Why we need to strengthen the business muscle of distributed design

The case for why ambitious distributed design practitioners needs to focus on business development alongside the creative process in order to maximize global transformative impact.

by Christian Villum - Director of Digital & Future Thinking, Danish Design Centre.

[photos can be chosen freely from either this repository: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1KVVxJaAgn_44Z4e9OFYb9CPi0dajW5z_ - or this one: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Igo6cBE5FcMImmHRAkoH2Fcy6RzLPHW0?usp=sharing - photographer Agnete Schlichtkrull under a Creative Commons BY-NC license]

For many people the curiosity towards exploring the potential of distributed design often takes its origin in the idealistic end of the motivational spectrum. Whether you are a maker, craft person or designer, the idea of opening up your design for others to contribute to can often be ascribed ideological reasons. Distributed design is deeply rooted in values such as sustainability, circularity and social equality, to name a few, and the idea of taking the distributed, collaborative approach in most cases couples two things: The initial desire to improve the design by allowing others to contribute their creative input, but just a importantly also to have the design contribute a positive impact on the world by empowering peers and adding value to the global digital commons. In other words the medium is most definitely part of the message, and many practitioners of distributed design have only little or even no interest in receiving financial rewards for their labour by developing their distributed design practice as a business. And even if they do, they only rarely take a systematic approach towards realizing such a vision of creating a model for economic compentation in exchange for their work; something that a more conventional entrepreneur would put front and center in their creative process.

This is not to say that idealistic distributed design practitioners are not ambitious. On the contrary: Some of the world's most fundamentally revolutionary ideas and designs (and products) come out of such idealism and would never have materialized if it wasn't for their originators' mix of grand vision, hard work and non-selfish (or even benevolent) lack of pursuit of money. Examples that come to mind include Wikipedia or Linux, just to name a couple. But when distributed design ideas actually do develop into a business idea it is often relatively far down the line in the evolution of the design, and sometimes even by coincidence because a business-oriented approach often sits rather uncomfortably with the kind of compassionate community structures dominating grass-roots hubs like Fablabs, maker spaces and online open source communities. Only very rarely is a business approach the point of departure for initiating a distributed design proces.

However if we, as a movement - the digital, distributed, sustainable, open source manufacturing movement - is to really make a dent in the world and contribute to (or even become a defining factor in) a massive, global transformation: To transition the world towards a more sustainable production and consumption paradigm as outlined, for instance, in the Fab City world vision, well, then we need to think much more strategically about how we onboard more conventional business thinking into our practice. Massive scaling of ideas to transform the world have a much higher chance of success if it manages to trigger the colossal business muscle that drives our society today. Like Richard Buckminster Fuller famously said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” This is where need to take distributed design, and this is why we need to "speak business" to truly have a shot at leveraging our ideas towards global impact.

Distributed design-driven business is, luckily, already happening in many places. Companies large and small around the world are experimenting with new ways of engaging their user base. Building communities that stimulate user's contributions instead of their consumption allows such users to become co-creators, and the companies to do well by doing good. This approach makes it possible to innovate faster, scale quicker and, in essence, save development costs internally while also stimulating economic growth across the entire community of contributors: The reason being that this community can also build business off of shared design assets, and thereby initiating a ripple effect of multi-bottomline value creation - both economically, sustainably and socially.

Examples include, for instance, Silicon Valley big wigs like IBM and Microsoft who recently acquired Red Hat and Github, respectively, to tap into existing communities, but also start-ups and small to medium-sized companies all over the world are creating new and exciting open source-based physical products that allow anyone to build on existing designs. 3D Robotics, Arduino and the British furniture company Opendesk, which is creating open design furniture in collaboration with 600 furniture creators all over the world, are just a few examples of how open source - and thereby distributed design - has become the foundation of some of the most innovative and interesting business models of our time.

The trend is part of the even bigger global narrative of technological disruption and digitization that is challenging old regimes and which is currently top of mind for many, if not all, companies. In other words the time is ripe for such a groundbreaking idea like what we are proposing here. The advent of the Internet inspires not only a move from building business on both atoms to bits, rather than just the former, but more importantly a reframing of how value is being created as well as how to monetize that in an sustainable ways. But not only that: Going open might even present bigger scaling opportunities that staying proprietary. The math is simple: If loosing the exclusive right to a design in return of a massive scaling opportunity as well as a rapid acceleration of innovation, well, then that might be a valuable tradeoff - and an opportunity to step into brand new economies of scale built on sustainable values.

This section of the book presents a couple of strong cases from the Distributed Design Market Platform ecosystem that exemplify some of these perspectives. In addition we introduce a brand new toolkit that allows any company to use strategic design to experiment with finding the specific distributed, open source market strategy and business model for their product and industry.