Matt Malpass: Overview of the Open Design and Manufacturing OD&M project.
Weds 8th March 2019, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern
The podcast below was recorded at the Beta Society launch event at Tate Exchange, 5-10 March 2019, also see 'What is Beta Society?'
Weds 8th March 2019, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern
The podcast below was recorded at the Beta Society launch event at Tate Exchange, 5-10 March 2019, also see 'What is Beta Society?'
Podcast: |
In this podcast Matt Malpass provides an Overview of the Open Design and Manufacturing OD&M project, a knowledge alliance of students, professors, researchers, makers, entrepreneurs and creative practitioners distributed across Europe and China. The OD&M programme has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. |
Matt Malpass, Intro to Open Design and Manufacture.
I’m Matt Malpass. I’m a Reader in Critical Design Practice at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where I work on the MA Industrial Design course and I’m Principle Investigator on an Open Design and Manufacture project. So, this is a project that the University has been involved with, with a bunch of European partners, looking at the Open Design and Manufacture paradigm.
See full text transcript below:
I’m Matt Malpass. I’m a Reader in Critical Design Practice at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where I work on the MA Industrial Design course and I’m Principle Investigator on an Open Design and Manufacture project. So, this is a project that the University has been involved with, with a bunch of European partners, looking at the Open Design and Manufacture paradigm.
See full text transcript below:
Transcript: Matt Malpass, Intro to Open Design and Manufacture.
I’m Matt Malpass. I’m a Reader in Critical Design Practice at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where I work on the MA Industrial Design course and I’m Principle Investigator on an Open Design and Manufacture project. So, this is a project that the University has been involved with, with a bunch of European partners, looking at the Open Design and Manufacture paradigm.
What I’m going to do is, we’re going to talk a little bit about the project and the arc of the project, some of our findings and some of our intentions. So, essentially (I’m not going to kill you with a Powerpoint either. There’s a few slides, but they’re just for me - they’re prompts for me). Open Design and Manufacture is a project. It essentially tries to build relationships between higher education - so, places like University of the Arts, Deusto University (which is our Spanish partner), Open Design Communities - so makerspaces, or innovation communities, or coworking spaces - and industry that is interested in the way that makerspaces and these innovation communities work. So, what the project has essentially been doing is looking at the cultures of learning, teaching and working in these three contexts, to develop and understanding and a community of practice that can inform how we teach and operate within these spaces. So, the project has been working across Europe. We’re the UK node - we’re partnered with FabLab London in the UK. We’re working with partners in Italy, in Spain, in Tongji China. We’re working with a peer-to-peer foundation - Peer-to-peer foundations, based out of the Netherlands, are an organisation that specialise in common spaced economies. So, peer-to-peer communities, where openness and sharing economies are positioned to perhaps be more effective than the closed economies that we work in at the moment. Technalia - who are a huge technology company based out of Bilbao - and Polish partners as well. So essentially this is the project: to build an alliance between these three sectors, across Europe and internationally, working with Tonji.
As with all of these EUropean project, there is a website that you can go and look at and download all the report that have been written and the story so far, but I’m going to talk specifically about our interpretation of this project to date and what we’ve been doing to date.
Essentially Open Design is a model of practice - a model of design practice - that is interested in the development of physical products, services, machines, systems through the use of publicly shared design information. So, this is very different to orthodox models of industrial design and making, where intellectual property is often perceived as being very closed. So this model of design is all about openness and sharing and peer-to-peer activity. It’s grounded in discourses of the ‘commons’. It’s grounded in creative commons in terms of IP ownership. It’s about giving your ideas away, sharing it with people, but then having those ideas come back. It’s typified by presumptive technologies - things like the RepRap, the traditional printer. This is a printer based on the premise that once you build one you can build more. It’s a printer that replicates and builds itself. It’s typified by technologies such as 3D printing, CNC, platforms like Wikiblock. So it’s where IP and design work are shared openly. It’s a model of practice where challenges or design briefs are ‘posted’ and we crowdsource the response to these challenges. It’s got its tradition in participatory design practices that were developed in Sweden in the 1970s. It’s got a relationship to social innovation and social enterprise. Typically it’s not a market-led commercial model of design practice. It sits in relationship to orthodox design, but is a critical and peripheral practice.
