Hasta La Ideas

In my personal book collection, I’ve had a history of underlining, dog-earing and otherwise “marking up” my copy, complete with page citations and summaries of important details on the inside cover. Since I do actually lend my books out, often with my notes, my lending library, has, in a sense been Openly Designed, and in the few circumstances, the readers have left notes of their own. As a reviewer, however, there has always been a drive to photograph the book in a pristine form, so I’ve tended towards keeping looseleaf sheets of paper with my notes, often on the backside of the PR fluff that tends to come with them. For Open Design Now, the introductory letter was rather brief, not too fluffy, and after I got through with it, was annotated with words like “YESSS,” so we will confess some mild bias toward the topic before we even opened the cover.

To further the interests of open source, I’ll include my notes in the photo gallery for this particular work, but it might also be worth observing that my notes filled not only the back of the PR letter, but also the unintelligible Dutch invoice and two other sheets of paper as well. We have never reviewed a book this rich in content and new ideas. Of course, Open isn’t the work of one author either. Instead, it includes articles by and interviews with design luminaries such as Joris Larman, collectives like Droog, manufacturing pioneers Bre Pettis, open design commentators and lawyers that we promise you haven’t heard of but will be thankful to read. Part way through Open I had a conversation with my patent attorney cousin, and by the mid-point of the book, I emailed her a photo of the cover to tell her it was required reading. We hesitate to say that books like Open Design Now are required reading for industrial designers, but if you consider yourself a maker or a tinkerer in any way at all, and plan to be working for the next decade or two, the concepts described within will likely affect your career and your life whether you read it or not.

Predictably (and respectably), the first words of the book, on the inner cover flap describe the Creative Commons status of the book , under which it is not copyrighted, per se, but instead licensed, and anyone can share the book as long as they attribute it, do not profit from it, and if you build upon it you must share it too (“share alike”). After a brief introduction, the book is organized into three sections: Articles, Cases and Visual Index. The Visual Index is bright yellow, and includes nearly all of the images in the book. When reading through the articles, little yellow boxes with terms like “Hacking” and “DIY” pop up sporadically. Each of those boxes refers back to the visual index, which is alphabetized, although the visual index is certainly lovely to peruse on its own merit.

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