Hasta La Ideas

This children’s library with rammed earth walls in Burundi, Africa, was built by Belgian studio BC Architects and members of the local community, according to an open-source design template (+ slideshow).

The Library of Muyinga is the first building of a project to build a new school for deaf children, using local materials and construction techniques, and referencing indigenous building typologies.

BC Architects developed the design from a five-year-old template listed on the OpenStructures network. They adapted it to suit the needs of the programme, adding a large sheltered corridor that is typical of traditional Burundian housing.

“Life happens mostly in this hallway porch: encounters, resting, conversation, waiting,” explained the architects. “It is a truly social space, constitutive for community relations.”

Rammed earth blocks form the richly coloured walls and were produced using a pair of vintage compressor machines. They create rows of closely spaced piers around the exterior, supporting a heavy roof clad with locally made baked-clay tiles.

“The challenge of limited resources for this project became an opportunity,” said the architects. “We managed to respect a short supply-chain of building materials and labour force, supporting the local economy and installing pride in the construction of a library with the poor people’s material – earth.”

The wide corridor runs along one side of the building, negotiating a change in level between the front and back of the site. Glass panels are slotted between columns along one of its sides and hinge open to lead through to the library reading room.

Here, bookshelves are slotted within recesses between the piers, while a large wooden table provides a study area and a huge hammock is suspended from the ceiling to create a more informal space for reading.

Wooden shutters reveal when the library is open. They also open the building out to the area where the rest of the school will be built, which is bounded by a new drystone wall.

“A very important element in Burundian (and, generally, African) architecture is the very present demarcation of property lines. It is a tradition that goes back to tribal practices of compounding family settlements,” said the architects.

High ceilings allow cross ventilation, via a pattern of square perforations between the rammed earth blocks.

Here’s a more detailed project description from BC architects:

The Library of Muyinga

Architecture

The first library of Muyinga, part of a future inclusive school for deaf children, in locally sourced compressed earth blocks, built with a participatory approach.

Our work in Africa started within the framework of OpenStructures.net. BC was asked to scale the “Open structures” model to an architectural level. A construction process involving end-users and second-hand economies was conceived. Product life cycles, water resource cycles en energy cycles were connected to this construction process. This OpenStructures architectural model was called Case Study (CS) 1: Katanga, Congo. It was theoretical, and fully research-based. 5 years later, the library of Muyinga in Burundi nears completion.

Vernacular inspirations

A thorough study of vernacular architectural practices in Burundi was the basis of the design of the building. Two months of fieldwork in the region and surrounding provinces gave us insight in the local materials, techniques and building typologies. These findings were applied, updated, reinterpreted and framed within the local know-how and traditions of Muyinga.

The library is organised along a longitudinal covered circulation space. This “hallway porch” is a space often encountered within the Burundian traditional housing as it provides a shelter from heavy rains and harsh sun. Life happens mostly in this hallway porch; encounters, resting, conversation, waiting – it is a truly social space, constitutive for community relations.

This hallway porch is deliberately oversized to become the extent of the library. Transparent doors between the columns create the interaction between inside space and porch. Fully opened, these doors make the library open up towards the adjacent square with breathtaking views over Burundi’s “milles collines” (1000 hills).

On the longitudinal end, the hallway porch flows onto the street, where blinders control access. These blinders are an important architectural element of the street facade, showing clearly when the library is open or closed. On the other end, the hallway porch will continue as the main circulation and access space for the future school.

A very important element in Burundian (and, generally, African) architecture is the very present demarcation of property lines. It is a tradition that goes back to tribal practices of compounding family settlements. For the library of Muyinga, the compound wall was considered in a co-design process with the community and the local NGO. The wall facilitates the terracing of the slope as a retaining wall in dry stone technique, low on the squares and playground of the school side, high on the street side. Thus, the view towards the valley is uncompromised, while safety from the street side is guaranteed.

The general form of the library is the result of a structural logic, derived on one hand from the material choice (compressed earth blocks masonry and baked clay roof tiles). The locally produced roof tiles were considerably more heavy than imported corrugated iron sheets. This inspired the structural system of closely spaced columns at 1m30 intervals, which also act as buttresses for the high walls of the library. This rhythmic repetition of columns is a recognisable feature of the building, on the outside as well as on the inside.

The roof has a slope of 35% with an overhang to protect the unbaked CEB blocks, and contributes to the architecture of the library.