In the Open Design and Manufacture project, the first thing we needed to do was go round and spend a lot of time in makerspaces - and you all have seen makerspaces. [Shows slides] This was FabLab, London before it closed down. Again this was the typical kit and the stuff you see in makerspace - again, 3D printers, presumptive technologies. The thing about a makerspace that’s really interesting is that it functions as a ‘bizarre bazaar’. In these spaces we get loads of different people from different backgrounds, coming together to do stuff. And it’s in the variation and the shared expertise within these spaces that give it a very particular characteristic. And this, from someone who runs a Product and Industrial Design course, is really interesting because typically my model of design is:
“we will give you an Industrial Design education, it will align with a particular canon and you will leave as a certain type of designer with a certain skill set”.
This stuff is like:
“We don’t really know what we’re going to get. We put a bunch of people in a room together with some sort of intention and aim and then the collective knowledge and skill set produces something effective.”
So I’ve been interested in looking at how people learn in these spaces and how this can inform the type of curriculum that we develop and deliver at Central Saint Martins.
Through Open and Design and Manufacture there was a review - internationally - of these makerspaces and how people learn and collaborate in these spaces: the type of projects that are undertaken, and some of the issues that these spaces face. Sustainability is one of the biggest issues. Every makerspace that we’ve partnered with during this project has close, or folded, or reimagined itself during the course of the project. It’s very difficult to sustain these spaces and so one of the findings is how institutions like UAL can support these makerspaces in terms of sustainability.
We took a trip to China. [Shows slide] This is a space in Shanghai. The reason we took a trip to China to look at the makerspace culture and the open design culture in China was because a mandate recently came down from central government that was focused on shifting the focus of China away from a nation that is perceived as ‘the factory of the world’ - that is producing for other people - to a nation that is innovative and designing in its own right. And so there’s huge amount of investment that’s been sent into these innovation spaces, these makerspaces, because they’re recognising the insight and innovation that is born out of these spaces. So, there’s been a huge amount of investment in these spaces. We saw cities that are being developed around this ethos - literally cities that are being built to support maker culture!
This idea of what we can learn in these spaces and how these spaces can be really effective and efficient in solving problems and addressing issues is best typified by this example [shows slide]. This guy is a banker, he’s a consultant in a bank and, six months before this picture was taken, hadn’t made anything in his life. He’s really interested in flying, but in China you can’t hold a private licence - you can fly in China. So he could become a pilot, he wanted to build himself a flight simulator and so, over the course of six months, having no making or engineering experience, he set about building himself a flight simulator in this makerspace in Shanghai. What he was really good at was asking the right questions. His professional practice as a consultant in a bank - a very ambiguous title and role - allowed him to set questions very effectively and efficiently. Working in this space with a load of people with lots of different backgrounds and interest and know-how, he functioned, just to ask right questions. So he asked the right questions, of the right people, and in the space of six months went to build a fully functioning flight simulator - hardware and software - from scratch. And this is the second iteration of it [shows slide]. Through question-setting and collaboration in this space with the range of expertise that existed in this space, this guy now has an operational flight simulator and he is learning to fly.
One of the key interesting things about this space is this notion of what we’ve termed “the bizarre bazaar”. There’s really eclectic and strange and fantastic know-how that exists within these communities and within these spaces and through a culture of exchange you can get a lot of stuff done very effectively.
In the UK - Nesta carried out a report - there are 97 of these spaces at the point of writing. There’s not about 142 makerspaces in the UK that are all struggling to sustain themselves, but are all full of characters like this.
