 So a bit about my background so you know where I'm coming from because I have a kind of weird accent. I'm a bit of a foreigner. I am Canadian from Vancouver, but I grew up in the post-industrial wastelands of Las Vegas, which is where this photo is from. It's actually of my brother when he was about four. That's one of the deserts that was outside our backyard actually. And these deserts are where a lot of my design inspirations come from, so you'll see a lot of photos of them throughout the presentation. But I currently live in London where I moved a few years ago to do a master's program where I did an intensive ethnography of about 30 millennial-aged hackers, all women. They lived all over Europe. They went to hacker conventions and they hacked different things, software and hardware. And I really wanted to better understand their ideas about gender and identity compared to generations before them. And from then I worked with the Open Knowledge Foundation's communities for a few years. I organized the world's first Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki last year, which I think some of you were at. And I also helped facilitate local communities, one of which is members are here, Open Knowledge Foundation Spain, and they're helping promote open data in your neck of the woods. But yeah, I recently joined Mozilla, as was just said, as their new hacking popular culture liaison, which is the best job title in the world, I think, in order to help the next generation of web viewers and web browsers become web makers, which is something I'm quite excited by. And I think something that might excite you guys too as designers. First, a disclaimer. I would like to note that I come at this not as an expert. I'm a digital anthropologist by training and I do some design and I work with some machines, but I think you guys are much more experts than me in this field. And I'm really looking forward to learning from you in the next few days and having a discussion with you to further inform my own work. And because I know that you guys already know why open design is important, I'm going to admit that entirely from the presentation. I don't think that's important here. You've already been converted. You're already pioneers. But the question that still really eludes me in my own work is what is open design today? Not why. I mean, that's something that I think we still need to discuss. That's something that we don't necessarily agree on and that's either a good or a bad thing, but it's something that means we need to continue having these conversations. And I think everyone really has a bit of a different idea currently of what open design is to them. A lot of people ask me, is it something like this? Because, you know, the Berlin Biennale, they had a key focus last year to get people to really participate in new ways. And the Draftsman's Congress was a massive old church that looked like this, where they had covered the walls in white boards and said, draw on them, do whatever you want, write whatever you want, be revolutionary. And it was really interesting to see people get involved who wouldn't normally see themselves as designers. So many people believe that might be open design, is opening up the design field to new users. Some people would say, is it fabbing? Is it physical design? This is a guy from Open Design City, which is a public workshop space in Berlin, where anyone can make anything. They quote, from a bioplastic wallet to a lamp made out of sweaters, it's all open. Or is it something like this? At the Open Knowledge Festival last year, one of my colleagues, Massimo Meccanelli, out of Italy, who's a key pioneer in the open design movement, decided that he wanted to make all of the name tags, open content, put all of the prototypes for them online, and let people change their name tags as they wanted, and then print them out in the fab lab. Or is it this? Is it just digital design? Is it books about designers for designers? Maybe that's it. Or is it this? Is it designers? This is Massimo again. He's going to be angry that I keep using him as an example. Is it designers just talking to other designers, doing workshops and learning from each other? Maybe. What I'm saying today is that it is all of these things, and it's also way more. And that's, I think, where things get a bit messy, complicated, and most interesting. And what I'm really interested in today is how do we reconcile previous open design practices from some of you as pioneers with some of the newer ones that perhaps we're doing at Mozilla and in web literacy groups and with the open design working group? How do we reconcile the pragmatic with the revolutionary, the single media work with multimedia work? So the way I'm going to go about this is looking at seven different aspects of the open design field today that I think are increasingly important and will be important in 2013. Sorry about my voice, by the way. And I invite you guys to debate me with this. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there isn't seven. Maybe there's 50. But I think it could at least start an interesting conversation. It's another picture from the Drassmann's Congress which, as you'll see, has really inspired me. So the first thing that I would say open design is, in my own experience, is a form of interconnectivity. The quickest definition of open design that I've seen comes from the peer-to-peer foundation. And they say open design is the application of open source methods to the creation of physical products, machines, and systems. So that sounds pretty straightforward, right? But then looking on Wikipedia, you'll see an entirely different definition that the open design movement currently unites two very different trends. On the one hand, people apply their skills and time to projects for the common good. At the other end of the scale is an inclusive effort of designers to implement