State of Art on Distributed Design
State of the Art
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State of the Art
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By Tomas Diez - Director of Fab City Research Lab Barcelona and Fab City Foundation, and Christian Villum - Director of Digital & Future Thinking, Danish Design Centre.
[photos can be chosen freely from either this repository: - or this one: - photographer Agnete Schlichtkrull under a Creative Commons BY-NC license]
The image above is one of the most used images in the world of computation and communications in order to explain the topology of networks.
Radio and Television models follow the model of a centralized or decentralized model.
The Internet was designed as a distributed network.
The World Wide Web (that runs on top of the Internet) is in parts both decentralized and distributed.
In industry, the current paradigm follows the decentralized model, moving towards a more centralized way of production looking for maximization of benefits, and generation of capital.
This same image when it is used to explain how the physical world designed and made by humans (cities, products, supply chains) is designed and manufactured also explains quite well how the current paradigm of production operates somewhere in between a centralized and decentralized model. Medieval cities used to be independent centralized centers, which could not be considered nodes as they were not connected with larger networks, at least at scale. After the invention of the printing press, these cities could start to develop a sense of connection and exchange of knowledge. The renaissance could be considered as a by-product of the spread of knowledge that happened centuries before, but also the beginning of the industrial era. Industrial cities operated as a decentralized nodes of production, with their own capacity to satisfy most of the needs of local populations, but connected with larger networks of supply chains at the global scale, hence the development of the nation states as the stronger form of organizing power. It was during the 20th century and thanks to the globalization process that cities off shore their production of food and goods mostly, leaving to the global market the responsibility to supply the needs of the locals and following infinite economic growth, as a result corporations became the stronger form of organization that can even put and remove national governments. The way we organize our production of knowledge, energy, goods, food, and any other resource needed to sustain life in this planet, is directly related to the form of organization of power, either economic, political, or social forms of power. It seems that we are in the verge of a new form of reorganizing the way we produce almost everything, thanks to the convergence of technological advancements, and the need to solve fundamental challenges of our times. This technological convergence is moving these new forms of organization to a more distributed model, with unexpected consequences in the definition of new roles of individuals, communities, organizations, political movements, and even corporations.
The rapid drive of technological transformation that is sweeping the planet is underpinned by a range of what could be referred to as social undercurrents, ie. new norms for interaction and collaboration. One of these undercurrents is arguably the global wave of digital collaborations seen for instance in the open source movement in which hundreds of thousands of people act as nodes in gigantic digital value creation networks that produces all kinds of assets including knowledge, science, software, services, virtual content, and physical products - and, above all, a rapidly expanding new commons of open design available to anyone to build on. The classic models of design taking shape inside organizations are increasingly being supplemented - and in time perhaps replaced - by decentralized and distributed practices that accelerate development pace and innovation speed dramatically.
Two parallel narratives define distributed design at this somewhat infantile stage of the term: (1) The maker/Fab Lab vision and global community which builds on the bottom-up DIY movement and white hat hacker ethos of self-empowerment and co-creation spirit of tackling technology head in an effort to improve the world one Arduino project at the time, and (2) the web3/decentralization/crypto crowd, which comes from a combination of two very different arenas; on one hand the cyberpunks and tech-libertarians who originally dreamed of digital freedom utopias, and on the other hand big money who has seen the light in new friction-less, unregulated and un-taxed economies of scale.
Both narratives holds interesting visions for the future, and, arguably, finds a shared denominator in the concept of distributed design which in many ways is rooted in a more philosophical understanding of what super-connectedness and abundant computing power may do to improve the world. However, it seems that this techno-optimism has been plagued with unintended consequences of the digital revolutions. Computers need rare minerals to be built, which are scarce and expensive to extract. When produced at scale, computers are causing both an ecological and a social disaster, these need to be reduced to its minimum, or to be hided as much as possible from consumers. Access to information lives inside another paradox, it can unleash the spread of knowledge and start a new renaissance, or it can create new mechanisms to manipulate entire populations to buy certain type of products or to vote to certain political leaders. We leave in a paradox of convergence, in which old philosophical understandings of the world and ways to operate it live together with these new forms of production and distribution, which are promising, but seem to be held on hold before the old figures it out how to deal with the new.
One thing that is becoming very clear is that this philosophical understanding embeds a strong fervor towards finding a sustainable path forward for the act of creating; one that builds on the distribution of knowledge, and the capacity that "bits" have to transform the visions of the world, and enable the articulation of collaboration at global scale. The other is the redefinition of the relation that humans have with "atoms" which are extracted or dumped into ecosystems, compromising the many futures of humans and other species that share spaceship Earth. A distributed approach to design and manufacturing has implications both at local and global scale, and we have seen some of those effects already happened during the last couple of decades, a few examples:
The Rep-Rap project and 3d printers made accessible rapid prototyping of rapid prototyping machines to millions of people, unleashing a huge global market of entrepreneurs around additive manufacturing. Still large corporations are trying to control the spread of additive manufacturing under the old patenting system and pushing to centralization of supply chains.
Arduino electronics prototyping board made possible to anyone to learn to program computers, and understand the basics of electronics by designing an open source platform for anyone to share their projects, but also for anyone to fork the very own design of Arduino to make other projects. The Arduino team struggled to collaborate with large corporations in the business of electronics, who at the end have been trying to absorb the open source philosophy inside their very industrial mindset.
Fab Labs have been making digital fabrication accessible to everyone. We will dedicate a deep look to this network in further chapters.
Other examples can show how products are also becoming part of a new form of production and distribution, such as: OpenDesk, Kniterate, Smart Citizen, Nervous Systems, Ultimaker, OtherMachines, Precious Plastics, and many more to be referenced in the contents of this publication too.
In this book we would like to extend that vision which was laid out in the Fab City book (2018), and while that may lean strongly towards the first narrative, the makers’ approach to distributed design, we intend to embrace the latter narrative as well by taking a strong jolt towards capturing current movements which are more business-oriented. For instance, by focusing on the new business models that drive the most advanced distributed design practitioners (makers, designers, crafters, etc.) towards looking not only at their practice as representing a more equitable and sustainable way of producing goods, but also at proof testing a new paradigm which may ultimately replace the current centralised and siloed norms.
To write about the state of the art of distributed design is quite challenging. As this book is written, edited, and printed on demand, many practitioners are collaborating at scale, in distributed infrastructure of workshops, sharing files through open source repositories, and willing to be copied and remixed, quite different from the type of designer and creative of the industrial era, looking for exclusive ownership of ideas and manufacturing capacity. The challenges ahead rely in the capacity for distributed design and manufacturing to become the new industrial paradigm of the 21st century, based on values that follow a different type of growth, and relationships between each other, and with our ecosystems. In a context of climate emergency, and huge social challenges, we believe that alternative modes of organizing production and consumption deserve to be tested and experimented in cities around the world. Distributed Design is enabling this process, starting with partners in Europe during the last two years, and scaling up this collaboration to other realities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and other regions that have their own approaches to local manufacturing, and that are struggling to not to be dragged to the 20th century industrial paradigm. The state of the art of Distributed Design yet needs to be written and developed, and turned into a living repository of recipes about how to make our communities, cities, and regions, better places for humans and the ecosystems that sustain our own life.