A mile away, there’s ‘The Maker Mile’ - Vyner Street - a bunch of makerspace, open design and innovation communities - and when we started the project we went around and we interviewed a lot of the companies that exist in this space and the makers that exist in this space - places like Machine Rooms, which unfortunately has folded during the course of the project. This ‘Machine Rooms’ was one of the most successful makerspaces in London, but it shifted its focus beyond being a space for making, to a space that incubated businesses and ideas. But even with that shift to enterprise and social enterprise, it still struggled to sustain itself. We worked with people like OpenDesk and Sam Labs to understand how these businesses grew out of these innovation communities. Unmade, based at Somerset House. We spoke to Bare Conductive. The purpose of speaking to these companies was to understand what these businesses - these startup businesses, these young businesses - want from graduates and learners from higher education, because I’m in the business of delivering design education so I want to prepare effective students for work, essentially, in new industry contexts.
As we went through the project we noticed that there was this real issue with sustainability of these spaces and our partner in the project was FabLab, London, which through the course of the project shifted its focus and emphasis to urban agriculture and urban farming - biodesign. So FabLab London became GreenLab as our partner. And this was another salient finding that came out of the project because, in order to sustain more effectively, Ande Gregson (the founder) needed to focus the space, the Fab Lab, more thematically, because too open - if the spaces are too open and the activities are too diffuse then it becomes difficult to sustain. So, what we’ve seen is more and more of these spaces taking more of a thematic focus and direction and often with social interests at the core. So, GreenLab has a real green sustainability agenda. They can be really powerful spaces to improve conditions in society, if we reflect on the thematic of this event.
[Shows slide] This is one example of how a space in Northern Island is being used as part of a peace and reconciliation project, where the site of making, the makerspaces, the shared activities that take place in these spaces, can be really effective spaces to build community cohesion, to manage conflict, where the power of making serves to address complex social issues. This is something that, as an institution, the University of the Arts is interested in: in how making can serve and address complex social issues.
A few years ago we asked this question - this predates the Open Design and Manufacture project but has a relationship to it. A few years ago we asked this question: “Design education - what’s the future?”. We had an event, like this, where we had people - students and grads - working in a studio - to visualise where design education should go, and they came up with three scenarios for a future. In each of these scenarios, the idea or the notion of the higher education institution being a central site - a building - with heavy infrastructure melted away. In all of these scenarios, the institution was diffused across a city. The University essentially was a matchmaking service, between makerspaces, factories, innovation communities, social spaces where we could match students with the resource that is required in order for them to address their problem, their project. So in this example here [shows slide], we’ve got a student who wants to develop a - I think it was - a water filtration system for canals - and he would come onto the University website and he would login and set the challenge or the brief, post the challenge or the brief and then we would matchmake around that brief in order to infrastructure the project. What’s innovative about this is factories would be working with the institution and during their downtime would be offering their machinery for students in order to be able to deliver the work. Factory workers would be supporting the students or the learners in delivering their work and the institution would recognise the participation of those workers - those machine operators - because they’re teaching! You go to a factory, you work with somebody to deliver a filtration system, somebody who’s been MIG welding all their life and shares that knowledge with somebody. We need some sort of mechanism to recognise the activity that that factory worker has been supporting with.
[shows slide] In another example that came out of this session was this notion of the ‘agonist’. Students learn in teams and teams come together around complex matters of concern, so in this example there was an issue with rural banking in Scotland so this furniture maker joins the institution and the institution pulls a team together - furniture makers, anthropologists, economic specialists - and that team is then sent on to Scotland to deliver this project and learn through the delivery of the project. Now these models of the future of design education informed a thematic that we adopted for Open Design and Manufacture and this focus on ‘citizen centered innovation’. Challenge-based learning - so where a challenge is posted around a complex matter of concern - and then a team of learners is brought together to address that problem. We worked very closely, initially, with Camden Council. Camden Council had a real issue with (well it’s not Camden Council who have the issue, it’s the residents within Camden) face a problem of overcrowding living. Working with a team of designers and people within the council, we brought teams together to address this problem through the design of space-saving furniture that would be produced in makerspaces, that would be designed in collaboration with the residents that were facing this issue.