a common framework amongst themselves for development. And yet these two strands are not necessarily united. They're not necessarily the same people, nor do they necessarily communicate. I think events like this are a great opportunity for us to have those communications. But I think normally we work in very different spaces. And there can be quite a chasm. A designer from Israel named Mushan Zaraviv wrote recently, How come the network collaboration that transformed code production and encyclopedia writing, such as Wikimedia, fails to translate to graphic and interface design? And I think this is something we really need to learn from and fix. So I'm going to show a few examples of groups that I think are trying to fix this currently. The first and most prominent is the Open Design Now book, which I'm sure has inspired us all as designers. Definitely inspired me because it was one of the first real attempts to understand open design across paradigms and to look for commonalities and ways to keep it from being an exclusive world of skill sharing only for designers. Only for those of us who happen to be lucky enough to grow with computers and, you know, learn web design in our spare time. Another example is the Open Design Working Group, which is something that I started with some colleagues, including Massimo. We started in 2012 and it was... we started it with the Open Knowledge Foundation and with the Alto Media Lab in Helsinki, which started the first fab lab in Finland a few years ago. And it was aimed at uniting the next generation of open designers across paradigms, much as the open design book did as an introduction, but we wanted to continue that discussion virtually. So we defined open design as from hardware to fabbing to fashion to product design and we wanted to have conversations about what we share and what we don't in our work. And one of the first things we did was host one of the first ever open hardware design manufacturing, making and fabbing topic streams at the Open Knowledge Festival, which was every big mouthful as it sounds. Well, it was really confusing to explain to people what that topic stream was. I think it was a really good moment for a lot of designers to come together for some, in many cases, the first time to say, well, I just do hardware design and I just do software design. How can we work together? Another few examples are the re-campaign. I really love that poster, the red one, I think it's beautiful. And it was started by some of our friends at the open source hardware and design alliance called Ohanda. And the core of this project is a free online service where manufacturers of open hardware and designs can register their products with a common label. And the label is called Reables. And it sort of has that re-sign and was supposed to be a very distinctive way for designers across paradigms to find out if a product was indeed open design, whatever that means. And we, inspired by the re-campaign, we did an experiment called FABSTAR last year, which was an attempt to hold regular summits and internal meetings for people who identified as fabbers, as fabblabbers to share notes internationally because we wondered why a lot of fablabs weren't yet. I think that's been changed quite recently with live streams happening between fabblabs, which has been quite exciting, but at the time a lot of the fablabs didn't know each other yet, so we did a few events around that. Another example, which I mean I'm probably biased because I was a part of this, but I think it's a good example of an attempt to start these conversations is the open book, which was an ambitious and somewhat crazy crowd-source experiment in publishing that we did with the Finnish Institute and the Open Knowledge Foundation. And there's over 25 writers, all of whom are leaders in open fields, self-identified leaders in open fields, across very different backgrounds of openness, so people who are open scientists, open business people, open designers, open educators, and all of these people explaining what openness was to them and how they thought they could collaborate with other fields of openness. The second thing that I see in open design right now is that it's a form of standardization, and that can either be a frustrating form of standardization or an exciting form. This image is an encoding and decoding image, which comes from a 1980 article called encoding slash decoding, where cultural theorist Stuart Hall finds communication itself in terms of code. He says that both encoding and decoding are creative processes, and that ideas are transformed into messages and then transformed into ideas yet again, much as what's happening between these two people. For example, in this picture, the code that Alice uses for encoding is different than the one Bob uses for decoding. And I think this sort of collaborative decoding and discussion process around the confusion between these two terms is what inspired us to really reopen the open design definition. The open design definition which we've reopened has a great many influences, a whole web of confusion, you could say, or a web of excitement, I guess. So I'll go through them quickly. The first is obviously that the grandfather, the open source definition, which is one of the first attempts to unite people who are coders and hackers and working on similar projects but don't necessarily have a similar methodology for how they explain those things to the public. The open source hardware definition was a really great community project which still is very strong. The open design definition draft, version 0.01, was the first attempt by a few pioneers to, I was checking, to engage with open design for the first time. This was in 1999. It was a few guys from MIT. I'm sure you guys probably know them better than me, but their work was very inspiring for why we decided to reopen this definition because while it was