Climatic considerations inspired the volume and facade: a high interior with continuous cross-ventilation helps to guide the humid and hot air away. Hence, the facade is perforated according to the rhythm of the compressed earth blocks (CEB) masonry, giving the library its luminous sight in the evening.

The double room height at the street side gave the possibility to create a special space for the smallest of the library readers. This children’s space consist of a wooden sitting corner on the ground floor, which might facilitate cosy class readings. It is topped by an enormous hammock of sisal rope as a mezzanine, in which the children can dream away with the books that they are reading.

The future school will continue to swing intelligently through the landscape of the site, creating playgrounds and courtyards to accomodate existing slopes and trees. In the meanwhile, the library will work as an autonomous building with a finished design.

Local materials research

The challenge of limited resources for this project became an opportunity. We managed to respect a short supply-chain of building materials and labour force, supporting local economy, and installing pride in the construction of a library with the poor people’s material: earth.

Earth analysis: “field tests and laboratory tests” – Raw earth as building material is more fragile than other conventional building materials. Some analyse is thus important to do. Some easy tests can be made on field to have a first idea of its quality. Some other tests have to be made in the laboratory to have a beter understanding of the material and improve its performance.

CEB: “from mother nature” – After an extensive material research in relation with the context, it was decided to use compressed earth bricks (CEB) as the main material for the construction of the building. We were lucky enough to find 2 CEB machines intactly under 15 years of dust. The Terstaram machines produce earth blocks of 29x14x9cm that are very similar to the bricks we know in the North, apart from the fact that they are not baked. Four people are constantly producing stones, up to 1100 stones/day.

Eucalyptus “wood; the strongest, the reddest” – The load bearing beams that are supporting the roof are made of eucalyptus wood, which is sustainably harvested in Muramba. Eucalyptus wood renders soil acid and therefor blocks other vegetation to grow. Thus, a clear forest management vision is needed to control the use of it in the Burundian hills. When rightly managed, Eucalyptus is the best solution to span spaces and use as construction wood, due to its high strengths and fast growing.

Tiles: “local quality product” – The roof and floor tiles are made in a local atelier in the surroundings of Muyinga. The tiles are made of baked Nyamaso valley clay. After baking, their color renders beautifully vague pink, in the same range of colors as the bricks. Each roof surface in the library design consists of around 1400 tiles. This roof replaces imported currogated iron sheets, and revalues local materials as a key design element for public roof infrastructure.

Internal Earth plaster: “simple but sensitive” – Clay from the valley of Nyamaso, 3 km from the construction site, was used for its pure and non-expansive qualities. After some minimal testing with bricks, a mix was chosen and applied on the interior of the library. The earth plaster is resistent to indoor normal use for a public function, and has turned out nicely.

Bamboo: “Weaving lamp fixtures” – Local bamboo is not of construction quality, but can nicely be used for special interior design functions, or light filters. In a joint workshop with Burundians and Belgians, some weaving techniques were explored, and in the end, used for the lamp fixtures inside the library.

Sisal rope: “from plant to hammock” – Net-making from Sisal plant fibres is one of the small micro-economies that bloomed in this project. It took a lot of effort to find the only elder around Muyinga that masters the Sisal rope weaving technique. He harvested the local sisal plant on site, and started weaving. In the pilote project, he educated 4 other workers, who now also master this technique, and use it as a skill to gain their livelihood. The resulting hammock serves as a children’s space to play, relax and read, on a mezzanine level above the library space.

Concrete “when it’s the only way out” – For this pilot project, we didn’t want to take any risks for structural issues. A lightweight concrete skeleton structure is inside the CEB columns, in a way that both materials (CEB and concrete) are mechanichally seperated. The CEB hollow columns were used as a “lost” formwork for the concrete works. It is our aim, given our experience with Phase 1, to eliminiate the structural use of concrete for future buildings.

Project Description: Library for the community of Muyinga
Location: Muyinga (BU)
Client: ODEDIM
Architect: BC architects
Local material consultancy: BC studies
Community participation and organisation: BC studies and ODEDIM Muyinga
Cooperation: ODEDIM Muyinga NGO, Satimo vzw, Sint-Lucas Architecture University, Sarolta Hüttl, Sebastiaan De Beir, Hanne Eckelmans
Financial support: Satimo vzw, Rotary Aalst, Zonta Brugge, Province of West-Flanders
Budget: €40 000
Surface: 140m2
Concept: 2012
Status: completed

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News: Nokia has become the first major manufacturer to give consumers access to its  3D design files so they can create their own versions of products, according to open design pioneer Ronen Kadushin.

