Website: ODDP
Deadline for submissions: UPDATED 15 October 2018
Guest editors: Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Stefano Maffei
Information for contributors
Designers’ practices have constantly evolved in the last two centuries, and during the last decades new design and production paradigms have emerged, transforming the discipline from processes developed exclusively by professionals to processes where users have an increasingly important and active role. The digitization of society, the democratization of technology, the personalization of production and the gradual opening of the design practice are emerging phenomena that generate a new scenario in which the processes of creation, production and distribution of goods and services is undergoing profound changes
The increasing number of designers and creative individuals (which is not accompanied by an equally strong demand of design jobs) represents a new condition that pushes some of them to self-produce goods, often at a small scale, by integrating complementary resources they do not possess. This is possible thanks to a wide network of physical and digital platforms for learning and training, research, design, production, distribution and (micro)financing. This trend is strongly connected with the Maker movement, a loose global movement of individuals who focus on making physical projects but with a digital layer and digital tools, often with collaborative processes and the sharing of the digital files or documentation. Makers often meet and work in globally-networked laboratories such as Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces that provide access to a local and global community of like-minded actors and to several digital fabrication technologies able to manufacture easily and locally digital projects. The democratization of technology, education, content and community building of such laboratories increases the possibilities for professional and amateur designers and at the same time it opens up new possibilities of collaboration and interaction among them and with other stakeholders
All these phenomena, which integrate design skills and the ‘making’ approach, enable the development of new entrepreneurial types of professional producers. On one hand designers acquire more technological and practical skills, on the other hand, makers evolve their design attitude and capabilities. Design and production are becoming thus more Open and Distributed: among several actors, several approaches, several locations and laboratories. The change of design and production models is becoming the core topic of the research and innovation policies, in many countries, regions and cities. At the same time, several bottom up initiatives are being developed by local people and associations, especially in urban contexts. Moreover, experts in economics, sociology, technology are studying manufacturing process changes in terms of development of personal fabrication, growth and impact of new communities of makers and the return to new forms of craftsmen. Furthermore, we think this is an important issue for the design on a global scale that has many points of convergence with the global theme of social innovation.
The evolution of Open & Distributed Design & Production can be already measured in decades, with many initiatives by both practitioners and researchers, and its themes have been discussed already in several conferences (like Crafting the Future, Open Design for E-very-thing, several editions of the research strand of the FABx conferences, organized by the International Fab Lab Association, and many more), journal issues (like several issues of the Journal of the Peer Production, the Copytheft issue of Disegno – The Journal of Design Culture, the Open Design at the Intersection of Making and Manufacturing issue of the Human–Computer Interaction journal, and many more) and research projects (MAKE-IT, Open Maker, OpenCare, Digital DIY and many more). This is a phenomenon that has already been promoted, discussed and studied by several disciplines and also design researchers, but while most of these contributions have explored its beginnings and main traits, we believe that it might be reaching a turning point in its evolution. Discussions about this phenomenon could be more strategic if they focus now more on how to make it more structured and prepared for the long term than just focusing on exploring common traits and how to scale it without thinking about a long term strategy. Political, social, economical and legal issues are increasingly relevant in order to make such initiatives inclusive, their processes and organization transparent and their management fair and equal.
We especially welcome proposals that addresses existing criticalities of the Open & Distributed Design & Production phenomenon and their connections with Strategic Design: how these criticalities impact over Strategic Design, and how could Strategic Design impact over them?
We suggest these strands for the discussion of Open & Distributed Design & Production:
Opening Design & Opening Production: Open and collaborative processes are spreading in production of goods and services. Practices and modalities for value production based on shared resources and active collaboration between diverse stakeholders are growing in diverse fields. From software and information production (with commons-based p2p production) to the consumer sector, (collaborative consumption) to the public service field (co-creation of services) to social innovation and sustainability (collaborative services and product-service systems). This strand aims at exploring how design can support open and collaborative practices and which impact they could have on boosting a local economy generating resilience.
Platforms for opening design & production: Open and collaborative processes are spreading in production of goods and services. Practices and modalities for value production based on shared resources and active collaboration between diverse stakeholders are growing in diverse fields. From software and information production (with commons-based p2p production) to the consumer sector, (collaborative consumption) to the public service field (co-creation of services) to social innovation and sustainability (collaborative services and product-service systems). This strand aims at exploring open and collaborative practices of value generation understanding how design can support them and which impact they could have on boosting a local economy generating resilience.
