Open collaborative design/Vast libraries of machines and components

With many people contributing to open design projects, as happens currently with software, a universal commons will emerge made up of vast libraries of designs for everything from components and sub-assemblies through to complete artefacts, machines and complex systems, available for anyone to download and incorporate into their own designs, or help evolve as part of a wider project.

As in software, it would be useful for components and assemblies to be as 're-usable' as possible in the sense of being able to be incorporated in many different machine designs. To aid this it should be possible to specify the vital dynamic functions of a component or assembly in the CAD software, so that it can easily be modified in shape and scale so it can be incorporated into a new design while ensuring it still works correctly.

This will enable a huge reduction in duplication of effort and allow people to focus their efforts on creating new machines of increasing complexity and building on the work of others.

See our List of open-source hardware to see how far this effort has come already