued in traditional design education.
The introduction of facilitation training at TU Delft is effective and innovative in this respect.
There is a further step to be taken here that would change the complexion of the course and
the interplay between design and facilitation, and has the potential to make open design
processes more fruitful. There is the possibility of designers not having to stop designing
while still relinquishing their usual dominant position in the idea generation/creative parts of a
design process. This is hinted at in Marcs personal practice, but is not something students are
exposed to during the course.
In the interviews with Marc, I introduced the concept of designing facilitation. At the moment
students on the creative facilitation courses have to construct a plan for their session, then
deliver this with an external group. The opportunity here is to really think about how to design
a session, with as much research, iteration, prototyping and testing as one would put into the
design of a new chair or iPhone app.
The potential benefits of helping designers to use their skills in a facilitation context are
significant. Strategically the ability designers have in both problem finding and problem
solving gives them a huge advantage in the conception (design) of situations that support
facilitation. More concretely, skills such as visualisation, interaction design and product/
service/system design all have applications in the creation of facilitation activities. This is
of course only half the story, as there are other skills and sensibilities that are not part of
the normal design education system. These include empathy, a rejection of hierarchies, a
willingness to draw others into the creative limelight and a lack of control over the idea-
generating component of the process. This requires the development of a new design
perspective that combines a new approach to interaction design, to design the facilitation
and excellent soft skills to implement the design while responding and improvising in the
moment as appropriate.
Marc Tassouls approach in Delft is an excellent first step in this direction, but to truly get to
the design of facilitation there is (at least) another step to take in both the design education
and practice of professionals who want to work in this area (the suggestion here is not that this
would be all designers). There are projects, especially within the UK; that are actively exploring
this approach.
The next case study looks in detail at one of these projects; here a group of professional
designers and creatives were employed to work together collaboratively to design and facilitate
a co-design process.
This involved developing an open creative process that included a range of stakeholders from
local dog walkers to landscape architects to teenagers to council workers to environmentalists
to representatives of the Queen of the UK in the creative process.
The designers conceived and delivered a programme of activities and interventions over an
eight-week period; these fed into each other to create designed solutions that were driven by
this range of stakeholders without descending into design by committee. In the process the
project developed some fundamental guidelines for designers who want to engage in open
creative processes. These directly inform the design of facilitation but also the design of open
design project frameworks.
Case Study 5:
PROUD: Beyond the Castle:
Open Designers in Action
This case study looks at PROUD: Beyond the Castle, a co-design project
involving over 2,000 participants in the UK city of Lancaster. This project adopts
a radical approach to co-design with a high degree of openness in the creative
process. Here, professionals employed by the project designed and delivered
creative facilitation rather than leading the creative process. This and the
applied context form the basis for a framework of eight principles for designers
working on open design projects, presented at the end of the chapter.
In the previous case study we looked at the innovative approach taken by Marc Tassoul and his
colleagues at Delft Technical University where design students are trained to facilitate. A logical
extension of this is to consider the design of facilitation itself, rather than requiring designers to
set aside their design skills in taking up a facilitator role.
The PROUD: Beyond the Castle (BTC) project described in this case study goes some way
towards exploring the effectiveness of this approach. It demonstrates the potential for the
design of facilitation in a real-world setting with a very complex set of participants, from dog
walkers to council planners to ecologists to children.
This project was led by the author as part of ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster Universitys
cross-disciplinary design research lab. Fundamentally the aim was to see if a set of professional
designers and creatives could design a scaffolding or structure which enabled people with a
very broad range of experience and expertise to have a creative (not just informational) input into
the design process. Here structures are the supports that enable creativity, design and innovation.
This could be a piece of software, a physical tool, a facilitation technique in a workshop or a
programme of events. The balance between structure and openness is one of the key issues in all
open design approaches and projects, from open source projects to Wikipedia to communities
building around Shapeways or 123D Design, even to the mechanical properties of tools all have
some form of structure that guides the creative work in those initiatives.
The Beyond the Castle project explores the possibility of designing open design processes
through a very open version of co-design. While there is a very long and varied history of
designers using participants to give them information and then going away and using this
information to come up with some clever ideas, the aim within this project was to draw people
into this creative part of the process and to make sure there was space for them to express
themselves as part of that process.
This required the development of a creative ecosystem that was both structured and flexible.
This allowed creative input in many different forms, not just in the traditional ways designers are
trained; so, for example, participants did not have to be able to visualise ideas for them to be
given value. Writing, talking and even body language were just as highly valued as visualisation
in the creative process. Flexibility was also required to enable disparate contributions to
meaningfully connect to each other. Finally flexibility was essential to allow for the whole picture
to change, in some cases radically, over the duration of the project. For example, the collective
responses received during the process changed the emphasis from physical improvements
(lighting, paths, rain shelters) to events and activities. There was a strong message not to
change this rather scruffy, unkempt space. This was a surprise for the parks department of the
council, initially the council lead on the project.
Structures within this flexibility are needed to guide the process forward, to maintain
enthusiasm and motivation. Also on a more practical level, it is so much easier to be creative
when there is something to respond to; this can be a design brief or a set of requirements or
aims.
Open Design and Co-Design
This case study was selected because it explores some of the fundamental issues of open design
that are sometimes masked by the technical challenges of web-based activity. Specifically it
looks at the design of facilitation, the balance between supporting and constraining creativity
and how to enable multiple creative inputs without design by committee. The vehicle for this is
a live project looking at the development of a politically important physical city centre space in
Lancaster. This involved professional designers and creatives as part of the 2,000 people who
were involved in the project, with 700 people actively contributing to the project.
The Beyond the Castle case study described here was part of a larger project with partners
across Europe looking at how co-design can help communities improve an aspect of their
physical environment. This larger project, called PROUD (People, Researchers Organisations
Using co-Design), is funded through the EU by a programme called INTERREG IV; the aim
of this programme is interesting and reflects the potential of open design to the EU, the key
message from the EU Commission being that: The project contributes to a more cohesive EU
society as it derives from cooperation of people from different countries working on common
issues that touch the lives of EU Citizens. This can be read as a call for open design practices
with a socially responsible or community aspect across Europe.
In the case of PROUD, there is a community of partners (and the regions they work in) from the
Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Finland. Each partner has a regional
challenge that, in a loosely defined way, needs to improve a public space within the city or
region in which there is an identified need. Partners undertook a co-design project with local
stakeholders to address this need.
In addition to these challenges, for the UK partners in the PROUD project the aim was to
explore and extend the fundamental principles of co-design and open design not framed by
technology. Going beyond this, the project wanted to produce really open, non-hierarchical
processes that also resulted in good outcomes. There are many examples of open creative
processes (whether this is called co-design, open design, participatory design or something
else) where the outcomes were pretty mediocre. This project was an attempt to show open
processes really could result in stronger outcomes than projects where designers drive the
creative process.
Taking the most open possible creative approach was quite risky, as really taking the openness
seriously (while still making a concrete outcome feasible) made the employed designers, the
council stakeholders and other professional groups profoundly uncomfortable.
As one city council public realm officer said:
It was quite difficult, but when I got the