“I’m pretty sure they are first global company to have a go at open design,” said Kadushin, following last week’s news that the Finnish mobile phone brand released digital files allowing users to alter and 3D print their own shells for the Lumia 820 smartphone.

Berlin-based designer Ronen Kadushin, who has been making open design templates freely available for download since 2005, says Nokia’s move is timely.

“I think they did it because they are in a business situation that pushes them to try this new model – not to make money, but to focus their brand identity as up-to-date and in tune with the 3D printing and maker culture,” Kadushin told Dezeen.

However, Kadushin doubts that Nokia will be able to control who downloads and uses their templates. “You have to register as a developer to download the files, but tomorrow it [will be] on The Pirate Bay for anyone to download anonymously,” he said. “But in any case, they will create a community of developers that will generate designs, new ideas, solutions and creativity.”

According to Wikipedia, open design is “the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information”. Enthusiasts see it as an alternative to the “closed” product development model employed by major brands, that jealously guard their intellectual property.

Electronics company Teenage Engineering began offering replacement parts for its synthesisers as downloadable 3D print files last year, but Nokia is the first major manufacturer to allow users access to its designs.

Last April, Domus editor Joseph Grima talked about the birth of “the era of open design”. In an interview with Dezeen, Grima said: “More and more design is resonating with the spirit of the social media era where it’s much more about sharing ideas, collaborating, being completely transparent, completely open, rather than the secretive model of the past.”

Grima curated an exhibition in Milan last year called The Future in The Making: Open Design Archipelago, which explored how designers were harnessing digital design and manufacturing technologies to share information and manufacture products without having to rely of large-scale industry or major brands.

Dezeen’s editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs interviewed Kadushin during Vienna Design Week last year, where he warned that 3D printers could soon enable people to print ammunition for an army.

Kadushin also discussed open in a video filmed at the launch of a book on the subject in Berlin in 2011.

The book, called Open Design Now, claims that design is “undergoing a revolution” thanks to new technologies like 3D printers and accessible software.

“Anyone can be a designer today,” the book adds. “Professionals and enthusiastic amateurs alike are using open design – the creation of products using publicly available blueprints and instructions – to share their work with the world. Consumers are designing cars, restaurants, even prosthetic legs.”

Kadushin’s previous open-source products including a contraceptive device made from a copper coin and a mallet for smashing up iPhones – see all designs by Ronen Kadushin.

See all stories about open design »
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Istanbul Design Biennial: Belgian design studio Unfold used open source components including a filter made of 3D printed ceramic to build this water boiler and purifier, which could be used in the developing world.

The machine was first devised by designer Jesse Howard in collaboration with Thomas Lommée of Intrastructures, a design studio that makes and uses components from the OpenStructures open source construction project. Read more about the OpenStructures system in our earlier story.

Unfold developed the original design by replacing its plastic bottle with a glass bottle, which has been cut in half to hold the water filter.

The ceramic water filter has extruded pockets filled with activated carbon, which acts as a natural purification device.

We recently reported on another Unfold project presented in Istanbul, which explored how 3D printed objects can be as unique as handmade ones.

See all our stories about Unfold »
See all our stories about 3D printing »
See all our stories about open design »

Here’s some more information about the project:

The OpenStructures WaterBoiler, originally designed and composed by Jesse Howard in collaboration with Thomas Lommée, was passed on to the Antwerp based design studio Unfold.

The WaterBoiler is based on the OpenStructures design principles. In Unfold’s adaptation, the water recipient, a salvaged, PET bottle, was replaced by a cut-through glass bottle that holds a ceramic water filter 3D printed using one of the machines that they developed. It further contains OS compatible parts designed by Fabio Lorefice (3D printed adaptor piece).

The water filter is a prototype, part of a recently started research project on the potential benefits of ceramic 3D printing for the production of water filters in the developing world.

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by Unfold appeared first on Dezeen.

News: cheap 3D printers mean manufacturing can again take place at home as it did before the industrial revolution, according to MakerBot Industries CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis (+ audio).

