After few months of pause, it is finally time to give an update about the development of the Open Design Definition, a project I’ve started while working at Aalto Media Factory (and co-organizing the Open Knowledge Festival) together with many others from this group.

01. The Open Design Definition workshop at Open Knowledge Festival

During the Open Knowledge Festival I also found the time for a workshop about the Open Design Definition, and it worked really well: the room was full and we started opening many issues on the GitHub repository of the definition. The discussion has improved a lot after that moment. Here on Slideshare you can find my presentation that resumes the concept and the work behind the Open Design Definition.

02. Further developing the discussion on the definition

I will now try to resume the main questions that have surfaced in the mailing list, during the workshop and on GitHub. These are the main questions that we have to answer in order to further proceed with the collaborative development of the Open Design Definition.

• Are we focusing only on Product Design (i.e. something physical, and that may be 3D printed) or are we talking about any kind of design? Personally I’m trying to having a discussion on all the fields of design, since there are already many different cases of Open Source in Design in many fields (see the presentation above), but of course this means that we have to describe a generic enough definition of Design, or a definition that makes references to the different Design fields.
• Shall we start from what Intellectual Property (IP) laws consider Design, or from what designers consider Design? This choice would lead to two very different definitions, so we have to decide this together: starting from the IP laws viewpoint, it will be easier to define licenses and IP strategies; starting from designers’ viewpoint will make the definition easier to be understood by the Design community at large
• And, related to this, shall we leave the discussion about licenses out, or shall we include something in the definition?
• What about the “source files” of a design project? Shall we consider, in the definition, to ask about publishing also the source files (i.e. vector drawing and not only the exported picture, CAD files and not only the rendering pictures)
• Shall we clarify and distinguish about the definition being about Openness and/or Freedom? Or shall we include both in the definition?
• Shall start preparing a draft of a definition, in order to start the discussion to be more focused? From which existing definition should we start?

03. Working in the Open Design Working Group

I then mined the interaction on GitHub (with these open source scripts), in order to see how the discussion and work on the GitHub repository is going on. Here you can find the network of the interactions: as you can see, most of the work has been done by me, only two people (in green) have committed, and many users are not even participating in the issues publishing or commenting. We should find a way to get them more involved on the GitHub repository.

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