quite revolutionary in its time in the early 2000s, it sadly went obsolete and a bit out of date. So we felt we needed to update it. And when we decided to update it, we wanted to add in the open definition, which is something that was created by the Open Knowledge Foundation. And the open definition is one of the first attempts to unite open content and open data practitioners across professional fields according to the following statement, which is a piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it without legal or technical restrictions. That can be a somewhat controversial definition, but it's definitely started a lot of interesting debates. And our renewal of the open design definition, it took into account a lot of the hard questions of our age that we felt weren't yet engaged by its predecessor by the 1999 version. So what about open data, for example? Not really mentioned there. What about intellectual property, especially in the late 2000s, which is quite a different beast than it was in the early 2000s. What about redesigning and hacking of existing designs via remix cultures and glitch cultures? Also wasn't really mentioned. And what about the many differing branches of design that are all emergent in their own way and see design in very different ways? My colleague did a comic to show how complicated it is for us to explain to people who aren't open designers what the hell we're doing with this definition. And we decided, because we wanted designers of all kinds to engage with it, not just coders like hacker designers who understand how to code, but also designers who may be a fashion designer who maybe isn't on computers a great deal. We decided to use GitHub as the collaborative tool for how people could edit it. And we did a great deal of workshops around the world to try to do a brief tutorial of GitHub and how to collaboratively edit a document on GitHub together, which were varying levels of success, I think in certain places the designers said that GitHub was too difficult for them. It was too high of a barrier. Even this sort of software was a bit disengaging and a bit disempowering. So that started some really interesting discussions about what kind of mediums do we use so that all designers feel included in the conversation. And also this attempt to use GitHub to do this collaborative definition document has caused some quite interesting press. I think the most memorable press was Bruce Sterling. Who gave a strange condemnation by saying, this will be every bit as exciting as watching people make law and sausage. I was impressed by that. And I think this sort of conflict which apparently can be controversial for people brings us to the next phase of design, which is the fact that open design is increasingly a form of politics. It's a political move. And I'm proud to say that it is. This image comes from an infamous condemnation of contemporary design called Fuck Committees. I believe in lunatics by Teamwork Coleman in 1998. I'm sure you guys already know about this, but it's one of my favorite things to reference. It's offensive, but I think it really gets to the heart of what was pissing people off in the early 2000s about the design movement. And he writes that, I'm angry because this is a struggle between individuals with a jagged passion in their work and today's faceless corporate committees which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience and of design and are yet removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone. I offer a modest solution, find the cracks in the wall and find the lunatics. I would argue that everyone in this room is a lunatic in some way. That's why we're working with open methods and design despite these complexities. One of the members of our open design working group, H. R. Mendez, who might be here, I'm not sure. Don't see him in the room, but... Oh, awesome. I was really impressed with the conversation. Oh, hi, nice to meet you. Have a minimum person. We had a conversation via our discussion list a few weeks ago about the political aspect of open design and whether there is one today. I mean, maybe that's been lost. And it started a really interesting debate and H. R. wrote in that conversation that he believes open design should always be considered in its political dimension because transparency, collaboration and the release of resources are strategies that do not fully guarantee the balance and social justice of society in and of themselves. I mean, I think that's a good question. Are designers out of the actual debate today? Can we not be activists and designers at the same time? Maybe not. In open design now, an Israeli industrial designer named Ronan Kashidin wrote that he believes open design should be a part of a larger political agenda, one that advocates for greater transparency in all of our products. He says this is the mission of the Open Design Lab at the WAG Society, which I would agree with. They aim to empower people to make and understand products for more transparency. I think in the same line of open data's promises seeking greater transparency, the agenda of open design could be to increase transparency and production chain and to educate others about what that means. But if transparency in the sharing of free and open methodologies is this important, how can we reflect that in our products and the work that we're doing? I think the free font manifesto here gives a really good example of this sort of politics. You know, they say that a free font must be freely given by its maker. And to be truly free, it should be available to everyone, not just to a circle of friends or to the buyers of a particular software package or operating system. And that's both a very floss statement and a very not floss statement at the same time, I think it's quite interesting what they're saying there and could be quite transformative, especially when we think about