New PhD Project "Concrete utopias of an open technology" [11.02.2013]

"The future is open source everything." With this quote, Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux project anticipated developments of the last years. The conceptual and normative approaches of open source are diffusing at a high pace into new areas and are being transformed, especially in the field of open design. In this field, networked communities are experimenting with open source practices to establish the open and collaborative design and usage of material artifacts. With this transformation of open source practices due to the inclusion of physical things, new forms of knowledge and objects emerge mainly in contrast to dominant industrial regimes of knowledge and of technology.

Christoph Schneider addresses open design in his PhD project which started in the beginning of 2013. Conceptually, open design is understood as a "re-design" (Latour) of the relations between people, knowledge and objects. This re-design not only includes artifacts (famously 3D-printers, for example) but also new spaces of knowledge (such as Fab Labs or Hackerspaces) as well as demands to subjects (being a "maker" instead of a consumer). As part of a wider societal project of open source, open design practices include visions of the future which anticipate technical as well as social changes. This is why open design shall be analyzed in the project as a contemporary form of "concrete utopia" (Bloch).

Part of this is the potential global reach of open design practices which is enabled through the Internet and the mobilities of people, knowledge and objects. The empirical investigation of the practices is based on the tracing of the mobilities of objects and visions and the analysis of their changing constellations.

The emergence of open design does not in itself guarantee that the future will be "open source everything", but to conceptually and empirically grasp this possibility is the aim of the project.