Open collaborative design

Open Source culture is becoming very prominent in the world of software. In the open source model people create software and make it freely available to other people. Not only is the product available but so is the workings of the software, the source-code. Anyone can customize and improve open-source software, again making these changes available to others.

If the software is useful to many people then there is a wide audience able to spot and report problems, and even fix them. People do this because everyone benefits from it. Someone putting in effort on one project knows there are people of a similar mind-set putting in effort on another project that will be useful to them also. What goes around comes around.

Because of the mutial benefit it encourages collaboration on an almost unheard of scale as well as very rapid evolution. And it is not just those actively participating in the open source ecosystem who benefit as the fruits of these projects can be used by anyone.

Software using this model evolves fast and there are many major open source projects known for their stability and security. There is now quality open source software available for every major category of application and what is more, they are available for free.

The Open Source methodology is not limited to software. A noteable example beyond software is the collaborative encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Accessible and editable by anyone. Started in 2001 it is now the largest encyclopedia in the world, grown organically from thousands of users, and the overall quality of articles is surprisingly good. With a few built-in mechanisms to make sure the project doesn't dissolve into total chaos, the result is that this pool of knowledge is assembled and edited by people who want to do it. No-one is paying them to do it and no-one is telling them to do it, they do it because they want. It feels like the right thing to do, they feel like they are contributing to something greater - their effort will be used and enjoyed by thousands of other people, and it is reciprocal.

Applying Open Source to the physical world

There is no reason why open source methods cannot be applied to machines and systems in the physical world too. The simplest method is to share information through a website on how to do and make things using text, diagrams and photographs. A more sophisticated way to collaborate on more complex machinery and products would be to share CAD assemblies over the internet much like project teams do in engineering and product design companies, knitted together with supporting information in a freely structured and evolvable manner much like a wiki.

Methods of turning the collaborative design into a physical objects

Get your hands dirty

Craft the item yourself or in a group according to plans using your own skills plus readily available components and perhaps specially ordered custom parts.

Contract manufacturing facilities

A large group of people all wanting the same base item could sent the details of the design to a contract manufacturing and assembly company to make use of specialist facilites and economies of scale. This would be akin to having the products made at cost price, without the markups involved when buying proprietary goods (relating to intellectual property, distribution, retail, other middlemen and general profit margins).

Rapid prototyping machines

Rapid prototypers or 3D printers are widely used in industry for creating solid three dimmensional objects straight from CAD models. Currently there are limitations with these machines but in the near future the price will reduce rapidly, the number of materials that can be used one batch will multiply, the resolution will become steadily finer and the build-speed will increase.

Products of a fully automated economy

The details of this are discussed in the next section.