understanding, could see where the
potential was. We tend to say this was
the leap of faith, it doesnt sit very well
within the council, because were used
to having set outcomes and controlling
it and obviously were answerable to the
public, so normally we would say right,
well spend six months on this and this is
what were getting at the end, and there
was a massive leap of faith for this, which
was quite obvious midway through when
certain partners had to step back and

just go right, we trust you on this, youre
going to produce something for us thats
going to work, and just run with it.
It was clear that this would not be an easy, by-the-numbers project for any of the participants,
partly because of the desire to stretch the collective understanding of co-design. Also, as we
will see, moving people out of their comfort zone was an essential component in the successful
outcomes of the project.
PROUD: Beyond the Castle, Lancaster City, UK
Placing the regional challenge in context, Lancaster is a city in the north west of England.
It is dominated by a hill with a castle and priory on it. The castle is five minutes walk from
the central shopping area of the city. The other side of the castle is an undeveloped, rather
overgrown area of around 800m2 sloping down to the River Lune. It is a space used by cyclists,
dog walkers and groups of teenagers, and sometimes as an illegal camping site for homeless
people. This area is also the site of a Roman bathhouse and underground are the remains of
four Roman forts, giving the site a national significance in archaeological terms, with very strict
prohibitions on development in the area.
Until recently the castle was used as a low security prison holding 250 people. This has now
closed and ownership reverted to the Royal Duchy (the Queens private estate). The Duchy has
decided to develop the castle into a museum, an upmarket hotel and outdoor performance
venue. This will dramatically change the character of this part of the city with an estimated
additional 100,000 visitors to the area each year. The Duchy only owns the castle building
itself; the surrounding land is owned by the city council, so there is a requirement for close
collaboration between the city council and the Duchy. This and the fact that the roots of the
trees on the site are starting to damage the archaeology has created the imperative to rethink
how the area functions and if it could be improved, especially in the light of increased visitor
numbers prompted by the development of the castle itself.
This placed some pressure on the city council to respond and develop a coherent plan for the site
that has both political and community support. This posed a challenge as, throughout the project,
members of the public considered the standard council consultation process to be more of an
exercise in communicating the decisions already made, rather than really looking for ideas and
opinions. To an extent this is recognised by the officers on the front line of engagement; as one
senior environmental officer puts it in an evaluation interview at the end of the project:
Wed only been handed the City Park

project [the original name for BTC]
a couple of months before, but we
were aware that thered been some
previous plans and consultations done
which, I think, some people felt were
imposed upon them, without a proper
meaningful consultation. One of our
prime objectives, to go back and do it
in a different way, and come up with
solutions for the site that everyone could
kind of buy into, PROUD seemed to tick
most of those boxes.
With a traditional consultation process already started, the PROUD project was invited to
undertake a co-design project to help produce this plan. A first review of the consultation
events so far uncovered a strong request to stop consulting with us! There was a very
consistent cohort of people attending the consultation meetings and they were getting fed
up of hearing the same ideas and observations with little sign of this having any effect. On
looking closer at the contents of the consultation, we came up with four key conclusions:
1. There are some repeated issues coming out from some key stakeholders, including
history, accessibility and environmental aspects of the site.
2. The name City Park was problematic. The space is not a park; there are several formal
parks in Lancaster laid down by philanthropic Victorians. By having park in the title, there
seemed to be an assumption that the space should be like one of these formal parks; that
worried people a lot.
3. We needed to engage with a wider range of people, not just the people with the time and
inclination to attend consultation events.
4. We needed to take stock and design a new programme for co-design with participants,
rather than doing more time-intensive but increasingly counter-productive events with the
same group of people.
Working with City and County Councils
Points three and four proved problematic for the council officers who were involved with the
City Park project. Although we had spoken to them about the openness of our approach, this
was the point where they realised that they were not going to be in control of the process, and
for some members of the council team this was very stressful indeed (a stress that was mirrored
in some of the designers we were to employ later in the process, but more of that later). This is
an example of how people who are used to being in control and in a position of authority find it
difficult to engage with an open project.
This illustrates some emergent issues around open design; firstly, that agreeing to openness
is quite different to really being open in terms of not knowing what outcomes are expected
and what processes will develop. It also demonstrates the need to find ways to communicate
with people with very different perspectives and agendas. Finally, the more fundamental
issue concerns project structure. In this case, to destabilise the normal modes of working
and promote a more open way, there was a requirement for an explicit intervention. This
intervention acted like a harbour wall, holding turbulence on one side while creating a calm
area on the other side for delicate ideas to grow. In practice this meant the management of the
PROUD project having sometimes very difficult, heated meetings with council stakeholders and
isolating the designers from this process. This notion of a separate space that is protected from
outside influences that allows people to be free with ideas, to collaborate, dream and express
themselves, is crucial to open design practices.
The need to shake up normal modes of practice is important in developing new ways of
collaborating and creating. It is also essential that, from this destabilisation or chaos, there
is a point where outcomes start to emerge that validate and reassure participants that
stepping outside their comfort zone was a worthwhile thing to do. This could be helping
people have a good experience the first time they use a completely new digital system
(as seen in Gadgeteer, allowing you to make a web camera as a first easy project) or a
workshop where you get a group to do something easy and rewarding to get them feeling
positive.
In the early stages of the project, giving the council some positive reinforcement was very
difficult because the public face of the process had to be paused to allow for the recruitment
of five designers and, with them, to co-design a new process. This meant the council was left
somewhat in limbo; the team was not able to tell them what the outcome of the process would
be, what the process would be precisely or who would be involved. Some officers were excited
by this and regarded it as an adventure; some were not able to cope with the uncertainty, and
again this discomfort with ambiguity was seen in some of our designers. This reinforces the
argument that not everyone is cut out to be involved in an open process.
With some successful public events undertaken, it was much easier for the people in the
council to reassure their managers (and the layers of management above those managers) that
the project would end up with something interesting. In this respect good documentation and
an up-to-date website (http://imagination.lancaster.ac.uk/activities/Beyond_Castle) were crucial.
As the key contact in the city council said:
I found the photographs that you did

