Lecture about open design by Roy Shearer & Paul Smith

In today's D&T lecture we discussed about different aspects of open design. By definition open design is the the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. All the people of our course have a small insight on how this system works since in the second year we had a project about wind turbines and as a task we had to create building instruction on "instructables" webpage.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Vertical-Axis-Wind-Turbine/ (Our team's website)

From that experience I already have some opinions about the whole open source system. In the second year our design process for the turbine was maybe a bit hectic (we build the final product in the last few hours of the project) and the outcome wasn't  the best possible. If people build our wind turbine exactly like it says in  the instructions it will not be the best possible product and can be a bit dangerous. We still made the website instructions look like we know what we we are doing and our design has got a lot of attention and comments. Today's talk made me think first time that I am actually in some extend responsible on something what is out there. 

I understand that there is the danger of people building objects blindly without thinking  the dangers of the building process or the final outcome.  It is a bit harsh to say but even if there are some accidents caused by open design it is 10000 better if people actually try/do/create new things instead of just accepting everything they are given. I believe that many designers in the end of the day have an intention of making good products especially if they are not looking to get money directly out of the designs. I am also sick of all the health and safety regulations which exist the real world and I can just imagine the jungle of regulations if open designs would start to get them as well. 

Now let's get to the benefits of open design. I can see world being a much more interesting place if people can find similar minded people and develop better ideas/services/products together. It enables people not only to create and design new things but also fix their old broken objects because since if they join the make/do community they will most certainly gain interesting skills. I am part of the MakLab and the atmosphere there is very inspiring.  

Some people seem to be afraid that there wouldn't be jobs for designers if everything would be open sourced. That would 100% not be true. If you think of writers, they can publish anything online and people can read from there. That is great but there are still many of them which will be working for big organisations which publish their books. I think that is the way product design will?should move on to. That enables the whole system to develop. Open system leads to criticism and criticism leads to development and better products.