design tools and how they are made. This is just a quote from H.R. again. Which leads me to my next point about open design. As I believe right now, it's increasingly becoming a form of source code and must be looked at as such. H.R. said at the Open Design and Shared Creativity Congress here in 2012, which I'm sure many of you were at, that open design is becoming to a large extent the extrapolation of free softwares and methods and goals in the field of design. This is understandable that its products, proposals arise from tools that enable collaboration and also look at how design work should be shared. And in their attempt to give the first statistical analysis ever of open design products, a group of researchers there, Kirsten Kalka, Christina Reisch and Cornelius Herstad, founded in the field of open design in the late 2000s, tangible objects were developed in a very similar fashion to software. One could even call design itself a form of source code for physical objects. An example of this happening in real life, quite recently, which I was glad to see, was an open design pop-up store in the city of Graz in 2011. The pop-up store had a full digital workflow, so the shop interior as well as all of the products you see there were sold entirely based on computational fabrication and on a case-by-case basis. And then they were produced locally in the region of Stadia, which is around Graz, and which profited from the added manufacturing a great deal. So it was a very positive process, both for the local community and for people engaging digitally and for the people who decided to come together to do this pop-up. Another great example is, you know, the famous Instructables restaurant by Arne Hedricks and Bas Van Abel, which I wasn't able to go to. Did anyone here go to it? A few. Yeah, it looks great. It was done by the fact societies Fab Lab again. And its description is that it's the first open-source restaurant in the entire world because everything you see, use, and eat is downloaded from Instructables.com. Everything. Yeah, it's an experiment in digesting free internet culture, they say. And they say in our restaurants you will go home knowing how to make the food as well as the furniture. And they've been implemented all over the world, which I think is quite inspiring. And this leads me to our next point, where I believe open design is increasingly a form of peer-to-peer role now already. Commodities are symbol-laden objects that satisfy human needs. And their subjective values as products of human labor are constantly negotiated and renegotiated through being exchanged and acquired. So that means every day when we're having these kind of transactions, we are doing a cultural remix of our own. And I think this becomes quite interesting when mixed with ideas about peer-production from other people, such as Yochai Blankler, grandfather of the floss movement, I would say, who wrote in Coase's Penguin that he believes the advantages of peer-production are improved identification and allocation of human creativity, i.e. the remixing of this transaction. And he's saying these advantages are salient because human creativity itself is becoming salient. He's talking about the information age and the internet, and he's saying that production now comprises the combination of pre-existing informational and cultural inputs, i.e. old transactions about ownership, with new ideas about human creativity. So that means we're able to remake things in their own image right now as we speak. I think another good point there is that Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, augments this quite nicely by saying that he believes there exists today not just the commercial economy, but also a sharing economy. He writes about this a lot lately and lectures about this a lot increasingly. He believes culture is no longer just regulated by price, but by social relations, i.e. cultural capital, but also by something else. He's saying these new social relations are not simple. Indeed, these relations are insulted by the simplicity of price. In his most recent book, he gives a nice anecdote about being on a plane next to a really young hacker who has a massive library of pirated DVDs, and because Lessig himself is against pirating, he says, could I loan one of those from you for $5? And he said he'd never seen a greater look of disgust or anger than he got from that young hacker who was offended that Lessig was trying to give him money, because he believed it's a shared collective good, and that why would we need money for that sort of transaction? An example of this sort of design-based peer production, which I find quite inspiring, and renegotiation of human labor itself, is this... It's called a maker space, community space, media lab. It has various names called Made in Callio. And this is a group of designers and hackers, producers and old anarchists, you could say, in Finland, who I met, who have decided to collectively own, build, and share a space, and to collectively own, build, and share designs together as a community. They equally share a percentage of all profits. They negotiate each day what they want those profits to go towards in the space. And they really... They help enrich the local community. This is in sort of a bad area of town in Finland, and they've really enriched that space and I think made it quite an inspiring space to be. As you can see, they have events where a lot of young people and people interested in this sort of work come out from all over the world to learn from them. And I think this leads to my next point quite well, which is that, I mean, I think open design itself is going through a process of relearning, and therefore, those of us engaged in this space are relearning also. Also in his new book, Remix, Laurence Lessig writes that our past teaches us about the value of remix. We need to relearn that lesson. The present teaches