Factories for opening design & production: Fab Labs, Hackerspaces, Living Labs but also public libraries offering production facilities; infrastructures for prototyping and supporting local production are spreading, as facilities where open access to technology and collaboration between participants lowers the threshold for making things and testing activities and initiatives. The aim of this strand is to discuss how these infrastructures could become more effective in supporting local forms of production and experimentation.
Design for "indie" innovation: The democratization of design (from open source design to the designer as a "mass profession") linked to the rise of DIY culture generates a new scenario for the development of design processes which have very different characteristics from the traditional ones. This strand aims at exploring these new design process related to the autonomous development of new product-service system that can be produced on-demand and on-site; the regeneration/refurbishing and upgrade of products and technologies; and the creative repair and/or hacking.
Strategic design has always been considered a specific disciplinary field mainly focused on product-service systems design and development. Its applications, methodologies and tools stimulate individuals and organizations to adopt and use design as a key factor/resource to innovate products and services, production, communication and distribution processes and generate economic, social, and cultural values. In an emerging scenario, which is characterized by the rise of open and distributed models, creative, production and distribution processes are transforming conditions and environments in which strategic design has operated so far.
New independent actors are emerging in economic, the nature of organizations is evolving in a hybrid direction, design and R&D processes become less hierarchical and more collaborative, user are changing the relationship with products-services systems. In this perspective, the influence and contribution of disciplines such as marketing - traditionally very "close" to strategic design - seems now less relevant as well as the extreme attention on brand identity and appearance. But strategic design is and remains a disciplinary field that highly stimulates individuals and organizations to think, work and act adopting a systemic perspective and a holistic view. For this reason, this special issue of SDRJ wants to thus gather contributions that explore what and (overall) how strategic design has been could and/or should evolve its own patrimony of approaches, methodologies and tools to operate and innovate in emerging contexts of open and distributed design.
Furthermore, we also suggest to investigate the above themes, with the perspective of Strategic Design, focusing on the social, political, legal, environmental and economic issues especially through critical trends such as unemployment, automation, democracy, decentralization, decolonization, gender issues, sustainability, circular economy, degrowth, anthropocene, post-humanism, techno-evangelism, techno-determinism and so on. Proposals on different strands, issues and trends that explore the criticalities of Open & Distributed Design & Production with the perspective of Strategic Design are very much welcomed.
References
Bianchini, M., & Maffei, S. (2012). Could design leadership be personal? Forecasting new forms of “Indie Capitalism.” Design Management Journal, 7(1), 6–17.
Forlano, L. (2017). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001
Foster, E. K. (2017). Making Cultures: Politics of Inclusion, Accessibility, and Empowerment at the Margins of the Maker Movement (Ph.D.). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ann Arbor, United States.
Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London ; New York: Verso.
Kohtala, C. (2016). Making sustainability: how Fab Labs address environmental issues. Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture - Department of Design. Retrieved from https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/21755
Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. (R. Coad, Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Menichinelli, M. (2016). A Framework for Understanding the Possible Intersections of Design with Open, P2P, Diffuse, Distributed and Decentralized Systems. Disegno – The Journal of Design Culture, III(1–2), 44–71. http://disegno.mome.hu/articles/2016/Disegno2016_1_2_04_Menichinelli.pdf
Menichinelli, M., Bianchini, M., Carosi, A., & Maffei, S. (2017). Makers as a new work condition between self-employment and community peer-production. Insights from a survey on Makers in Italy. Journal of Peer Production, (10). Retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy/
Morozov, E. (2014). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (First Trade Paper Edition edition). New York: PublicAffairs.
Schedule:
Launch of the call for papers: May 19th, 2018
Full paper due: September 16th, 2018
Notification of Review results: November 6th, 2018
Deadline for submission of the final version: December 10th, 2018
Final acceptance: January 15th, 2019
Publication: May 1st, 2019
Submission guidelines
Manuscripts must be prepared using the guidelines found at the Submission page.
The manuscript must be written in English.
Previously published articles will not be accepted. Submitted articles must not be under consideration for publication anywhere else. The publication of the article is subjected to the previous approval of the journal's Editorial Board, as well as to peer review made by, at least, two reviewers using the double blind review process.
Manuscripts must be sent through the journal’s online submission system. You have to register in the platform in order to submit your article.
If you have questions regarding the submission process, contact the journal at periodicos@unisinos.br.
