Introduction to This Special Issue on Open Design at the Intersection of Making and Manufacturing

ABSTRACT

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Philip Green

David Philip Green ([email protected], dpgreen.co.uk) is an interdisciplinary researcher with an interest in co-designing open documentary projects with diverse publics; he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England.

Verena Fuchsberger

Verena Fuchsberger ([email protected], hci.sbg.ac.at/person/fuchsberger/) is interested in the materiality of interactions and the relations between individuals, materials and digital-physical artefacts; she is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre of Human-Computer Interaction at the Univerisry of Salzburg.

Nick Taylor

Nick Taylor ([email protected], nick-taylor.co.uk/) is interested in the intersection of design, technology and society and the impact of emerging technologies and practices; he is a Senior Lecturer in the Duncanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee.

Pernille Bjørn

Pernille Bjørn ([email protected], pernillebjorn.dk) is interested in the basic nature of collaborative work with the aim of designing collaborative technologies; she is a Professor in Computer Supported Co-operative Work at the University of Copenhagen.

David Kirk

David Kirk ([email protected], northlab.uk) is interested in design research methods and the ways in which technology design can be centred on rich understanding of user experiences, cultures and contexts; he is a Professor of Digital Living and leads NorthLab, a highly interdisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design community based at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.

Silvia Lindtner

Silvia Lindtner ([email protected], silvialindtner.com) is interested in innovation and technology entrepreneurship, making and hacking cultures, shifts in digital work, labour, industry, policy, and governance; she is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at University of Michigan.