us about the potential of a new hybrid economy, one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies. And the future can benefit both from this commerce and from this sort of new communities. That's the book, which I think is... I think it's quite an interesting representation of some of the stuff that we're all talking about right now, whether you agree or disagree with it. It's available for free online, I would recommend checking it out. And this leads to, I think, an interesting methodology and conversation around connected learning, which is championed by people like Joi Ito at the MIT Media Lab and by a lot of people at Mozilla currently who are working with WebMaker. And this is a web of confusion up here, but to boil it all down, the main goal of connected learning is that there is a wide agreement that we need new models of education and co-learning, and not simply new models of schooling. We need new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity and velocity of our new knowledge society and the information society we live within. And this applies directly to design practices as well as many other paradigms which they outline. Basically, they're asking for us to be mentors more in this sort of emergent pre-culture, pure culture and a networked culture that we're helping build. One of the pioneers in this movement is Mimi Ito, Joi Ito's sister, which I didn't realize until like a few days ago, I'm amazed by that. She's a famous cultural anthropologist who studies a lot about digital learning. And she says that one of the things the internet has given us, most of all, is a complete abundance of knowledge. But how can we use that capacity and the capacity of our social networks as connected digital native folk to bring new people together who want to learn together as a team. And I think that's basically what the traditional hacker ethos was all about. Correct me if I'm wrong. I wasn't really there at the time, I was a bit young. But I really like how Chris Kelty, who spoke yesterday, I'm really sad I missed him, but he wrote a famous book, Two Bits, which is a cultural anthropology of hacker and coder communities. And in that, he brings up a really nice quote from Richard Stallman, one of the pioneers of the hacker movement, who says that he believes co-learning and pure networked learning is much like hacking because they're both a process of changing the limits of what's possible in a spirit of playful cleverness. I really love that quote. And I think now we have an opportunity to be able to apply that spirit to contemporary tools that we work with, as designers working with open design tools, as people working with web native tools. I think WebMaker is a great example of a series of web native tools that could be argued to be open design tools, but they aren't like open office or LibreOffice, they're things that you only engage with through your browser. But for many of them, the source code is freely available. They use HTML5 and CSS and things that they're hoping will be quite universal. And their goal is to help the next generation of web users become web makers. Designers and also producers through the open web, through the implementation of new web literacy tools, such as the web native popcorn.js, which it looks like Nicos talked about yesterday with you guys. Also Thimble and X-ray goggles, which are two web literacy tools that allow people to open up the back end of the internet and engage with it. Did anyone here have a website on GeoCities when they were younger? Awesome, yeah. I mean, GeoCities is how I learned how to be a web designer. It was just me late at night when my parents thought I was in bed and I didn't know what to do. So I went to one of the sites, Myspaces and different GeoCities homepage and tried to figure out how do these people make this? How do they do these crazy hodgepodge of strange mashups? And my first GeoCities site had a lot of wolves just like this one and a lot of strange quotes just like this one. And I think that's something that new tools like Thimble, another part of WebMaker, are really trying to bring back that spirit, that real cleverness. People in Mozilla are calling WebMaker a Swiss army knife for makers and I think this is the first part of that journey. Just looking at a web page and figuring out how it's made when you're 10 or 12 years old, that can be a really revolutionary moment for you. It definitely was for me. Also, I think relearning through remix is a big deal right now with Mozilla. Popcorn maker will allow you to take anything from YouTube or anywhere else that's a video and add whatever you want onto it. So it's inviting you to remix your own world and to rehash it and to relearn it and to share it with others as you see it, not as someone is delivering it to you. And I think this leads me to my last point, the last facet of open design that I see being increasingly important. And that is that open design is itself a form of culture and it's an emerging culture that we're building together and we really need to think about what that means. I think RIP, a remix manifesto by Brett Gaylor is a really good example of the importance of us being self-reflexive as we build this culture. He's talking about remix culture, but what we need to remember is that culture always builds on the past as he says there. And I think that this means that open design itself is more than just a new way to create products. I think as a process and as a culture in itself, open design changes the relationships that we work with every day and we make use and look after things. All our decisions from now on need to take into account these complicated systems and the interactions between them, as John Thakura says in Open Design Now book. And I think an example of this, of creating a new cultural narrative, is the Noun Project, which I'm sure many of you use. I use it a lot as a designer