particularly useful, when you emailed out
the photographs of what happened at an
event was good, because they were good
quality but you could see people getting
involved at different ages and oh did you
see the photographs? Oh yeah, yeah,
they were really good. So even if they
couldnt attend, they saw the photographs
and it was more like a reassurance, yeah,
its okay, youre engaging in enough
people with a broad background, theyre
getting involved. And I think thats where it
changed.
It took three months of behind the scenes effort to get to this point; much of this was taken up
by specifying, recruiting and finally procuring our creative experts for the project. The team
had five core creatives, and each of these had between 14 and 16 days to contribute to the
project. They were not all designers; the search for a new type of creative professional led to an
experimental, mixed team. This included a landscape designer (and local resident) to provide
expert knowledge, a branding expert to help understand the identity of the space, a young
Dutch co-designer who was part of the Silver=Gold project, an expert in participatory narratives
to explore non-visual co-design possibilities and finally a skilled facilitator. The job descriptions
developed for PROUD could also describe the qualities of a new breed of professional open
designer. These criteria were:
Good design experience; why not take advantage of the decades of collective
experience the design professional has developed and passed on?
Specialist or domain-specific knowledge, with all the advantages described by von
Hippel and his lead-users
Non-designerly skills in creativity; visualisation is only one way to be creative
Good communication skills to a very broad range of people with different perspectives
Expertise in helping others to be creative through facilitation.
In addition to the open creatives that were recruited, the project also employed a co-design
manager. Her role was to focus on the organisation and management of the process. Working
with an excellent administrator, their role was to make sure the logistics, materials, networks
and connections were in place to enable designers to run the events exactly the way they
conceived them. This was a critical aspect of the structuring or scaffolding that supports a
project. The co-design manager was also responsible for mapping the vision of the designers
to the overall aims of the project and, where appropriate, shaping the activities to keep them
on track. This is another facet to the creation of calm waters discussed earlier and, as Lotte
Van Wulfften Palthe, one of the more reflective designers employed on Beyond the Castle,
commented:
Good organisation is only possible when

the aim and the concept of the project are
really clear. These two are actually already
an important part of the organisation.
This helps during the project to keep
the essence of the project clear. That
is important for the team because the
processes we design are never created
in a linear way. You sometimes lose your
connection with the essence of what
you were working on. At that point it is
crucial to have someone that guards that
scaffold and reminds you of the primary
goal. In the end good organisation creates

the freedom for the team to work within.
Freedom to experiment and to get the
best out of ourselves and each other.
For open design, the lesson here is that logistics, administrative support and the management
of projects is very important, even if they are only really noticeable when things go wrong.
The challenge is how to ensure that open design projects are supported in this respect when
it requires highly skilled, motivated people and their contribution is often hidden and so not
acknowledged.
Interventions
The first task with the creative team was to get them together for two full days of discussion,
planning and familiarisation. It was here that they developed (with some other inputs) a
common conception of co-design and the needs of a co-design programme for the PROUD
project. It was also during these two days that one of the creatives coined the term Beyond
the Castle, and very quickly this was adopted across the project as a vast improvement on
City Park.
Towards the end of these two days a plan was established with five events that, working
together, would constitute the co-design for the local challenge. The five events were:
Beyond the Castle: This was an awareness-raising event where a corner of the central
shopping square in Lancaster was transformed into a representation of the area Beyond the
Castle. Passers-by were invited to document both the things they did in the area around the
castle and how it could be improved, using a three-metre model of the area.
Just Imagine All the Stories: This was a series of eight interconnected activities running in
the green space behind the castle. They were connected by the idea of co-design through
story-telling. This included bringing the past into the present with the aid of a living Roman
centurion and a marsh fairy. This was designed to engender a deeper interaction and was
aimed at families and the young at heart.
Just Imagine the Shape of the Park: This involved first mapping possible developments in
the Beyond the Castle area and also physically modelling these interventions. Participants in
this activity ranged in age from three to 92.
Visioning: This is a different type of event; all the other BTC activities were completely open to
the public without any registration. In this event the 15 most active and interesting contributors
were selected to help make sense of the more than 2,000 ideas contributed from previous
events and also to help curate the next stages of the process. In an actively facilitated and
designed event, the group identified and ranked 80 or so more general or emotional values
that needed to be kept in mind; these were labelled the dont forgets (for example, dont
forget to keep people involved in the process or dont forget that the space is for tourists and
residents). The group also undertook a thematic analysis of the ideas gathered so far and
identified common factors within themes (for example, history or cultural activity).
The group also identified contradictions, for example, a desire for better accessibility, more and
better paths and improved lighting, but at the same time a strong desire to keep it wild.
Co-Design Exhibition: The designers promised an interactive co-design exhibition, with no