Above: MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis talks to Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs

“Before the industrial revolution everybody did work at home; there was a cottage industry,” said Pettis (pictured above), who spoke to Dezeen today at 3D Printshow in London, where his company launched a new desktop printer costing $2,200. “Then you had to go to the factory to work. Now we’re bringing the factory back to the individual.”

Pettis was in London to unveil MakerBot’s Replicator 2 3D printer, which he claims is the first affordable printer that does not require specialist knowledge to operate. “We’ve just put the factory in a microwave-sized box that you can put on your desk and have at home,” said Pettis.

Brooklyn-based MakerBot was founded in 2009 with the goal of producing affordable 3D printers for the home and it has become one of the best-known brands in the rapidly expanding 3D printing and open-source design movement.

Pettis claimed that 3D printing was now advanced enough to produce consumer items on demand; last month the company opened its first store in New York, selling MakerBots and products printed in store on the devices. “This bracelet I’m holding took fifteen minutes to make,” he said.

3D Printshow is the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to 3D printing and runs until 21 October at The Brewery, London EC1.

3D printing and open design have been hot topics recently, with several projects at the Istanbul Design Biennial exploring possible applications for the technology and gun enthusiasts releasing blueprints to print guns.

Here’s a transcript of the interview, conducted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs:

Bre Pettis: “I’m Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot Industries and we make MakerBots. We just came out with the MakerBot Replicator 2. It’s a desktop 3D printer, which means you can have ideas and make them too. You can create models and 3D print them. And it’s an exciting time because this technology used to be really big machines that were inaccessible in elite institutions and now you can just have one on your desktop or on your coffee table at home and you can just make the things.”

Marcus Fairs: “Do you think this is the first machine that’s consumer friendly? You don’t need to be a geek, you don’t need to be an expert programmer to buy and use this machine – have we got to that stage yet?”

Bre Pettis: “Yes, the thing that’s most exciting for the average user is that we just launched a whole software suite called MakerWare, and it’s makes it so much easier. You literally just drag and drop, you position it how you want it and you press make, and it just does it for you. So it’s gone from a command-line tool, which is kind of hard to use, to a super easy, really nice software package that makes it easy for everyone to make the things they want.”

Marcus Fairs: “People are getting very excited about 3D printing and other types of open-source manufacturing. Is that excitement a bit premature or is there really going to be a revolution in the way that objects are designed and manufactured?”

Bre Pettis: “Well, it’s interesting. Before the industrial revolution everybody did work at home, there was a cottage industry. And then when the Jacquard loom and these kinds of things came along, you had to go to the factory to work. But we’ve just put the factory in a microwave-sized box that you can put on your desk and have at home. So it’s an interesting kind of cycle of life of manufacturing now that we’re bringing the factory back to the individual.”

Marcus Fairs: “And how much do you think this will change the existing structure where you have a designer who designs a product and a factory or brand who manufactures it – how will that existing top-down model be changed by this kind of technology?”

Bre Pettis: “So industrial designers, engineers and architects are actually the ones [whose] whole workflow has changed by this. They used to have to have an idea, send it off to a modelling house, have it take a couple of weeks or a month and then iterate on a monthly cycle. With a MakerBot you iterate on an hourly cycle, in some cases minutes – this bracelet I’m holding took fifteen minutes to make and I’m just cranking them out all day here.

“So for the people who are making products, this just changes their life. It makes everything so much faster, so much easier, so much more accessible. If you have one of these on your desk you can actually try making the things that you’re working on, and if you don’t like them you can throw them away, you don’t have to sign up for a service or have to stress out about how much it costs; it’s inexpensive. You can fail as many times as you need to to be successful.”

Marcus Fairs: “But you’re talking about prototypes. I mean, how far away are we from finished products being printed on demand for consumers?”

Bre Pettis: “So in New York City we just opened a retail store, and we do two things there – we sell MakerBots, and we sell things made on a MakerBot, and we literally have a bank of MakerBots that just make things 24 hours a day for the store.”

Marcus Fairs: “And what are the best-selling products that you make?”

Bre Pettis: “Right now the best-selling products are jewellery and we have this little contraption that’s like a heart that’s made out of gears, and people really like that too, it’s made by a designer named Emmett.”

Marcus Fairs: “So it’s still sort of small products, sort of novelty value products – what about the huge industrial applications, the mass applications, the larger products?”