in my work. Their aim as a bunch of designers who are interested in openness was to build a global visual language that was only licensed freely offered images. Each designer licenses his own image as he would like using a creative commons derivative, that everyone can understand and use. And this is a bit more revolutionary as the side of their work, is that they want to create a silent language that speaks louder than words, that teaches us new things about what our culture can be, and that allows us to communicate across cultures and across languages, which is something that would be nice to do here since I unfortunately do not speak Spanish and I can only speak in one language, that very much limits me and my benefit to people who aren't also speaking English. I think another great example of this sort of goal to inspire designers to remix their own culture together and to build a new culture is the public domain remix, which is currently getting started in France with a colleague of mine, and this is a partnership challenge run by the Open Knowledge Foundation in France, some local communities there, so with Wikimedia France. And its aim is to encourage people who are designers or maybe not designers yet to remix public domain works in a creative way using interdisciplinary, weird approaches. So rather than following the same medium, they encourage people to shift from one medium to another. And a great example of this is the Open, as I can't say it in a French accent, they're French, but it's much more elegant when they say it. But this has been exhibited all over the world and I think it's a really interesting example of how we as designers can mash all these things together and do something inspiring with all these things we're learning and absorbing and talking about. And basically, it's a mechanical software created by a collective in Paris who reappropriate old bicycle parts and old bits of garbage from around Paris, and they make all these strange machines with them, which have both physical and digital elements and are all based on open software and open prototypes. And this one produces abstract artworks. There's it producing an artwork which automatically become part of the public domain even as they are created without them having any choice in the matter, which I think raises an interesting conversation right there. And each of these artworks are based on a series of public domain materials which are quite varied, including Archimedes Pendulum, the Harmonograph, Walter Bowersfield's Geodesic Dome, and the works of La Fontaine. And that's one of the one of the productions there. Basically, you interact with the machine and it creates this thing as you're watching and then the thing is spit out and it goes immediately digitally onto the internet as a public domain work that other people can then remix. And this comes to the end of what I'm going to say. I think this is what design is to me. It's a thing of many faces, a beast of many types, and I think it's something that is equally inspiring and frustrating in its complexity. And as a result, there's many different ways that we can engage with it. These are some of the ways that I'm engaging with it as a field and there's some of the ways that I would love for you guys to join me in engaging with it, especially with WebMaker, which is in very early days. A lot of the code needs a lot of work and a lot of the communities need to be enriched more. So if you want to get involved with WebMaker I would love for you guys to join the Open Design Working Group and the discussions we're having there to make them even more fruitful and to help us build the definition and get it out to a wider audience that's not just us in this room but also other designers who maybe aren't working with open concepts yet but might find different aspects of that inspiring. Yeah, and also, I mean, mostly I would like you to argue with me and let's have a debate about, I mean, what we think that open design is and whether the seven things I've introduced are correct or whether you think I'm totally out of the wrong tree. I think you guys have a lot of power here and a lot of wisdom to share with me just as much as I'm sharing what I think with you. So yeah, it would be great to have a discussion now. I don't know if you want to facilitate it. Thank you, Kat. That was a very interesting inspiring seven points. I think knowing who's in the audience there should be questions. Okay. Before I ask this question I'm just, can someone bring up a translation device so that you can ask questions in Spanish and English so that she can hear the translation? I know, but maybe someone else would like to speak Spanish and we have the luxury of having simultaneous translation so that's all. Thank you. Just to be perverse and take some work off of the translator so I'll make my question in English and then translate myself. Innovative. I don't mean to be too facetious maybe just a little bit but I couldn't help but notice your talk the word open all over the place and is it a conscious choice to use this I mean the open source definition and all this history of calling these things open rather than free has a bit of politics behind it because some people were saying when we use the word freedom we scare off business so let's find a word that's more neutral, a bit less scary and they settled for open so the question would be where do you stand on that and should I just say the question in Spanish right now? Sure. She said that the positive ones were full of the word open and for me because more or less she was there when the decision was made and the concept of open source and the concept of free software that the Free Software Foundation was managing for me the fact of using a word and not the other has a certain political charge and I was asking her what do you think about it? Thank you. I think that that points to a very interesting