clear idea of what this would be. This is a good example of really designing an activity with
the usual elements of divergent, convergent thinking, prototyping and so on. Working with a
range of participants as lead-users, they came up with a plan that would immerse exhibition
visitors in all the ideas submitted so far, and then construct an interactive process that
would give them the opportunity to really co-design new solutions to the challenges they had
selected. Until this point the feeling was that they were laying the groundwork for co-design
rather than co-designing directly.
The resulting activity had people selecting one of the dont forgets and one element of
thematic analysis, and selecting a prompting question (for example, how could this be
implemented for less than 1,000?) to come up with suggestions that were documented on
cardboard boxes. On average participants spent over 40 minutes developing their suggestions,
sometimes in conversation with volunteers at the exhibition, but more often not.
The remarkable thing about these design suggestions is the range and sophistication of the
ideas developed by individuals, often filling all six sides with concepts and development ideas.
Largely these were good ideas; for example, the development of a viewing platform on the site
with a nuanced aesthetic analysis, or the ideas for climbable sculptures created by two young
children with an incredible freshness and dynamism. These ideas are being fed into the next
phase of the process (without PROUD involvement).
After the ideas were transcribed and analysed, these detailed ideas (and the large range of
preparatory ideas, comments and suggestions) were presented to the city council. By including
the recommendations and suggestions that grew out of BTC in the master planning process,
the council has ensured that Beyond the Castle has set the agenda for development at least
until 2020.
Open Design Guidelines for Designers
Beyond the Castle has proved to be an effective co-design project and within this there are
also some key lessons for open design. This is particularly important for the contribution that
professional designers can make to open design. It was very difficult for some designers to
really open up the creative process and welcome others in, even when they considered that
their practice was already open. Some designers working on the project were not able to set
aside their persona as an expert. In interactions with other participants they considered that
their expert knowledge and processes were (much) more valid and could not step down from
the pedestal. The result was consultation or worse, patronising other participants rather
than open collaboration. The challenge for open design processes is to facilitate and promote
exactly this wider creative exchange. The difficulties experienced by some designers on BTC
are indicative of the wider challenges for professional design contributions to open design.
As part of the exploration of these differences and reflecting on the BTC project after its
handover to the local council, the UK PROUD team developed eight fundamental principles of
open creative processes, with a particular focus on how professional designers should think
about their contribution to open design.
1.Agree how the success of the project will be recognised. How will progress be
acknowledged and used as motivation if there are no goals or criteria? These could be long-term
strategic aims or much more tactical short-term goals, or (most likely) a combination of the two. In
itself this could be a creative project, but getting a core set of aims and criteria is essential.
2. Move in and beyond your normal design practice. One of the key outcomes of this
whole BTC project is that, if design by committee is to be avoided, participants have to be
able to change the way they think about problems and go beyond their initial intuitive ideas.
The danger is that individuals have an ideal position, then compromise until the compromises
overlap and agreement is reached, but with everyone equally unhappy. Rather than dialling
down expectations until there is a compromise, new processes are needed. These are still
emerging but they need to help participants, especially designers, leave behind their pre-
formed solutions and find a new set of ideas together with the other participants.
3. Involve and respect lots of people in the ideas-generating parts of the process. The
acknowledgement that not only designers can have great ideas is at the core of all open design
approaches. Everyone has the potential to contribute to the ideas-generating and development
phase of the process. This is not to say that everyone has the same creative ability, but for a
particular project, that creative ability will not reside only in the professional designer. Again this
can be a challenge for designers, as this is the last bastion of the magic that a designer thinks
they can bring to a project. This is not to decry the design profession, but history shows us that, in
many cases, jobbing designers are not really any more creative than others.
4.Use the expertise of all participants in the process. In addition to creativity,

participants all have expertise that should be welcomed in and used to inform the process. In
this context designers are participants with the same status as others. There is a danger that, in
being open, designers become passive and actually feel as though they cannot contribute. The
aim of open design is not to make users dominant over designers but to remove the dominant/
subservient context altogether. The real challenge is to get as many people involved as possible
in a capacity that allows them to make the most positive contribution.
5. Let everyone be creative in their own way. Most designers from an art school tradition
are inculcated with a particular set of methods and approaches that frame their perspective and
creative process. Generally this is associated with visualisation, divergent thinking and, through
this, trying to think the unthinkable. Designers need to really accept in their hearts as well as
their heads that there are other ways to be creative and that, just because they do not fit with
their expectations, this does not make them inferior. There must be space in an open process
for different types of creativity, as well as facilitating the interchange between these multiple
frames of creativity. In one case in BTC, residents were asked to fill in an ideas box as part
of a workshop; one resident refused to respond in the moment, choosing instead to go away
and think, and then come back. She returned two days later with a long list of very positive
suggestions and ideas, produced in a very different manner to the spontaneous brainstorming
mode that residents were initially asked to participate in. Actually, the intelligent designer should
realise that understanding and using these frames is a very good way of improving their own
practice.
6.Explore and challenge assumptions. This reinforces the point above of reflecting
on the motivations, and the factors that inform these motivations, of all participants. Some
of these assumptions may be symptoms of hidden, highly relevant or, in von Hippels terms,
sticky information that would be useful to share explicitly. Equally these assumptions may
not necessarily hold true in all situations and may not be the stumbling block they first
appear. This is well supported in innovation research; unacknowledged assumptions may
introduce unnecessary path dependencies, that is, close off avenues of exploration for no
good reason.
7.Expect to go beyond the average. Even in some of our international PROUD partners
there is a sense that participatory or inclusive approaches are worthy, but often not good
design. If open design processes are to have a future, they have to shake this off. There are
two aspects to this: firstly, open design processes should not be obvious, unplanned and/or
dull consultation or information-gathering exercises, but rather they should be designed to be
extraordinary, fun, dynamic actions that maximise the potential for people to contribute. This
does not require a large budget or gimmicks; it is just a matter of applying some design ability
to create something good. Secondly, the outcomes of these processes, whether products,
services or knowledge and understanding, have to hold up in terms of quality, effectiveness

