I saw that just recently IKEA has an arm that explores open source design and is really looking to spread open source design across various industries, so they’re working on something they call “the garden sphere” which is an urban agriculture project and we’ve talked about urban agriculture a number of times on the podcast. This particular project enables people to download the designs for what amounts to this giant sphere made out of wood that you can more or less grow all kinds of vegetables within this sphere and supposedly, at least according to the PR for this project, you can feed your whole neighborhood with fresh produce from this sphere that the folks at one of IKEA labs has created this.

You can download the designs for free and it’s a CNC process for cutting the plywood pieces that you assemble and that provides you with this object that you then use for your urban farming. That’s one example that got me excited this week. Of course, there are many examples of this kind of design being offered for free in an open source context. There’s open source home building. Dirk, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this project before called “Open Source Ecology.” You can find them at OpenSourceEcology.org, and they’re all about creating a modular system for inexpensive home building that people can do themselves if they follow these plans that come with the kit and they even give you plans for creating the tools for construction of the home, so not just the modularity of the house but also open source tool sets like I think there’s an open source backhoe designs so you can go and create your own construction equipment.

Another great example there, and my final example of some cool open source design for good works, there’s a 3D design contest for medical tools in Africa and we’ll include the link in the transcript for the podcast but the basic idea is that you’re going to be 3D printing some basic medical tools for communities in Africa that may not have easy access to these particular tools and this is sort of an open call to do that. I’m finding this use of technology so … You have these fantastic resources but then you’re applying them locally, you’re giving local people the designs so they can do things on their own, build things on their own. I’m finding this to be a pretty amazing story and I think something that’s going to be built on and is really going to improve people’s lives.

Dirk, when you’ve heard about these stories, what’s your take on it? How do you see open source design playing a role in all of these things?

I mean, I’m not sure. The 3D printing of medical tools, I mean, that starts to get really interesting, particularly when you’re talking about smaller things because then you can … There’s a straight path. I mean, I know that there’s devices that can be bought for hundreds of dollars that can be filled for also small amounts of money that can print things that are at a scale, comparable with small, handheld medical devices. Now, are those particular models of machine, do they provide the tolerance and precision necessary to create a medical device that won’t do more harm than good? I’m not sure. That’s a whole other question, one of resolution and precision, but it all sounds nice.

The open source movement is fascinating because it’s one that it’s strictly better, open source is strictly better than hoarding information from the standpoint of accelerating innovation, from the standpoint of making people’s lives easier, allowing collaboration and riffing off each other’s work and that’s great. What’s less clear is the impact it has in our capitalist financial model. If you talk about artificial intelligence and robots for example, those are going to be taking away jobs, those are going to be disrupting in the capitalist system, however, they’re also going to be rewarding the people who deploy them. The rich owners deploy the robots, the robots take the jobs of the poor frontline workers, and at least makes sense in the crazy, broken system that we have of greed.

Open source is less clear because you really are, when you go into open source, you’re giving up competitive advantage, you are accelerating the group, the mass, but you are not necessarily benefiting your own financial interests, and yet, similar to robots and AI, you are inevitably taking jobs from people. I mean, there’s tasks that people would have to spend time on otherwise, but they no longer will have to spend time on because of the proliferation of open source resources. For me, open source is like this utopian thing that if we culturally didn’t believe in this capitalist beast, it’s like, “Duh, of course it makes sense,” but in the context of capitalism it’s a little head scratching. I’m happy for it as an anti-capitalist, but I’m skeptical of it in terms of its role in the system that we live in.

You wouldn’t be able to do that work otherwise because you just don’t have the resources, so it gives you knowledge resources in abundance and sort of accelerates that process. Now, I take your point, there’s probably a chipboard designer and a industrial designer who could get work from you but if you don’t have those resources to begin with, I’m not sure if that’s too much to their detriment.

I think the intersection between this DIY maker movement and open source is really powerful because I think as much as we talk about having global supply chains, there’s also going to be a growing need for doing things locally and I think this just gives us so much technological power to get things done locally in a way that’s very sophisticated, might be more eco friendly, and could be the way that manufacturing and construction moves forward into the 21st century. I think that we’re so used to thinking about, we’re talking about bringing jobs back to America now, that’s on everybody’s mind. What if those jobs aren’t in big factories? What if they’re more like maker movement type jobs like constructing things locally?

I think if we reframe the way we think about some of these jobs, I bet you there’s a lot of work to be done that’s a little bit more specific, a little bit more specialized, and a little bit more local, that doesn’t necessarily need a big corporation to go and do it. I see all these pieces coming together, I don’t know how they all fit, but I’d say maker movement, local building, open source, more community based thinking, I think these are all really great points of leverage and are going to provide jobs in the future.

I recall in our discussion, I was really over the top excited about this because now you’ve got these manufacturing tools that have been made into a laptop, right? It’s the laptopization of manufacturing tools. As I see these things come together, I get excited about it and I think the future of work and open source is going to be a little bit more interesting and a little bit more adventurous than we think.

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