discussion that has continued to be had around the terminology and the linguistics of the words that we use to identify as a floss hacker and designer I would use the word free when I'm talking about stuff that I believe in I only use floss software and I think the history of the floss movement is much more inspiring than the history of the open source movement which in a way was you could say a derivative of the floss movement which originally inspired it but I think the word open can be important in conversations because it's the best umbrella term for those of us that lie on different sides of that paradigm, of that ideological paradigm a lot of my designer friends wouldn't necessarily call themselves floss hackers or designers but they would call themselves open designers so well I think for those of us who identify as floss open as a bit of a weak term it is nevertheless I think the least scary term for people who are maybe newer to this field and I think those people today I think today I'm talking to experts in the field but usually the people I'm engaging with are people who are just learning about what this all is and I think usually I like to give them the history lesson and the importance of floss lesson a bit after I give them the importance of open this lesson so yeah that was not to by any means disrespect the floss movement at all but I think that's the conversation we're continuing to have and the open knowledge foundation for example is the word open as a standard for the same reason because they want to unite people from different communities but they have controversial ideas about CCSA share alike licenses they don't like share alike licenses whereas I personally would say I do there's a lot of interesting debates that we continue to have on the mailing list of the open knowledge foundation about why that is and why we're using certain terms and why we're championing certain licenses over others hi thanks for the talk I wonder if we should be talking about design at all because you know if you're designing something someone else has to make it right and I know certainly in my own practice as a designer I don't really like to talk about that too much because I'm just one person who's part of a productive you know a kind of effort to produce something and it's just one part of a wider process so I guess the question is why not talk about open production within which design is one part and I suppose part of my hesitation here is that you know when you focus on design it seems a bit like you're maybe trying to elevate the designer I suppose into something that's maybe a bit more special and trying to preserve a particular kind of capital maybe which isn't really helpful in the context of what it seems you're trying to do through the open design movements hmm yeah I would agree it would be amazing if there could be one term that we could all use I mean that united us all like I think makers helps us get there a little bit but there are still designers who would say well I'm not a maker because I only do digital prototypes or something I mean even the limitations of we had the longest name ever in the topic stream at the Open Knowledge Festival because we had to use every word related to design ever and that was because of a massive argument amongst a lot of the designers and makers and fabbers and manufacturers and producers who helped build that stream because some would say well makers or fabbers aren't going to come to this stream unless they're mentioned in the topic and others would say yeah but we just need one word we need one word the public doesn't care let's just think of a word that unites us and I mean we weren't able to come to a consensus so I think if you have a term that maybe we could all use that would be this is a good place to bring it up because I would use it definitely yeah we're definitely that so what do you disagree about can you speak in the microphone I find this tendency to sort of for people who are busy with digital technology to self-identify either as nerds very very dangerous and negative I've never considered myself a nerd and I feel it's something that keeps digital technology marginalized because it's like people who don't self-identify as such can safely keep thinking ah it's for the nerds yeah I think there's a complicated politics of identity of people trying to take the word back and remix it in a way, in a cultural sense to say yeah I am a nerd and I'm proud of that and it's no longer has a negative connotation but I think also it can be equally limiting because we all have different connotations of what a word means and you can't assume by using a term that everyone else understands what that term means or they have the same linguistic or cultural background so yeah I think it's complicated another question regarding your presentation and your call for argument I'll just argue that you're a slide about the free font manifesto and can do more harm than good because as far as I know the original um yeah the original one I don't know if Helen Lupton has updated since but it's actually a manifesto for free as in cost fonts and not actually open fonts and as you mentioned it's fonts that are meant to be shared and distributed but there is no mention about the the rest of the four freedoms as specified by the canonical definition lastly it's almost a charity appeal like what if a few digital type foundries on earth gave away one good typeface as a gift and like the scratching of great to good is kind of asking for charity that many people involved in the actual Libre font movement might not take that lightly so that's a good remark about your presentation that is the only point that I would take issue with thank you that's good feedback I shouldn't uh I shouldn't by any means say that this is a universal example of what the free font movement is I think for me this is the most mainstream example