Bre Pettis: “The true MakerBot operator has no limitations. This machine we just launched has a massive 410 cubic inch build volume, which means you can actually make really big things, you can make a pair of shoes if you want to. The cool thing is that if you want to make something bigger, you just make it in component parts, and then you either make snaps, so it snaps together, or you glue it together and you can make things as big as you want, if you make it in components.”

Marcus Fairs: “So this has just come out and how much does it retail for?”

Bre Pettis: “This retails for $2,200, and it’s really a great affordable machine that’s also just rock solid. We’re really proud of it.”

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News: new technologies are causing a “cultural revolution” that will transform the way objects are made and the way they look, according to the curator of Adhocracy, a new exhibition exploring the impact of digital networks and open-source thinking on the design world (+ interview transcript).

“It’s more than simply a technological revolution; it’s a cultural revolution we’re undergoing now,” said Domus magazine Joseph Grima, who curated the exhibition as part of  the inaugural Istanbul Design Biennial, which opened this weekend: “And I think this is just the beginning.”

Rigid top-down systems established to optimise mass production in the last century are being replaced by flexible peer-to-peer networks, leading to new aesthetic codes and the destruction of the idea of the designer as author, Grima told Dezeen.

He added: “It ultimately boils down to the emergence of the network as the productive model par excellence of our time. It’s a complete shift away from the heroic figure of the designer towards the absence of any single figure as the author; more of a collaborative, networked approach. Every era has had its own aesthetics, its own codes, and the codes of this era are definitely of a very different kind to those of the previous century.”

Grima spoke to Dezeen last Friday along with associate curators Ethel Baraona and Elian Stefa after the opening of the Adhocracy exhibition, one of two main components of the biennial.

The Istanbul Design Biennial is organised by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and runs until 12 December 2012. Adhocracy is at Galata Greek Primary School while Musibet, an exhibition curated by Turkish architect Emre Arolat exploring the rapid and chaotic growth of Istanbul, is at Istanbul Modern.

Below is an edited transcript of the interview conducted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs, interspersed with photos from the exhibition:

Marcus Fairs: First of all, please explain who you are and your role on the exhibition.

Joseph Grima: I’m editor of Domus and curator of the Adhocracy exhibition.

Ethel Baraona: I’m editor from DPR Barcelona and associate curator of the Adhocracy exhibition.

Elian Stefa: Elain Stefa, associate curator of the exhibition and general coordinator.

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the exhibition you’ve all worked on.

Joseph Grima: The exhibition is an attempt to understand and trace the lines of force that are redefining what design is today. And this is manifesting itself through all sorts of different aspects of everyday life. We wanted to really look at design not as something in a Salone del Mobile, furniture fair way but something that is the art of producing the objects that define who we are. And therefore to interrogate them in a way as to what is unfolding in this particular moment of radical change, in response in particular to the advent of new technologies: new relationships being born between people on a peer-to-peer basis rather than on a typical economic model of top-down bureaucracy.

Marcus Fairs: What does Adhocracy mean?

Joseph Grima: It’s a word that’s been used since the 1970s. I think Alvin Toffler first proposed it. It hints at the idea that the traditional organisation not just of labour but of production – the paradigm of industrial production – that was prevalent in the twentieth century is one of rigidity. It has a very clearly marked set of rules, it’s extremely hierarchical, it’s organised by levels of control.

And this is something that, in the period of history in which it was conceived, served to streamline the process of production. It was based on the idea of the creation of multiple objects; multiple objects that would run into the millions that were all exactly the same. The paradigm of industrialisation is standardisation and replication. And this of course for many decades was an extremely advantageous model. Fordism of course was a direct consequence of the theory of bureaucracy.

But at some point it also became evident that there was an inherent rigidity to this model. It was incapable of embracing change, incapable of adapting to complex situations. And that’s when this idea of Adhocracy in the early seventies started to emerge in many different fields: in the field of corporate culture organisation, the field of design with Charles Jencks’ Adhocism and many others. And in a way, what we considered to be an idea that was somewhat behind its time, has come to its full impact on society today. So the exhibition is an attempt to sample from a variety of different fields, not just from what we’d normally consider the design world, but also outside that; to sample a number of projects that are representative of the capillary seeping of this idea of Adhocracy into everyday life.

Marcus Fairs: As you say there’s not just design projects in the show: there’s a journalism project, a music project, a film project. Ethel, walk us through the exhibition briefly and give us some specific ideas of things that are in the show.