The students mapped the makerspaces in relation to Camden and through a series of participatory and co-design workshops worked to develop this furniture that could be delivered through CNC routing and could be assembled by people within the community. A range of furniture was developed - this is it at scale [shows slide], this is the full range.
The idea is that because people face different issues - this came out through the participation - because people face different issues, we need to have ways of scaling and modelling furniture to address the specific issues of the residents within Camden. A system of parametric design and nesting furniture was developed - [shows slide] this is the complete system. The premise being that, as a user that required this furniture, you would log into this website, you would tailor the furniture because of your needs and then this would generate a cut pattern that could be manufactured, via CNC. One scenario is that there is a jobseeker, or somebody who is looking for work, and as part of the job seeking requires them to be actively participating in training. One scenario could be: “ok, somebody’s looking for work, but they are spending time operating the CNC to deliver the furniture for a block of residents that they may be living with”. So time becomes currency, but that person that is operating the CNC and working with the parametric software could also be credited or that learning activity could be recognised. I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute.
This project gave rise to another project (that if you were here yesterday you have probably seen presented - the Charlton Street Market project. Some of the students that worked on that project are here now) which was a project that essentially wanted to regenerate a market space - the Charlton Street Market - stimulating the economy of the space, bringing a social dynamic back into the space through a series of physical objects (market stalls) that become site for exchange and site for social exchange. Again, if you were here yesterday I’m sure the students talked about the participatory element of this, where they worked with New Horizons, which is a charitable organisation that is about getting people into employment and work, Troy (a market worker), they worked with Camden Living Centre and they worked also through a lot of participatory design activity on the streets, with the community.
One of my frustrations, as a design practitioner and an educator, is that when go out into the community and we do these sorts of projects - we work with these people in these projects - they bring so much knowledge and knowhow to these project and how do we recognise this participation? Formal education structures don’t let me credit the participation of those people in this learning experience that the students may be having. So, a function of Open Design and Manufacture, and our project, is to be able to recognise the participation of people in these projects and the learning that occurs beyond just the students that are participating in the project. So, we’ve developed a system of learning recognition, of digital badging that will recognise anyone’s participation in one of these projects. We started with the Digital Maker Collective, to run a series of events, where participation in those events can also be recognised through a Open Design and Manufacture Endorsement Framework. So, this was a ‘tear-down’ event, that was focused and orientated around circular economy. People were invited to break down a load of electronic products: to understand what’s in them, how things are made, the impact that the materials have on the environment. Through this activity - it’s a creative and playful activity, open to anyone - we learn about the circular economy. Now what Open Design and Manufacture as a project, as a platform and as a community will ultimately let us do is recognise the learning that takes place in these sorts of events, in the same way as that I may formally, as a design educator, recognise the learning that takes place in a design project.
One of the ultimate aims of this project is: to be able to recognise informal learning through an authority that exists within the Open Design and Manufacture community, that serves a number of agendas. Ultimately it democratises access to education (to design education), it provides open forms of assessment and accreditation.
As a very brief scenario: Doris is a florist and she’s been working on a stall - Chapel Street Market - for the past 50 years. She wants to go to University, just out of interest, but at the moment she’s not got the formal qualifications that would let her enter a Ceramic Design course, but Doris is incredibly creative and has all the haptic sensibilities and know how and creativity feathat we look for in a student that wants to apply to BA Ceramic Design. What Open Design and Manufacture will potentially let Doris do is to recognise - through an Open Learning endorsement and recognition framework - her experience. She’ll be able to tell a story about her experience, her creativity, that as a higher education institution we can look at and perhaps say: “you know what, you come into BA Ceramic Design, but come in in the 2nd year and we’ll charge you only 2 times the fees”. So potentially it democratises access to formal educational structures, if formal education is a thing of the future, because what we have learned from the WTF and what we’re learning from Open Design and Manufacture is that there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on out in these makerspaces, these innovation cultures, these non-accredited learning environments, than higher education might be able to offer. Institutionally this is quite problematic for me because potentially it’s the thing that kills the higher education as it exists at the moment. My students will tell you I say: “Go out! Engage the communities. Go beyond the walls of the institution - there’s more interesting stuff happening outside than inside - and that’s what I’ve learned as a practitioner in higher education, from this Open Design and Manufacture project. That’s what I’m taking away - this distributed model of the arts school.