Deadline for submissions: UPDATED 15 October 2018
Information for contributors
Designers’ practices have constantly evolved in the last two centuries, and during the last decades new design and production paradigms have emerged, transforming the discipline from processes developed exclusively by professionals to processes where users have an increasingly important and active role. The digitization of society, the democratization of technology, the personalization of production and the gradual opening of the design practice are emerging phenomena that generate a new scenario in which the processes of creation, production and distribution of goods and services is undergoing profound changes
The increasing number of designers and creative individuals (which is not accompanied by an equally strong demand of design jobs) represents a new condition that pushes some of them to self-produce goods, often at a small scale, by integrating complementary resources they do not possess. This is possible thanks to a wide network of physical and digital platforms for learning and training, research, design, production, distribution and (micro)financing. This trend is strongly connected with the Maker movement, a loose global movement of individuals who focus on making physical projects but with a digital layer and digital tools, often with collaborative processes and the sharing of the digital files or documentation. Makers often meet and work in globally-networked laboratories such as Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces that provide access to a local and global community of like-minded actors and to several digital fabrication technologies able to manufacture easily and locally digital projects. The democratization of technology, education, content and community building of such laboratories increases the possibilities for professional and amateur designers and at the same time it opens up new possibilities of collaboration and interaction among them and with other stakeholders
All these phenomena, which integrate design skills and the ‘making’ approach, enable the development of new entrepreneurial types of professional producers. On one hand designers acquire more technological and practical skills, on the other hand, makers evolve their design attitude and capabilities. Design and production are becoming thus more Open and Distributed: among several actors, several approaches, several locations and laboratories. The change of design and production models is becoming the core topic of the research and innovation policies, in many countries, regions and cities. At the same time, several bottom up initiatives are being developed by local people and associations, especially in urban contexts. Moreover, experts in economics, sociology, technology are studying manufacturing process changes in terms of development of personal fabrication, growth and impact of new communities of makers and the return to new forms of craftsmen. Furthermore, we think this is an important issue for the design on a global scale that has many points of convergence with the global theme of social innovation.
The evolution of Open & Distributed Design & Production can be already measured in decades, with many initiatives by both practitioners and researchers, and its themes have been discussed already in several conferences (like Crafting the Future, Open Design for E-very-thing, several editions of the research strand of the FABx conferences, organized by the International Fab Lab Association, and many more), journal issues (like several issues of the Journal of the Peer Production, the Copytheft issue of Disegno – The Journal of Design Culture, the Open Design at the Intersection of Making and Manufacturing issue of the Human–Computer Interaction journal, and many more) and research projects (MAKE-IT, Open Maker, OpenCare, Digital DIY and many more). This is a phenomenon that has already been promoted, discussed and studied by several disciplines and also design researchers, but while most of these contributions have explored its beginnings and main traits, we believe that it might be reaching a turning point in its evolution. Discussions about this phenomenon could be more strategic if they focus now more on how to make it more structured and prepared for the long term than just focusing on exploring common traits and how to scale it without thinking about a long term strategy. Political, social, economical and legal issues are increasingly relevant in order to make such initiatives inclusive, their processes and organization transparent and their management fair and equal.
We especially welcome proposals that addresses existing criticalities of the Open & Distributed Design & Production phenomenon and their connections with Strategic Design: how these criticalities impact over Strategic Design, and how could Strategic Design impact over them?
We suggest these strands for the discussion of Open & Distributed Design & Production:
Opening Design & Opening Production: Open and collaborative processes are spreading in production of goods and services. Practices and modalities for value production based on shared resources and active collaboration between diverse stakeholders are growing in diverse fields. From software and information production (with commons-based p2p production) to the consumer sector, (collaborative consumption) to the public service field (co-creation of services) to social innovation and sustainability (collaborative services and product-service systems). This strand aims at exploring how design can support open and collaborative practices and which impact they could have on boosting a local economy generating resilience.
Platforms for opening design & production: Open and collaborative processes are spreading in production of goods and services. Practices and modalities for value production based on shared resources and active collaboration between diverse stakeholders are growing in diverse fields. From software and information production (with commons-based p2p production) to the consumer sector, (collaborative consumption) to the public service field (co-creation of services) to social innovation and sustainability (collaborative services and product-service systems). This strand aims at exploring open and collaborative practices of value generation understanding how design can support them and which impact they could have on boosting a local economy generating resilience.