Ethel Baraona: As Joseph was saying, it deals with these new changes and how new technology allows us nowadays to do new kinds of designs. It also has social and political implications. For example Pedro Reyes’ Imagine piece [above and below] is fantastic because it’s a critique of the weapons business, which is everywhere in the world. He transforms them into musical instruments, to try to give another kind of message. People understand it’s a kind of business that should stop right now. We have some other projects that are not static objects, that are urban actions – and people who are in the basement are actually doing stuff while the exhibition is going on. I think these represent very clearly the Adhocracy concept.

Marcus Fairs: Give some more examples.

Elian Stefa: For example on the roof of the exhibition we have UX, which is something completely different from everything else. These guys are a collective from Paris and they go underground. Basically they’ve explored the whole of the [Parisian network of catacombs] and they’ve taken over a section of the city. So it’s a whole approach to design that is completely radical and completely unforeseen in these kinds of exhibitions.

We wanted to show that design is not – was never – limited to just product design, but that design has a much larger scope. Design as a way to solve problems, even as a way to cure boredom. I mean you have seventeen-year-olds who are sending Lego men into space out of their back yards. It’s just about creativity and finding these kinds of solutions. What design means now is not really product design; it’s not even commercial in any way.

Joseph Grima: I think this is a really important point: the evolving idea of what the designers’ role is. So if there is a third industrial revolution unfolding around us – which is very clearly visible in the technology that is being used to produce objects – it no longer forces us to produce millions all exactly the same but can actually offer much more personalisation; it can return to the model of the craftsman in the workshop.

At the same time the role of the designer is evolving. Projects that are emblematic of this are [modular construction system] OpenStructures, [open-source microprocessor] Arduino; projects that are not about creating objects but about creating systems for other people to adapt, and to create objects out of them. It’s a little bit like an iPhone: it can be many things for different people depending on the apps you install. And for developers, depending on how they utilise the hardware that’s built into an iPhone, it can be anything. And that’s increasingly an incredibly interesting paradigm of design today: not creating something that’s closed and finished, but something that’s open and that can be interpreted. That’s exponentially more powerful.

Elian Stefa: The key words are process and platform. It’s a way to build on things; things that are not finalised. They continue growing afterwards.

Ethel Baraona: It also deals with subjects like economics, copyright and patents. Maybe this third industrial revolution is changing now also in these kind of terms. Artificial intelligence and collaborative production are changing all of the concepts we have learned over the years; so we wanted to show this also.

Marcus Fairs: You mentioned the UX project. They broke into a historic building and made some alterations but they were positive alterations. But you could also look at that as a criminal act. You could break in and do some damage. There’s also a film in the exhibition about a drone that flew over the streets of Warsaw during the riots and was used as a journalistic tool. But drones were developed by the military for other kinds of uses. Also the 3D-printed gun, which was in the news lately, isn’t in the show. There are open-source websites where people share stolen credit cards details. A lot of these technologies can be used for sinister means. Why is this an edit only of positive applications?

Joseph Grima: We didn’t actually edit out the negative connotations. If the whole thing about the guns had come out a little bit sooner we certainly would have put it in, even though we’d have probably got in some trouble in this day and age in Turkey for trying to 3D print a gun. Nevertheless what we were trying to point out is the ambiguities inherent in new technologies. It’s a well-known conundrum that the human spirit is naturally driven to innovation and creation and, as with the nuclear bomb, it can be used in two distinct ways. And that’s always going to be the case.

But what we were more interested in in this particular case, with UX for example, this idea that in fact something that is, according to the bureaucracy of law, completely illegal and should not happen, was actually capable of producing something positive: to bring back to its former glory one of the monuments of Paris. There’s a suspicion that anybody who breaks into a building is automatically bad and I think what’s really interesting today is that law itself, and legality – and what Ethel was talking about, the systems of copyright and intellectual protection and so on, law itself.

If we’d had more time and a larger exhibition, legality and judicial issues would have made a really interesting chapter. Legal systems are having to evolve incredibly quickly to deal with challenges that could they never even have conceived of three of four years ago. So it’s about this rapid change in which the structures of power, the structures of authority, are often paradoxically at a disadvantage, despite their incredible endowment of funds. This kind of tactical approach of the crowd, the masses, the individuals grouping together, is an almost irresistible force. It’s something that can hardly be overcome.