A bit of a convoluted story - any thoughts or questions?
I’m Matt Malpass. I’m a Reader in Critical Design Practice at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where I work on the MA Industrial Design course and I’m Principle Investigator on an Open Design and Manufacture project. So, this is a project that the University has been involved with, with a bunch of European partners, looking at the Open Design and Manufacture paradigm.
What I’m going to do is, we’re going to talk a little bit about the project and the arc of the project, some of our findings and some of our intentions. So, essentially (I’m not going to kill you with a Powerpoint either. There’s a few slides, but they’re just for me - they’re prompts for me). Open Design and Manufacture is a project. It essentially tries to build relationships between higher education - so, places like University of the Arts, Deusto University (which is our Spanish partner), Open Design Communities - so makerspaces, or innovation communities, or coworking spaces - and industry that is interested in the way that makerspaces and these innovation communities work. So, what the project has essentially been doing is looking at the cultures of learning, teaching and working in these three contexts, to develop and understanding and a community of practice that can inform how we teach and operate within these spaces. So, the project has been working across Europe. We’re the UK node - we’re partnered with FabLab London in the UK. We’re working with partners in Italy, in Spain, in Tongji China. We’re working with a peer-to-peer foundation - Peer-to-peer foundations, based out of the Netherlands, are an organisation that specialise in common spaced economies. So, peer-to-peer communities, where openness and sharing economies are positioned to perhaps be more effective than the closed economies that we work in at the moment. Technalia - who are a huge technology company based out of Bilbao - and Polish partners as well. So essentially this is the project: to build an alliance between these three sectors, across Europe and internationally, working with Tonji.
As with all of these EUropean project, there is a website that you can go and look at and download all the report that have been written and the story so far, but I’m going to talk specifically about our interpretation of this project to date and what we’ve been doing to date.
Essentially Open Design is a model of practice - a model of design practice - that is interested in the development of physical products, services, machines, systems through the use of publicly shared design information. So, this is very different to orthodox models of industrial design and making, where intellectual property is often perceived as being very closed. So this model of design is all about openness and sharing and peer-to-peer activity. It’s grounded in discourses of the ‘commons’. It’s grounded in creative commons in terms of IP ownership. It’s about giving your ideas away, sharing it with people, but then having those ideas come back. It’s typified by presumptive technologies - things like the RepRap, the traditional printer. This is a printer based on the premise that once you build one you can build more. It’s a printer that replicates and builds itself. It’s typified by technologies such as 3D printing, CNC, platforms like Wikiblock. So it’s where IP and design work are shared openly. It’s a model of practice where challenges or design briefs are ‘posted’ and we crowdsource the response to these challenges. It’s got its tradition in participatory design practices that were developed in Sweden in the 1970s. It’s got a relationship to social innovation and social enterprise. Typically it’s not a market-led commercial model of design practice. It sits in relationship to orthodox design, but is a critical and peripheral practice.