and innovation for the given context. This could be a new city-wide transport system or a piece
of jewellery just for a single person, but without the end results being good (however this is
defined for a particular project), taking an open approach will be a passing fad.
8. Bring the process to the best possible conclusion with the best possible outcome.
This is about acknowledging the process and contribution made by the collective. Contributions
should be documented and participants should not be left dangling, with opinions or
ideas excluded from things like project documentation. On a wider scale there should be a
comparison of the final outcomes with the agreed success criteria; what has been achieved,
where the project goes next, and so (probably) the cycle starts again but in a positive sense of
having moved forward collectively.
Conclusion
Beyond the Castle has some insights to offer for the human collaborative side of open design
and the role of the design profession in open design in general. There needs to be a careful
balance between offering structures to act as scaffolding for the propagation of open design
and the freedom to go in unexpected directions. Here structures could include mentoring,
exemplar projects, guidance to follow, components to use or other types of support to create
fertile ground for open design to flourish.
There is a trade-off, though: too much structure and the scaffolding becomes a restriction, and
open design turns into superficial personalisation under the hidden hand of the designer. In
itself this is not a disaster but it is also no different from current, established design practices.
There is also a danger in trying to transform non-designers into designers with a veneer of
guidance and then expecting them to be creative in the same way as designers with many
years practice and instruction. In light of this, in the Beyond the Castle project there was a very
careful discussion about any barriers, rules or structures introduced to the process and without
exception these structures were inspired and shaped by participants of the process, rather than
imposed from the outside.
The role played by our professional creatives also has interesting implications for wider
thinking on open design projects. Some came in expecting to lead the creative component
and changed their approach to a more open understanding of co-design. Some were not
able to make this transition, while still others were comfortable supporting others creativity,
but were less comfortable contributing directly themselves. The PROUD team more or less
expected this differentiation but, echoing one of Stephane Vincents worst-practice examples,
we underestimated the time, effort and (thus) budget required to foster cross-disciplinary
design.
Part 3:
The
Future
Chapter 7
The Future for Open Designers
The aim of this book is to explore the landscape of open design from a human
rather than a technical perspective. In this concluding chapter we draw
together the insights gathered from looking at citizen-led design, innovation,
mass creativity and other open creative processes. This provides a context to
better understand the case studies in the book, focusing on the diversity of
open design and the challenges designers face in undertaking it. Finally, we
look at how these can be overcome through the use of facilitation, either as
something that is taught or as a new approach to design itself. The chapter
concludes with a proposal for how the design profession could develop in the
future and how this can make an active contribution to open design.
Predictions
Of course in a sense this book is already in the future; you are reading this some months or
years after the text was written. If this book had focused on the technology used in open
design, this would be rather worrying. Who can be sure where rapid prototyping will be in a few
years? Will Fab Labs become commonplace or will economic realities overcome the romance of
the maker and they recede into history, following MySpace, the Zune, Nokia and bullet time?
Beneath the technical possibilities of open design, the real drivers are human needs and wants.
Overall these do not change rapidly and, through these fundamental motivations, the actions
of multitudes of people will form the tidal forces that will direct the future of design and open
design. These forces will determine if technological possibilities are taken up and developed or
if they flounder. For example, it took 20 years for keyhole surgery to be widely adopted because
it ran counter to the machismo culture of the surgeon. It took medical students maturing into
senior positions to enable this transformation.
Learning from Design
One of the problems for open design is that it is drawing together contrasting people,
perceptions, disciplines, technology and even ideology. This amalgamation often does not
include the collective experience and lessons learned by the disciplines involved. For example,
162 Part 3: The Future
as the Gadgeteer project proceeds, the researchers involved struggle with enclosure design
because they are not drawing on the experience that is well established in professional design
fields. Similarly in design, Droog has no experience of developing digital platforms, so the
downloadable design initiative has been superseded by services such as Shapeways and
Kickstarter, driven by new business models rather than design values.
There is a long history of open process (open design) interventions in design. These address,
among other things, the importance of low culture, the rise of user-generated content, the
demand for personalisation and the potential for personal manufacturing. In a historical context
these responses have included designers trying to produce non-designed things, as seen
in Archigram and also the anti-design movement in Italy. The public face of this culminated
with the Memphis group in the 1980s. More recently, Droog made some very interesting
interventions in the guise of their do create series of unfinished products.
Beyond professional design, the rise of the creative masses is promoted by more political
actions through groups such as the Situationists. This had a practical impact, not just in the
riots of 1968 but through punk music, the Whole Earth Catalogue, fanzines and DIY.
From the world of business, radical politics and the actions of everyday people as they
personalise the things they buy, the conventional role of the designer as a form-giver and taste-
maker is being challenged. Many sectors of the design profession will follow the path taken by
the photographic profession that has seen radical changes in the last 15 years. In photography
now, we see a healthy (but small in size) art and specialist professional sector. The jobbing
photographers who made a living documenting everyday events for people, like family portraits,
have largely disappeared. There have been even more seismic shifts in the infrastructure that
supported film photography; almost all the developing and photographic printing labs are
now closed. In design, it is likely that we will see a fairly sharp contraction in the number of
professional designers in the conventional sense of those trained in art school for three years.
Darwinian pressures will strongly disadvantage the average rather than extraordinary designer,
or those who are trying to do everything but are not excellent at anything. Why pay for an OK
website when you can make one yourself in a few hours for a small fraction of the cost?
This concentration of talent in design (or the weeding out of average designers) does not
mean there will be a retrenchment into traditional specialisms. Products, services, systems,
interaction and communication are too interconnected now for traditional disciplines to
dominate. This is an opportunity for new types of design activity and new types of design
professional to emerge. We are starting to see this in the way some of the best design
education establishments are developing their curriculum. TU Delft is a good example of this,
but it is also evident in Politecnico di Milano, Glasgow School of Art, the Royal College of Art
and Lancaster University, and undoubtedly this list is expanding all the time.
Chapter 7: The Future for Open Designers 163
Case Studies
The landscape of new design, mass creativity, innovation and open design was the foundation
for the case studies in this book. Broadly speaking, they examined:
The diversity of open design approaches