Marcus Fairs: In some ways manufacturing is behind other industries. Publishing for example was transformed by technology twice in recent years – first the desktop publishing revolution, which allowed anyone to create newsletters, magazines, posters and so on, and then more recently by online platforms like blogs. The music industry has been through a complete meltdown, thanks to file sharing. Why has manufacturing been slow to adopt these models and what can we extrapolate from the way those other industries have been transformed to predict how the industry might now change?

Elian Stefa: It has to do with the physicality of the situation. All of these transformations happened in fields that are easily sharable. Music, films and so on are just digital information. You just send it to another person. But now we have this crossroad into the physical world of the same concepts. And we’re actually seeing this transition. We’re not sure if it will take on fully as much as it has in the film industry and the music industry, but it will definitely have major implications. So this is one of the main reasons: you have open-source designs but you do have to build them. There’s a lot more effort involved, but the consequences are bigger.

Marcus Fairs: So how much of a threat is this to existing manufacturing systems? How much of a threat is it to existing bureaucratic systems?

Joseph Grima: A very good example is the record industry, as you mentioned, which spent an enormous amount of time and effort to legally suppress file sharing. Then Apple came along and set up iTunes, which is basically file sharing made easy, legal and cheap, and completely swallowed the whole industry. I think it would be extremely dangerous to consider this a threat to the existing systems. Innovation is hardly ever a threat; it’s an opportunity. You have to view it as an opportunity; you have no choice. Otherwise you’ll be wiped off the board.

Marcus Fairs: What is the relevance of all this to a country like Turkey? It feels quite ad-hoc here; it’s a fast-growing economy that perhaps plays by different rules. Does this kind of thinking lend itself to particular communities or countries? Or is it, by the nature of the way data can be shared, something that will just pop up all over the place?

Ethel Baraona: In countries like Turkey, or Africa and Latin America, you can see that they are used to sharing knowledge of how to do things. And technology is just a tool; one more tool to expand this knowledge. So I think it’s interesting to people here, in a country where, when you walk around, you can see, for example you see the furniture that we have from [Enzo Mari’s 1974 project] Autoprogettazione [above] and then, 40 years later, on the roof, with Campo de Cebada [below], it is the same evolution that you can see here on the streets; people doing their own stuff.

Elian Stefa: in some countries, in the developing world, there’s a lot more issues that may be smaller, that people can solve by themselves. This is exactly where adhocracy shines. But there’s another aspect to it; we have projects from all over the globe. The reason for that is because a lot of this maker spirit, a lot of this doing your own, finding your own solutions, is inherent in people. So you see really advanced open-source systems from advanced countries, and you see the sharing of information in a more informal way from developing countries. For example we have a project from Mumbai and Istanbul, Crafting Neighbourhoods, which talks about that. It’s not formally open-source. but it is in spirit.

Marcus Fairs: Could ad-hoc manufacturing systems emerge as a strong component of an economy in countries like Turkey, Nigeria or India first?

Joseph Grima: By its nature it’s always countries that are forced to seek out solutions that are not necessarily about buying off-the-shelf, turnkey solutions from corporate suppliers that are at an advantage in a way because they’re forced to explore other possibilities; how to achieve results without simply shelling out cash to buy boxed solutions to problems. And with that process of experiment, of trying to hack something together yourself, you’re initiating a chain reaction of innovation; a perpetual iteration of design. And that affects everything from product design to information technology. It ultimately boils down to the emergence of the network as the productive model par excellence of our time. It’s a complete shift away from the heroic figure of the designer towards the absence of any single figure as the author; more of a collaborative, networked approach. Maker Faire Africa [above and below] for example has links all over the world. It’s a global project. It’s very difficult to use national boundaries to contain phenomena in this day and age.

Marcus Fairs: Joseph, you curated an exhibition in Milan that explored similar themes [link]; this expands it beyond objects and into music software, film-making and things like that. But what is the next stage? If you were to do this again in a year’s time, how would it be different?

Joseph Grima: That’s an interesting question. Where do we go from here? There are significant differences between this show and the show in Milan, which was really intended to be seen in the context of the furniture fair, and in contrast to the model of the furniture fair, with the heroic figure of the designer, and show how new technologies are transforming dramatically not just the production process but also our idea of the design process today.

This exhibition is well beyond that and a lot of the projects here in the central void speak of a cultural shift that transcends the realm of technology. Pedro Reyes’ project for example is absolutely non-technological – it’s taking weapons and turning them into musical instruments – but at the same time it’s emblematic of this idea of hacking objects to transform them into something that is exponentially more powerful and completely subverts their use.