In the Open Design and Manufacture project, the first thing we needed to do was go round and spend a lot of time in makerspaces - and you all have seen makerspaces. [Shows slides] This was FabLab, London before it closed down. Again this was the typical kit and the stuff you see in makerspace - again, 3D printers, presumptive technologies. The thing about a makerspace that’s really interesting is that it functions as a ‘bizarre bazaar’. In these spaces we get loads of different people from different backgrounds, coming together to do stuff. And it’s in the variation and the shared expertise within these spaces that give it a very particular characteristic. And this, from someone who runs a Product and Industrial Design course, is really interesting because typically my model of design is:
“we will give you an Industrial Design education, it will align with a particular canon and you will leave as a certain type of designer with a certain skill set”.
This stuff is like:
“We don’t really know what we’re going to get. We put a bunch of people in a room together with some sort of intention and aim and then the collective knowledge and skill set produces something effective.”
So I’ve been interested in looking at how people learn in these spaces and how this can inform the type of curriculum that we develop and deliver at Central Saint Martins.
Through Open and Design and Manufacture there was a review - internationally - of these makerspaces and how people learn and collaborate in these spaces: the type of projects that are undertaken, and some of the issues that these spaces face. Sustainability is one of the biggest issues. Every makerspace that we’ve partnered with during this project has close, or folded, or reimagined itself during the course of the project. It’s very difficult to sustain these spaces and so one of the findings is how institutions like UAL can support these makerspaces in terms of sustainability.
We took a trip to China. [Shows slide] This is a space in Shanghai. The reason we took a trip to China to look at the makerspace culture and the open design culture in China was because a mandate recently came down from central government that was focused on shifting the focus of China away from a nation that is perceived as ‘the factory of the world’ - that is producing for other people - to a nation that is innovative and designing in its own right. And so there’s huge amount of investment that’s been sent into these innovation spaces, these makerspaces, because they’re recognising the insight and innovation that is born out of these spaces. So, there’s been a huge amount of investment in these spaces. We saw cities that are being developed around this ethos - literally cities that are being built to support maker culture!
This idea of what we can learn in these spaces and how these spaces can be really effective and efficient in solving problems and addressing issues is best typified by this example [shows slide]. This guy is a banker, he’s a consultant in a bank and, six months before this picture was taken, hadn’t made anything in his life. He’s really interested in flying, but in China you can’t hold a private licence - you can fly in China. So he could become a pilot, he wanted to build himself a flight simulator and so, over the course of six months, having no making or engineering experience, he set about building himself a flight simulator in this makerspace in Shanghai. What he was really good at was asking the right questions. His professional practice as a consultant in a bank - a very ambiguous title and role - allowed him to set questions very effectively and efficiently. Working in this space with a load of people with lots of different backgrounds and interest and know-how, he functioned, just to ask right questions. So he asked the right questions, of the right people, and in the space of six months went to build a fully functioning flight simulator - hardware and software - from scratch. And this is the second iteration of it [shows slide]. Through question-setting and collaboration in this space with the range of expertise that existed in this space, this guy now has an operational flight simulator and he is learning to fly.
One of the key interesting things about this space is this notion of what we’ve termed “the bizarre bazaar”. There’s really eclectic and strange and fantastic know-how that exists within these communities and within these spaces and through a culture of exchange you can get a lot of stuff done very effectively.
In the UK - Nesta carried out a report - there are 97 of these spaces at the point of writing. There’s not about 142 makerspaces in the UK that are all struggling to sustain themselves, but are all full of characters like this.
A mile away, there’s ‘The Maker Mile’ - Vyner Street - a bunch of makerspace, open design and innovation communities - and when we started the project we went around and we interviewed a lot of the companies that exist in this space and the makers that exist in this space - places like Machine Rooms, which unfortunately has folded during the course of the project. This ‘Machine Rooms’ was one of the most successful makerspaces in London, but it shifted its focus beyond being a space for making, to a space that incubated businesses and ideas. But even with that shift to enterprise and social enterprise, it still struggled to sustain itself. We worked with people like OpenDesk and Sam Labs to understand how these businesses grew out of these innovation communities. Unmade, based at Somerset House. We spoke to Bare Conductive. The purpose of speaking to these companies was to understand what these businesses - these startup businesses, these young businesses - want from graduates and learners from higher education, because I’m in the business of delivering design education so I want to prepare effective students for work, essentially, in new industry contexts.