The problems traditional designers face when operating in an open creative process
Strategies in design education to develop a new type of open designer
New open designers in action and the benefits they bring to open design initiatives.
The case studies started with an in-depth look at two examples of open design processes that
are poles apart. Gadgeteer is a hardwaresoftware system enabling non-specialists to devise,
construct and share their own electronic products, for example, MPS players, burglar alarms
or digital cameras. At the other end of the spectrum, Region 27 uses open design processes to
help create new urban policy.
Across the whole spectrum of open design the professional designer is not in control of the
creative process. This is not always a comfortable position for designers involved in open
design processes. Often they have been trained that their primary role is to be responsible for
the inspiration or creative magic within a process and, without this responsibility, they often find
it difficult to define their role. This was demonstrated in the Silver=Gold project where very good
designers could not help but take charge of the creative process.
The challenge for designers is to accept that, firstly, never mind feeling the need to be in charge
of the creative process in open design processes, there is often no single creative prime mover
at all. The second challenge is that, despite the name open design professional, design has
a very modest role in open design activities. In fact if the term were not already well colonised
(and overused), you could build an argument that open design could be more accurately
described as open innovation or, if one were being mischievous, genuinely open innovation.
In the preceding chapters we have seen that open innovation is really a nicely packaged
description of the general innovation ideas that have been in circulation since at least the 1930s.
In contract, collaborative approaches to the creation, distribution, sharing, modification and
fabrication of ideas beyond the present business models really do present a break with and
opening up of innovation systems.
Designers need to find new ways to contribute in open design. In the PROUD project
designers created the scaffolding or support for open design processes for others to use. Here
professional designers used their creative skills to help others enter into a creative process. This
was a successful approach; the participants were firmly in control of the creative content of the
project. Further, the results of the project were assessed by council clients to be better than if
designers had been working in isolation.
164 Part 3: The Future
Having said this, the five designers working on the PROUD: Beyond the Castle project were very
carefully selected, had intensive support themselves and even then it was impossible for one
of this team to step away from their persona as expert in charge. To have more widespread
design contribution to open processes, there needs to be a change in the mindset of many
designers. Courses such as Industrial Design at TU Delft are starting to grow a new breed of
designers who are comfortable facilitating creativity in others, rather than seeing themselves
as the creative wellspring. This notion of the designer acting as facilitator has been extended at
Lancaster Universitys design research laboratory, ImaginationLancaster, where research on the
design of facilitation is bearing fruit. This combines long-developed design skills with facilitation
to design innovative approaches to promote open processes.
The Design Participant
What position will the design profession have within the emerging area of open design? The
case studies presented here point to two new roles emerging for design professionals. The first
of these places the designer as an active participant working within open design collaborative
processes. This type of design activity is with us already in that designers contribute to
open projects as just people. There are, however, ways that the skills of designers could be
modified to help open processes be more effective and where their experience could be more
productively deployed.
In addition to their expertise and talent, design professionals could be trained to be creative
using different frames or ways of thinking, and in being able to talk in the creative languages of
others. So while sketching and visualisation are key tools of idea generation for designers, other
people with different backgrounds will be creative in different ways. Open designers should be
skilled in being creative in many different ways, but further, they should be able to learn new
creative languages quickly and effectively. These open designers would be nomadic creatives
who can work effectively in different contexts, not by bringing a special process with them but
by going native and working in ways that draw out the maximum potential of all participants.
The Design Facilitator
The second type of person, the design facilitator, is someone who works on the design of an
open design process itself. This could include the design of facilitation, workshops, events and
other contexts, but could also just as validly include software platforms, supply chains and
manufacturing systems. Although on the surface these seem to be radically different, actually
there is a common component running through all of these types of activity. The core issue is
the design and management of the interaction with participants, and creating situations where
they are able to reach their maximum potential to design and innovate. This interaction could be
Chapter 7: The Future for Open Designers 165
directly with people working in groups, a looser interaction with communities all developing their
own projects, or the interaction with an individual to create their own products. Making these
interactions as rewarding and useful as possible is the key to the success of open design. The
eight principles for open design presented in the PROUD case study offer a guiding framework
for how the design facilitator should start to think about the successful creation and nurturing of
open design projects. The eight principles proposed here are:
1. Agree how the success of the project will be recognised.

2. Move in and beyond your normal design practice.
3. Involve and respect lots of people in the ideas-generating parts of the process.
4. Use the expertise of all participants in the process.
5. Let everyone be creative in their own way.
6. Explore and challenge assumptions.
7. Expect to go beyond the average.
8. Bring the process to the best possible conclusion with the best possible design outcome.
At the moment there are many designers who act as design participants in the casual sense
that they put time and energy into open design projects that they are not being paid for in a
professional capacity. There are fewer who would currently identify with the ability to learn
(or even the concept of learning) different creative languages to help communication and
collaboration with people with very different but equally creative perspectives.
Similarly, there are very few designers indeed who would identify themselves as designing
facilitation, who use their design skills to create new, effective structures to help a wide range
of people be creative in their own way. It seems, though, that in the long term, as more people
have more opportunity to be more creative, the design of open design contexts that facilitate
this creativity will be the future of professional design contributions to open design.
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Index
123 software, 71 communication, mass creativity in, 2829

Communication Research Institute of Australia
A (CRIA), 43
Access Space, 70 competences in facilitation, 141142
amateur/professional blurring, 5254 compromised outcomes of co-design, 121122,
Ambasz, E., 62 155
anti-design, 4647 context for open design, 34
Apple, 33, 36 Coyne, Richard, 1314, 54
Arad, Ron, 478 craft/industrial approach, 47
architecture, 14 Creative Facilitation (Tassoul), 129130
design compared to, 4041 creativity, acceptance of different types of, 156
New Babylon, 64 crowd sourcing, 3133
Archizoom, 46 Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is
Arduino, 8384 Driving the Future of Business (Howe), 32
assumptions, exploration and challenging of, Customatix, 57
156 customisation, 5658
Atkinson, Paul, 5, 41, 53
D
B 3D printing, 6970, 71, 72
Bakker, G., 46 de Certeau, Michel, 97
Barr, Alfred, 128 Deleuze, G., 5455
Bauhaus, 42, 128129 democratised innovation, 3336
Bauhaus (Barr), 128 Democratizing Innovation (Von Hippel), 3031
Beegan, G., 53 design
best practice, rejection of, 99101 mass production and, 129
blogs, 2829, 69 relationship with innovation, 910
Blomberg, J., 44 digital technology. see also .Net Gadgeteer
Brabham, D.C., 32 de-emphasis of, 5
Buijs, Jan, 129 mass creativity, 2526, 2829
new possibilities through, 45
C not essential for open design, 81
case studies. see also education; .Net and rapid manufacturing, 71
Gadgeteer; PROUD: Beyond the Castle distributed design, 5963
project; Region 27; Silver=Gold project DIY
professional designers role in, 163164 and distributed design, 59
selection of, 83, 146 music, 29
themes focused on, 7778 do brand, 6061
Chesbrough, Henry, 1719, 20 do create, 49, 6163
Christensen, Clayton, 3435, 127 downloadable design, 6668
citizens, relationships between, 99 Downs, G.W., 15
co-design, 479. see also PROUD: Beyond the Drexler, K. Eric, 72
Castle project; Silver=Gold project Droog collective, 4849, 5963, 6668
E generative design tools (GDT), 6566

