[Open Design] Open design and it's political dimension

Tue Apr 16 07:58:00 UTC 2013

Hi Kat, I'm sure your "young" experience is much better documented and wise than mine! :) Anyway, I'll try to add my scope here.

I agree, could be connections between the two domains and will be good thing to explore them, but I'm not sure about the Benkler creativity issue that you mention is one of them. I'll try to explain it.

As I can see in the open design discussion there are many supporters of the creativity as a goodie and, is true, creativity can be understood as an expression of the emergency phenomenon. I mean emergency as described in complexity science. From this scope, the saturation of human interaction produces emergency as creativity. So, openness, as a device that enables and enhances human interaction, works for creativity growth.

But, in other hand, ¿is creativity cause of social equality and balance equilibrium between power and individual? No, instead, creativity is a consequence of the freedom (of interaction) and not vice versa.

In fact, creativity is a slippery concept that was serving a pioneering form of precarious employment in cultural industries because the meaning of creativity in that context build an artificial line separating creative people and non creative people. We need to understand that just the act of composing a simple sentence encloses a lot of creativity. From this scope all people is creative. So, creativity makes no meaningful difference between people.

Please, feel free to discuss that points. Thank you!

aitor

El 19/03/2013, a las 13:42, Kat Braybrooke escribió:

> Hello Aitor, 
> 
> Thanks for this - quite interesting. Having a background in both political science and design, so this is especially fascinating for me - do you have more of the speech recorded than the introduction? 
> 
> This quote I found especially compelling: "Open design should always be considered in its political dimension, because transparency, collaboration and release of resources are strategies that do not fully guarantee the balance and social justice by themselves."
> 
> In my own (young!) experience with fields related to transparency and collaborative peer-production, I wouldn't say the concept of Open Design has often easily fit within such politicised paradigms - but I agree that it should. 
> 
> Extrapolating a passage from Yochai Benkler's famous 'Cos's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm', one could start to make some interesting connections between the two dichotomies you identify - namely, the increasing politicisation of such commons-based production versus the more functional method: "The advantages of peer production are, then, improved identification and allocation of human creativity. These advantages appear to have become salient, because human creativity itself has become salient. In the domain of information and culture, production generally comprises the combination of preexisting information/cultural inputs, human creativity, and the physical capital necessary to (1) fix ideas and human utterances in media capable of storing and communicating them and (2) transmit them. " 
> 
> Would be interesting to have a further discussion about this!
> 
> Kat
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> @kat_braybrooke | kaibray.com | london
> local groups | open design | the open book
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Aitor Méndez <aitor at e451.net> wrote:
> Hello everybody. I'm Aitor Méndez, graphic designer from Madrid, Spain.
> 
> The following is an introduction of the speech I wrote past year for the Open Design and Shared creativity Congress. In this moment I'm not totally sure of the role of Open Design in the social structure as seems in this introduction, but I think this can be a good starting point to talk about political dimension of Open Design:
> 
> The politics of language in graphic design.
> Interventon at Open Design and Shared Creativity congress. Madrid June 2012.
> 
> Introduction:
> 
> This presentation aims to be an approach to open design through an unusual perspective, language. Open design is, to a large extent, the extrapolation of free software’s methods and goals to the field of design. Thus it is understandable that its proposals arise from tools that enable collaboration and how the results of design work can be shared. Language is a fundamental and unavoidable tool in design work, and it is surprising that no one, to my knowledge, has ever broached the issue of language from the perspective of open design.
> 
> But, what is the question that we have to approach? What are free software and culture about? Are transparency, collaboration and reusability aims by themselves? Most of the approaches and debates regarding open design seem to implicitly answer yes, losing sight of the fact that transparency, collaboration and reusability are mere strategies for a single purpose: the emancipation of the individual from the various powers that try to impose their conditions of existence. This objective could also be defined as the attempt to balance the forces between large power structures and individuals, giving back to them the chance to intervene and participate effectively in the organisation of their own existence. This question, and no other, is the spirit that should guide open design. This claim may seem obvious but it is increasingly necessary to pose due to the multitude of cases of misappropriation, or rather expropriation that the market executes regarding free and open strategies. We can see how the market uses free strategies to pursue its own ends, very far from equilibrium and social equality claimed in the premises of a free cultural movement.
> 
> In other words, open design should always be considered in its political dimension, because transparency, collaboration and release of resources are strategies that do not fully guarantee the balance and social justice by themselves.
> 
> The dichotomy between these two meanings of open design- the one that identifies a political dimension as its purpose and its raison d'être, and the one that is merely to implement a range of strategies that could also be used to promote the emancipation of the individual and, instead, supports their subordination- is, in fact, the same as it is given in the field of free software between these two meanings "open source" and "free software". It would be appropriate, therefore, to address these two areas as open and free design layout.
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