It’s something you see in technology; the Kinect [motion sensor for the Xbox 360 console] for example has been the most hacked object of the last year, but you also see it in the urban hackers UX, you see it in the spontaneous food festivals in Helsinki, you see it in countless projects, all the Arduino projects, in drones being used as a tactical approach to journalism, enabled by technology. It’s a kind of chain reaction in which these things can rise to the surface all together. So where to take it from here? This is an attempt to create a snapshot of a cultural condition at a particular moment in history. All of this will appear extremely commonplace and mundane to us in the future; in many ways it already does. It’s already part of the air we breathe.

One of the reasons the exhibition is so varied is that if we’d only had a few and they’d been homogenous it would have been, so what? So the attempt is to draw the lines, connect the dots between very diverse fields, and say it’s more than simply a technological revolution; it’s a cultural revolution we’re undergoing now. And I think this is just the beginning. It’s very hard to tell where it will go but more and more it will impact the social and political realm. If you think about open data, data journalism, all of these projects are going to dramatically transform governments in the coming years. I think that would make an interesting show.

Ethel Baraona: I also think it has a very powerful approach to economic issues. Governments live from their economic power; things that create new trade, money, exchange with peer-to-peer design, these are transforming economic power. Maybe it’s just a starting point now but we could a big change, a revolution not only in social and government issues but also in governmental powers in a few years.

Marcus Fairs: What about the aesthetic issues? Designers have been the guardians of the aesthetic realm but it’s been undermined by the success of mass production. A lot of the objects in the exhibition are quite ugly by normal definitions; they’re quite difficult aesthetically. Where does this movement take our understanding of aesthetics?

Elian Stefa: I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That’s basically it.

Ethel Baraona: We now have the tools to understand the final form of the object; we can now see the process. So the final object is different. A few years ago the process was hidden. Now it gives a new approach to the final object. You can see that the object is different, but you can see why. So it’s changing the way we look at objects.

Joseph Grima: The point you bring up is the difficult and indigestible nature of certain objects in the exhibition. It was also a response to Deyan [Sudjic]’s provocation, the theme he proposed for the biennial, which was imperfection. And I think in a way imperfection, the way we understood the theme, was that if industrial production, the replication of multiples, was synonymous with perfection, then today perfection is almost frowned upon; it’s lost its cachet. It’s synonymous with the idea of one size fitting all.

What is emerging is a culture that has an aesthetic of the appreciation of individualism, of user input. A lot of the projects have a kind of beauty tied to the fact that the user has a personal connection with that object. You think of Tristan Kopp’s ProdUSER bicycle [above] or Minale-Maeda’s Keystone coat hangers [below], these are objects in which [the user] has been involved in the production process. I think that creates a bond that transcends. Apart from the fact that I think they’re incredibly beautiful… or OpenStructures. The aesthetics are very different from that of the run-of-the-mill Argos toaster. It does have a beauty of its own. It’s almost a return to the earliest projects of industrial design, of Braun and a lot of those companies, there’s a return to that simplicity, of showing the elementary function of these objects. Making them accessible.

Marcus Fairs: So it’s forcing new ways of reading and understanding beauty.

Joseph Grima: Exactly.

Elian Stefa: We also have to understand that design is part of culture. Culture has to represent the political conditions and situations. Considering the fact that we just passed a major global economic crisis…

Joseph Grima: We just passed it?

Elian Stefa: Well, we’re still in the middle of it! But these kinds of conditions are the perfect breeding ground for projects like these. These projects express exactly that. They’re not really poor, the materials they use are not really poor, they’re just what is available now.

Joseph Grima: The aesthetics of an era are always an expression of its core values. And this imperfection of certain objects is something that has a value for us today. But also the machines… something we obliquely referenced is James Bridle’s theory of the New Aesthetic, which is a consequence of the permeation, the saturation of our lives with machines. The idea that machines are shaping not just how we do things but also how we perceive the world: that’s becoming part of our core consciousness. That’s something that we touched upon a little bit [in the exhibition], quite obliquely. But yeah, every era has had its own aesthetics, its own codes, and the codes of this era are definitely of a very different kind to those of the previous century.

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it’s a cultural revolution” – Joseph Grima appeared first on Dezeen.