education Gladwell, Malcolm, 1617
benefits of facilitation, 142143 Gropius, Walter, 42
competences in facilitation, 141142 ground-up innovation, 3336
designing facilitation in open design, 135142, Guattari, F., 5455
143
experience before improvisation, 142143 H
facilitation in open design, 129133 Hartman, D., 21
future of facilitation, 143 homogeneity of public services actors, 97,
improvisation in facilitation, 133135, 140141 101102
traditional design, 128129 Howe, Jeff, 3132
emancipatory geography, 6465 Huizingh, E.K.R.E., 23
ethics and open design, 58, 7273 Hutton, Richard, 49
expertise of all participants, use of, 156
I
F ideas-generation, involvement of people in, 155
Fab Lab, 6970 improvisation in facilitation, 133135, 140143
facilitation in open design industrial/craft approach, 47
benefits of, 142143 information sharing, mass creativity in, 2829
competences in, 141142 innovation
designing, 135142, 143, 164165 categorising, 16
downloadable design, 6668 definition, 1516
education in, 129133 democratised, 3336
experience before improvisation, 142143 game-changing, nature and impact of, 3435
future of, 143 history of, 15
generative design tools (GDT), 6566 lead-users, 3031, 34
improvisation in, 133135, 140141 movers first, second and third, 1617
leadership style, 132 open, 1723
Silver=Gold project, 117 relationship with design, 910
failure, learning from, 99101 spaces for, 110
fanzines, 4, 5, 69, 162 innovation studies, 4, 15, 30
Finley, Dawn, 49 Innovators Dilemma: When New Technologies
frames of reference, 13 Cause Great Firms to Fail (Christensen),
open innovation as new, 212 345
wicked problems, 14 Italian design groups, radical, 467
G J
Gadgeteer Jorn, Asger, 64
characteristics of, 8384 Julier, Guy, 1112, 130
compared to Arduino, 8384
and design, 9192 K
genesis of, 8485 Kadushin, Ronen, 10
as mass creativity example, 27 Kelley, Tom, 10
as open design platform, 8489 Kensing, F., 44
physical design, 8791 Klip Binder house, 49
selection of as case study, 83 Kripps, Antoinette, 115117
users, types of, 8687 Kuhn, Thomas, 13
Index 175
L N
La Region 27. see Region 27 nanotechnology, 72
Lau, Manfred, 91 .Net, 27, 85
Lawson, Brian, 12 .Net Gadgeteer
Le Corbusier, 40 characteristics of, 8384
lead-users, 3031, 34 compared to Arduino, 8384
Leadbeater, Charles, 27, 29, 33 and design, 9192
leadership style, 132 genesis of, 8485
low culture materials, use of, 47 as open design platform, 8489
Lupton, E., 53 physical design, 8791
selection of as case study, 83
M users, types of, 8687
manufacturing, open access to, 6973 New Babylon, 64
Marcus, Andrew, 29 New Bauhaus, 42
mass creativity Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 64
advantages of professional designers, Nike, 56
34
amateur/professional blurring, 5254 O
anti-design, 4647 online design. see digital technology
co-authoring products, 4749 open design. see also responses to open
crowd sourcing, 3133 design
democratised innovation, 3336 compared to professional design(ers), 13
design-led vernacular, 4547 context for, 34
and digital technology, 2526 defined, 3
do create, 49 designing process of, 156157
Gadgeteer, 27 ethics and, 58, 7273
industrial/craft approach, 47 first uses of term, 10
lead-users, 28, 3031, 34 history of, 4
low culture materials, use of, 47 human needs and wants as drivers, 161
participatory design, 4345 motivation for, 5
Proctor and Gamble, 2627 and open innovation, 23
strategic responses to, 5255 principles of, 155157, 165
terms and definitions, 2728 professional design(ers) role in, 6, 1112
users role in professional design, and prototyping, 98
4245 rhizome metaphor for, 5455
vernacular design, 2830 tension with open source, 8183
Wikipedia, 26 wicked problems, 14
mass production and design, 129 open innovation, 1723
Memphis, 4647 open source, 19
Mens Sheds, 70 tension with open design, 8183
MES, 2526, 57 open structures, 6468
Microsoft, 27 Oslo Manual, 1516
modernist design, 40
modular house design, 46, 49 P
Moholy-Nagy, Lszl, 42 Papanek, Victor, 13
Mohr, L.B., 15 paradigms, 13
music, DIY, 29 open innovation as new, 2122
PARC Xerox, 1921 management and administration, importance