As we went through the project we noticed that there was this real issue with sustainability of these spaces and our partner in the project was FabLab, London, which through the course of the project shifted its focus and emphasis to urban agriculture and urban farming - biodesign. So FabLab London became GreenLab as our partner. And this was another salient finding that came out of the project because, in order to sustain more effectively, Ande Gregson (the founder) needed to focus the space, the Fab Lab, more thematically, because too open - if the spaces are too open and the activities are too diffuse then it becomes difficult to sustain. So, what we’ve seen is more and more of these spaces taking more of a thematic focus and direction and often with social interests at the core. So, GreenLab has a real green sustainability agenda. They can be really powerful spaces to improve conditions in society, if we reflect on the thematic of this event.
[Shows slide] This is one example of how a space in Northern Island is being used as part of a peace and reconciliation project, where the site of making, the makerspaces, the shared activities that take place in these spaces, can be really effective spaces to build community cohesion, to manage conflict, where the power of making serves to address complex social issues. This is something that, as an institution, the University of the Arts is interested in: in how making can serve and address complex social issues.
A few years ago we asked this question - this predates the Open Design and Manufacture project but has a relationship to it. A few years ago we asked this question: “Design education - what’s the future?”. We had an event, like this, where we had people - students and grads - working in a studio - to visualise where design education should go, and they came up with three scenarios for a future. In each of these scenarios, the idea or the notion of the higher education institution being a central site - a building - with heavy infrastructure melted away. In all of these scenarios, the institution was diffused across a city. The University essentially was a matchmaking service, between makerspaces, factories, innovation communities, social spaces where we could match students with the resource that is required in order for them to address their problem, their project. So in this example here [shows slide], we’ve got a student who wants to develop a - I think it was - a water filtration system for canals - and he would come onto the University website and he would login and set the challenge or the brief, post the challenge or the brief and then we would matchmake around that brief in order to infrastructure the project. What’s innovative about this is factories would be working with the institution and during their downtime would be offering their machinery for students in order to be able to deliver the work. Factory workers would be supporting the students or the learners in delivering their work and the institution would recognise the participation of those workers - those machine operators - because they’re teaching! You go to a factory, you work with somebody to deliver a filtration system, somebody who’s been MIG welding all their life and shares that knowledge with somebody. We need some sort of mechanism to recognise the activity that that factory worker has been supporting with.
[shows slide] In another example that came out of this session was this notion of the ‘agonist’. Students learn in teams and teams come together around complex matters of concern, so in this example there was an issue with rural banking in Scotland so this furniture maker joins the institution and the institution pulls a team together - furniture makers, anthropologists, economic specialists - and that team is then sent on to Scotland to deliver this project and learn through the delivery of the project. Now these models of the future of design education informed a thematic that we adopted for Open Design and Manufacture and this focus on ‘citizen centered innovation’. Challenge-based learning - so where a challenge is posted around a complex matter of concern - and then a team of learners is brought together to address that problem. We worked very closely, initially, with Camden Council. Camden Council had a real issue with (well it’s not Camden Council who have the issue, it’s the residents within Camden) face a problem of overcrowding living. Working with a team of designers and people within the council, we brought teams together to address this problem through the design of space-saving furniture that would be produced in makerspaces, that would be designed in collaboration with the residents that were facing this issue.
The students mapped the makerspaces in relation to Camden and through a series of participatory and co-design workshops worked to develop this furniture that could be delivered through CNC routing and could be assembled by people within the community. A range of furniture was developed - this is it at scale [shows slide], this is the full range.