like it is an example that my mom knows about for example I mean which is in its way nice because it introduces hard to the movement a little bit but I would then say there's some really good free font movements that you should look at after which which have you know a stronger political and I think commons based methodology behind their work because you're right this is a bit it's a bit simplistic and um I think well it's catchy it makes sense to people in the public who are you know just first engaging with this sort of stuff um it is a bit it's lacking a bit in like the longer term work that is trying to do before you I ask a question um you sort of skip the question why open design assuming that somehow even when we didn't agree what that was um would be in favor of that but can you say something about the need for definition because I think that's maybe something we can discuss hmm yeah I mean I think I guess the definition in itself answers the why of open design before it even starts to engage with the deeper issues of how do we unite our work as designers um and I think the the why of open design is something that we're still debating in the discussion list and in the workshops we're doing because everyone has a different why and I mean do we use all of the why's or do we just make there be one unified why like we were saying earlier with with terminology and linguistics um I think because there's many different needs and different different approaches to openness and to free movements um the complexities of what is most important in all of those needs and wants is in itself very complicated so that's something we're still working on you still think it's necessary to have a definition like in what way is the definition useful in this movement um seeking for the definition that's yeah I mean I think I think well as I said there's some other really great definitions out there like the open definition the open source hardware definition um which are still being updated they have very rich communities um people translating them into every language I think the open design and whatever else is under design movement doesn't yet have a definition that's our universal thing that we can refer people to um so like an open data geek could refer people to the open definition when they say well why are you interested in open content but we currently have a very outdated open design definition from the early 2000s which I personally I mean this is correct me if I'm wrong but I feel that definition does not engage with contemporary issues that we're talking about today so that I mean that is why we've tried to start this open design definition and that's also why it's taking a long time for us to do because it takes a lot of consensus and collaboration and community building and discussions to even get to the point where we could do version one which has just been released online um but it's very much a work in progress and I hope it will continue to be a living document well um not so much a question as a comment and it was a bit provoked by his intervention and it's meant to be a bit of a provocative comment too so it was he was complaining about how the words nerd and geek were at some point quite negative and I remember that I still lived a little bit of that and like a lot of words like niggers, slot, geek, a lot of words like that the community that is being attacked can do this kind of like mental jujitsu and say okay I take the word back now it's no longer an insult now it's a term that I appropriate right so but in changing in appropriating this word and I do see his point it's gone from being a negative term to being an elitist term something that scares people a little bit away the attitude that he was complaining about is something that I come from a background of mathematics and was pointed out to me a long time ago if in a reasonably decent school somebody cannot read they are you know almost a bit of a moron how can this person not know how to read properly ah but if they can't do math that's no problem because most people do math anyway so why should any particular person be decent in math now for a long time I saw this as a as a problem as a harsh problem for a few years now maybe not so much in proprietary commercial production you value efficiency and hyper production of pretty much anything that they consider positive and in material terms when you hyper produce it comes with environmental degradation in the cultural arena when you hyper produce for me personally that really raises the noise to signal ratio it floods the internet the medium of communication you're using with too much production now at some point I decided why does everybody need to know how to solve mathematical problems when did mathematics become that important that everybody needs to be able to do this and I would ask the same of digital technologies why does everybody need to be an expert in digital production of whatever not everybody needs to be an oil painter not everybody needs to be as culture so one of the positives for me of free or open culture production is that it takes away some of the commercial incentive and so it takes some of the incentive to hyper produce away if I'm not going to make a lot of money then I speak when I have something to say not just because I need to speak and in the same vein I would argue that not everybody needs to know how to say a certain kind of thing actually if there aren't too many I'm a bit happy I don't have so much incredible stuff that I need to see right so there was many questions but also answers I propose we close this session for now Kat will be around all day tomorrow so try finding her either tomorrow or through her work at Mozilla maybe you can put up your slide again I want to thank you very much for another very interesting session and questions and answers and see you back here in this room in 10 minutes thank you