participatory design, 4345 of, 152153
PDFs, 29 as part of larger project, 146147
Perens, Bruce, 82 positive reinforcement, need for, 150
physical design in .Net Gadgeteer, 8791 previous plans and consultations, 149
Pilkington, 22 principles of open design arising from,
politics and co-design, 118121 155157
power and co-design, 118121 selection of as case study, 146
Poyner, Rick, 9 visioning, 154
problem-solving approaches, design of public sector. see Region 27
downloadable design, 6668
generative design tools (GDT), 6566 R
Proctor and Gamble, 18, 2627 radical Italian design groups, 4647
professional design(ers) Ramakers, R., 46, 5960, 6263
advantages of, 34 Rand, Paul, 1011
blogs, opportunities in, 29 Rayfishshoe Company, 58
blurring with amateur, 5254 Region 27
changes in industry, impact of, 124125 approach adopted, 93
co-authoring products, 4749 challenges for, 97103
co-option of crowdsourcing platforms, 3233 change to traditional consultancy approach,
compared to open design, 13 102103
design-led vernacular, 4547 citizenship participation, 109
erosion of authority of, 14 civil servants, support for, 109110
facilitation design as new role, 164165 creation of, 93
future role for, 92, 162164 digital projects, 105108
as gatekeepers, 4041 experts, involvement in projects, 105
history of, 12 funding, 94
nature of, 1011, 1213 homogeneity of public services actors, 97,
participatory design, 4345 101102
role in open design, 6, 1112 innovation space, 110
Silver=Gold project, perspective on, 118123 La Transfer, 108112
users, role of in, 4245 methods of, 9497
professionalisation of design, 4041 open design, relevance to, 94
proto-products, 4749, 59, 6163 projects, 103108
prototyping, 98 prototyping of policy tools, 98
PROUD: Beyond the Castle project regional laboratories, 108112
aims of, 145146, 147 rejection of best practice, 99101
challenge in degree of openness, 147148 relationships between citizens, 99
co-design exhibition, 154 staff employed, 93
context for, 148 toolboxes for collaborative design, 110111
Councils, City/County, working with, 150151 transferable processes, 104
difficulties experienced by designers, 155 rejection of best practice, 99101
events programme, 153154 relationships between citizens, 99
experts, recruitment of, 151152 responses to open design
explicit intervention, need for, 150 Access Space, 70
flexibility, importance of, 146 amateur/professional blurring, 5254
key issues at start, 149 blogs, 69
Index 177
customisation, 5658 mass creativity, 2526

in different design sectors, 52 new possibilities through, 45
distributed design, 5963 TechShops, 70
downloadable design, 6668 27th Region. see Region 27
Fab Lab, 6970 toolboxes for collaborative design, 108,
generative design tools (GDT), 6566 110111
manufacturing, open access to, 6973 transcendence of initial ideas, 122, 155
Mens Sheds, 70 Transformer Chair, 4748
open structures, 6468 Trott, P., 21
opportunities and implications of, 7173
rhizome metaphor, 5455 U
TechShops, 70 user-centred design, 4243
rhizome metaphor, 5455 users role in professional design, 4245
S V
shoe sector, customisation in, 5658 Van Der Meer, Hans, 19
Silver=Gold project Van Wulfften Palthe, Lotte, 152153
approach regarding elderly participants, vernacular, design-led, 4547
122123 vernacular design, 2830
as co-design project, 113 Villas, Nick, 8485, 8690
creation of, 113114 Vincent, Stephane, 94112, 119
design process, 122123 Von Hippel, Eric, 2728, 3031
designers perspective on, 118123
Eindhoven City Council, role of, 114117 W
facilitation of design, 117 Wamble, Mark, 49
politics and power, 118121 We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass
transcendence of initial ideas, 122 Production: The Power of Mass Creativity
undefined co-design, 114, 124 (Leadbeater), 33
weak outcomes of co-design, 121122 weak outcomes of co-design, 121122
Simon, Herbert, 1213 Wecht, Ingrid van der, 116
Situationist International, 6465 wicked problems, 14
SketchChair software, 91 Wikipedia, 26
Snodgrass, Adrian, 54 Woods, Dan, 33
Sottass, Ettore, 46, 49 worst practice, learning from, 99101
Studio Alchimia, 46
X
T Xerox, 1921
Tassoul, Marc, 129142
technology. see also .Net Gadgeteer Z
de-emphasis of, 5 zines, 28
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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ISBN: 9781409448549 (hbk)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

1 Introduction to Open Design 3

2 Innovation and Design

3 Mass Creativity: Design

4 Design Responses to Mass

5 Open Design Futures 51

6 Introduction to Case Studies 77

Case Study 1: The .NET Gadgeteer:

Case Study 2: La Region 27 and the

Case Study 3: Silver=Gold:

Case Study 4: Educating Open

Case Study 5: PROUD: Beyond the

7 The Future for Open Designers 161

This chapter introduces a new perspective on open design that places an

Open Design in Context

The Role of Digital Technology

Looking Beyond Technical Capability

1. The landscape and literature of open design

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

Precisely because innovation studies is not preoccupied by design, it is highly relevant to

The Relationship Between Innovation and Design

Design and Open Design

Understanding the Designer

Design is a personal activity and springs

The Birth of the Designer

Innovation and Open Design

The Oslo Manual defines innovation as the implementation of a new or significantly

The smart people in our field work for us.

PARC Xerox: A Counter Case Study

The Open Innovation Paradigm

There are many scholars of R&D

Its simplicity, the texts used by Trott

Its timely, OI was launched during a

Its extendibility, OI offers a high level

application into more specific

Open Design and Open Innovation

Vernacular Design and DIY

Electronic distribution is also replacing some forms of conventional paper-based communication.

Innovation and Lead-Users

an online distributed problem solving

organization leverages the collective

iStock (www.istockphoto.com) is a website that allows individuals to submit photos, illustrations

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing.

Apple: Challenging Democratised Innovation

There is also an interesting relationship between designers and non-designers when

Repeatedly we see companies dismiss avenues of innovation because, by the criteria

The Professionalisation of Design

The house was a machine for living.

the boundaries between professional and

The Role of Users in Professional Design Processes

The convention of describing non-designers involved in design processes as users is problematic

architects to be both servants as well as

quality of design is dependent not

The main assumption guiding collaborations

Design-Led Vernacular: Designs Attempt to Be Both

the worlds most popular Avant Garde

As a group, Memphis rejected mass production and the associated design-for-the-masses

Opening Up the Designers Creative Process:

1 Introduction to Open Design 3

5 Open Design Futures 51

6 Introduction to Case Studies 77

7 The Future for Open Designers 161