Factories for opening design & production: Fab Labs, Hackerspaces, Living Labs but also public libraries offering production facilities; infrastructures for prototyping and supporting local production are spreading, as facilities where open access to technology and collaboration between participants lowers the threshold for making things and testing activities and initiatives. The aim of this strand is to discuss how these infrastructures could become more effective in supporting local forms of production and experimentation.
Design for "indie" innovation: The democratization of design (from open source design to the designer as a "mass profession") linked to the rise of DIY culture generates a new scenario for the development of design processes which have very different characteristics from the traditional ones. This strand aims at exploring these new design process related to the autonomous development of new product-service system that can be produced on-demand and on-site; the regeneration/refurbishing and upgrade of products and technologies; and the creative repair and/or hacking.
Strategic design has always been considered a specific disciplinary field mainly focused on product-service systems design and development. Its applications, methodologies and tools stimulate individuals and organizations to adopt and use design as a key factor/resource to innovate products and services, production, communication and distribution processes and generate economic, social, and cultural values. In an emerging scenario, which is characterized by the rise of open and distributed models, creative, production and distribution processes are transforming conditions and environments in which strategic design has operated so far.
New independent actors are emerging in economic, the nature of organizations is evolving in a hybrid direction, design and R&D processes become less hierarchical and more collaborative, user are changing the relationship with products-services systems. In this perspective, the influence and contribution of disciplines such as marketing - traditionally very "close" to strategic design - seems now less relevant as well as the extreme attention on brand identity and appearance. But strategic design is and remains a disciplinary field that highly stimulates individuals and organizations to think, work and act adopting a systemic perspective and a holistic view. For this reason, this special issue of SDRJ wants to thus gather contributions that explore what and (overall) how strategic design has been could and/or should evolve its own patrimony of approaches, methodologies and tools to operate and innovate in emerging contexts of open and distributed design.
Furthermore, we also suggest to investigate the above themes, with the perspective of Strategic Design, focusing on the social, political, legal, environmental and economic issues especially through critical trends such as unemployment, automation, democracy, decentralization, decolonization, gender issues, sustainability, circular economy, degrowth, anthropocene, post-humanism, techno-evangelism, techno-determinism and so on. Proposals on different strands, issues and trends that explore the criticalities of Open & Distributed Design & Production with the perspective of Strategic Design are very much welcomed.
References
Bianchini, M., & Maffei, S. (2012). Could design leadership be personal? Forecasting new forms of “Indie Capitalism.” Design Management Journal, 7(1), 6–17.
Forlano, L. (2017). Posthumanism and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001
Foster, E. K. (2017). Making Cultures: Politics of Inclusion, Accessibility, and Empowerment at the Margins of the Maker Movement (Ph.D.). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ann Arbor, United States.
Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London ; New York: Verso.
Kohtala, C. (2016). Making sustainability: how Fab Labs address environmental issues. Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture - Department of Design. Retrieved from https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/21755
Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. (R. Coad, Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Menichinelli, M. (2016). A Framework for Understanding the Possible Intersections of Design with Open, P2P, Diffuse, Distributed and Decentralized Systems. Disegno – The Journal of Design Culture, III(1–2), 44–71. http://disegno.mome.hu/articles/2016/Disegno2016_1_2_04_Menichinelli.pdf
Menichinelli, M., Bianchini, M., Carosi, A., & Maffei, S. (2017). Makers as a new work condition between self-employment and community peer-production. Insights from a survey on Makers in Italy. Journal of Peer Production, (10). Retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy/
Morozov, E. (2014). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (First Trade Paper Edition edition). New York: PublicAffairs.
Schedule:
Launch of the call for papers: May 19th, 2018
Full paper due: September 16th, 2018
Notification of Review results: November 6th, 2018
Deadline for submission of the final version: December 10th, 2018
Final acceptance: January 15th, 2019
Publication: May 1st, 2019
Submission guidelines
Manuscripts must be prepared using the guidelines found at the Submission page.
The manuscript must be written in English.
Previously published articles will not be accepted. Submitted articles must not be under consideration for publication anywhere else. The publication of the article is subjected to the previous approval of the journal's Editorial Board, as well as to peer review made by, at least, two reviewers using the double blind review process.
Manuscripts must be sent through the journal’s online submission system. You have to register in the platform in order to submit your article.
If you have questions regarding the submission process, contact the journal at periodicos@unisinos.br.
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