The idea is that because people face different issues - this came out through the participation - because people face different issues, we need to have ways of scaling and modelling furniture to address the specific issues of the residents within Camden. A system of parametric design and nesting furniture was developed - [shows slide] this is the complete system. The premise being that, as a user that required this furniture, you would log into this website, you would tailor the furniture because of your needs and then this would generate a cut pattern that could be manufactured, via CNC. One scenario is that there is a jobseeker, or somebody who is looking for work, and as part of the job seeking requires them to be actively participating in training. One scenario could be: “ok, somebody’s looking for work, but they are spending time operating the CNC to deliver the furniture for a block of residents that they may be living with”. So time becomes currency, but that person that is operating the CNC and working with the parametric software could also be credited or that learning activity could be recognised. I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute.
This project gave rise to another project (that if you were here yesterday you have probably seen presented - the Charlton Street Market project. Some of the students that worked on that project are here now) which was a project that essentially wanted to regenerate a market space - the Charlton Street Market - stimulating the economy of the space, bringing a social dynamic back into the space through a series of physical objects (market stalls) that become site for exchange and site for social exchange. Again, if you were here yesterday I’m sure the students talked about the participatory element of this, where they worked with New Horizons, which is a charitable organisation that is about getting people into employment and work, Troy (a market worker), they worked with Camden Living Centre and they worked also through a lot of participatory design activity on the streets, with the community.
One of my frustrations, as a design practitioner and an educator, is that when go out into the community and we do these sorts of projects - we work with these people in these projects - they bring so much knowledge and knowhow to these project and how do we recognise this participation? Formal education structures don’t let me credit the participation of those people in this learning experience that the students may be having. So, a function of Open Design and Manufacture, and our project, is to be able to recognise the participation of people in these projects and the learning that occurs beyond just the students that are participating in the project. So, we’ve developed a system of learning recognition, of digital badging that will recognise anyone’s participation in one of these projects. We started with the Digital Maker Collective, to run a series of events, where participation in those events can also be recognised through a Open Design and Manufacture Endorsement Framework. So, this was a ‘tear-down’ event, that was focused and orientated around circular economy. People were invited to break down a load of electronic products: to understand what’s in them, how things are made, the impact that the materials have on the environment. Through this activity - it’s a creative and playful activity, open to anyone - we learn about the circular economy. Now what Open Design and Manufacture as a project, as a platform and as a community will ultimately let us do is recognise the learning that takes place in these sorts of events, in the same way as that I may formally, as a design educator, recognise the learning that takes place in a design project.
One of the ultimate aims of this project is: to be able to recognise informal learning through an authority that exists within the Open Design and Manufacture community, that serves a number of agendas. Ultimately it democratises access to education (to design education), it provides open forms of assessment and accreditation.
As a very brief scenario: Doris is a florist and she’s been working on a stall - Chapel Street Market - for the past 50 years. She wants to go to University, just out of interest, but at the moment she’s not got the formal qualifications that would let her enter a Ceramic Design course, but Doris is incredibly creative and has all the haptic sensibilities and know how and creativity feathat we look for in a student that wants to apply to BA Ceramic Design. What Open Design and Manufacture will potentially let Doris do is to recognise - through an Open Learning endorsement and recognition framework - her experience. She’ll be able to tell a story about her experience, her creativity, that as a higher education institution we can look at and perhaps say: “you know what, you come into BA Ceramic Design, but come in in the 2nd year and we’ll charge you only 2 times the fees”. So potentially it democratises access to formal educational structures, if formal education is a thing of the future, because what we have learned from the WTF and what we’re learning from Open Design and Manufacture is that there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on out in these makerspaces, these innovation cultures, these non-accredited learning environments, than higher education might be able to offer. Institutionally this is quite problematic for me because potentially it’s the thing that kills the higher education as it exists at the moment. My students will tell you I say: “Go out! Engage the communities. Go beyond the walls of the institution - there’s more interesting stuff happening outside than inside - and that’s what I’ve learned as a practitioner in higher education, from this Open Design and Manufacture project. That’s what I’m taking away - this distributed model of the arts school.
A bit of a convoluted story - any thoughts or questions?
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