[open-hardware] New Open Design Working Group at the OKFN

[Kat Braybrooke]

Hello all,

A quick note that the new Open Design Working Group [1] has just been
launched by the OKFN with the cooperation of Massimo Mechinelli (Aalto
Media Factory in Helsinki) and Primavera De Filippi (CERSA/CNRS,
Paris) - and we'd love to have your involvement as it takes its first
steps as a community!

With this working group, we aim to unite designers with open knowledge
practitioners across various facets (from design as a blueprint to
design as process to design as an artifact) and applications (product
design, graphic design, fashion design, service design, interior
design, architecture, hardware, data visualisation) to discuss issues
related to intellectual property, business models and definitions of
open practices. We feel that because there is still not a shared (and
updated) definition of what Open Design is, there remains a need to
discuss, debate, workshop and conceptualise together as designers
across boundaries for our work to have full societal impact.

As a working group, we will aim to act as a central point of reference
for the development of Open Design in theory and in practice by
organising workshops, curating collections of existing open material
and developing domain-specific guides. We will collaborate with
designers, artists, hackers and makers across the spectrum of the
field as a hub for low cost, community-driven projects around Open
Design. We are also planning on being involved with the Future
Everything's FAB* Summit [2] in Manchester this May and helping
coordinate an Open Design stream at the Open Knowledge Festival [3] in
Helsinki, so it would be great to have your involvement and ideas in
this process!

If you're interested in becoming a part of this initiative, please
introduce yourself on our new Open Design discussion list [4] which
we'll be using to discuss ideas, events and first steps in the next
few weeks.

Thanks so much, and we look forward to building new links together
through design!

[1] http://design.okfn.org/
[2] http://fabstar.org/2012/03/05/fab-futureeverything-manchester/
[3] http://okfestival.org
[4] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/opendesign

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| Kat Braybrooke | Community Coordinator
| Global Chapters and OKFestival
| Open Knowledge Foundation | London
| OKFN.org | Twitter @kat_braybrooke