User Profile: Lisa Selin Davis

We've got a third draft finished and comments posted...if anyone wants to weigh in, now's the time!

Please have a look! We're on our way!
http://zero.newassignment.net/filed/rough_draft_2nd_draft

A long while ago I asked folks at a design blog called DesignBoom if they wanted to participate. They sent a long letter saying no and saying why not. They also have this open letter to journalists (takers, not sharers) here: http://www.designboom.com/openletter.html

I'm pasting in the text of their email to me (which I hope is not a violation, but it's very interesting)

international design newsstand
when designboom started its publishing activity in 1999,
we had no experience in the field of communication
but a 20-year-background as designers and design-consultants
(and long collaborations with famed designers as
achille castiglioni, vico magistretti, enzo mari, renzo piano,
konstantin grcic, campana brothers etc).
we simply wanted to share our knowledge,
and we were attracted by a 'tool' (internet publishing)
that could avoid most financial, national and cultural barriers.

at that time 'only' journalists (print press) were distributing information
on the design culture, but from our point of view, they did it on a
very naive basis, talking about forms without really understanding the
cultural aim of its creators and the technical development of production.
they had a poor 'corporate' approach (interpretation of press releases)
which brought a lot of mystification into to the field of design.

we also wanted to connect with other websites and create an international
channel of more in-depth-information. designboom created the
'international design newsstand' with contributions from websites from usa,
australia, china, japan, colombia, equador, spain, belgium, germany,
sweden, UK, ... and had monthly issues of local design news.
each contributor was asked to send in articles and all articles were edited
into a feature that was then available to be published on all contributors
websites. after more than two years organizing these issues, educating
other to respect, collaboration and timely delivery, we lost the interest in such
a project.

on the concept of collaboration
in the meantime, after 7 years, designboom advanced to the web's most popular
international design publication, with much more than 1 million of readers monthly
from 156 countries. I'm not sure if what I am now going to say is for interest for your article.
maybe you prefer to write about the immense potential of crowdsourcing,
and there is for sure.
but would you include it in your concept of 'culture'?
that's why I guess a critical point of view would also fit into your article, right?

With crowdsourcing, journalism is becoming much more collaborative, more egalitarian.
crowdsourcing = a job, outsources to an undefined, generally large group of people in
the form of an open call over the Internet.

as you for sure know, journalism has been outsourced since many years to undefined
'freelance' writers for a very low salary and consequentially their quality of work
could not be always sufficient. that is why EACH DAY we receive more than 20 requests
from journalists (and pretenders) asking for help -
here are 4 examples of friday june 18th (just to give you an idea...)
...
I am contacting you from a German magazine called ART. To illustrate an
article in our next issue I am looking for a high resolution version of the
attached image. Would you be able to help me to get in the possession of
that picture? I would highly appreciate any hint.
Kind regards,
...
I am the photoeditor of a greek weekly supplement 'Tachydromos'.
We are preparing our deco issue and one of our editors is interested
in doing a story on the monobloc plastic chair by Colombo that you
published in your last newsletter. Would it be pssible to send us high
resolution images with the photos of the chairs around the world to
include in our story?
...
WWE would like to do a short telephone or email interview about
the history of the folding chair. It's for an article on props used
in the wrestling ring.
Thank you in advance for your help,
...
We would like to use this photo in a web article about influential
architects and designers. May we have your permission to go ahead?
Our deadline is tonight.
I would need to hear back from you in the next few hours.
Best regards,
(name)
Picture Editor
Forbes.com

on the concept of culture transmission
yes. a few years ago we had two people in the office only for
answering all those emails of journalists, all questions,
sending out images for free, ...
in the hope of a cultural exchange, some sort of mutual relationship,
whatever keeps us awake.
instead we rarely received a thank you or a mention for collaboration!
not to mention all our photos and texts of articles, which print press
(from 'important' daily newspapers to glossy magazines and
internet blogs) regularly use without permission and credits
or false credits.
I am also a design historian, who has worked closely with the
masters of last centuries design production.
we have a huge archive of facts, images, related info, which are just known to us.
we
very famous american museums curate design history exhibitions
with 80% info from designboom, from our own historical researches,
using entire exerts and scientific without a single credit ...

it culminated in an open letter to a few curators and many journalists
- may 2006
http://www.designboom.com/openletter.html
of course, things have not changed at all, but we have learnt to live with it.

on the concept of dignity of work
designboom is one of the few companies in our field, which pays a
regular salary to ALL our collaborators, for our researches, photos etc
and offers financial help to all internship applicants.
from a business point of view, it is just crazy to continue to implement
this free collaboration service, and never receiving any credits, feedback, contacts.
this evolution seems not to be a 'cultural' transformation, but a clever form of
manipulation, egocentrism and business oriented marketing.

Suzanne B has graciously interviewed Marion Blackwell, whose Porchdog House is part of the Biloxi Model Home project. I was hoping to find out about the folks who downloaded the specs off the OAN and built it in the virtual reality alternate universe Second Life (www.secondlife.com). More on that, and a video of the construction, here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/second_life_mee.php.

Suzanne did a great job grilling Marion about the crowdsourcing aspects of the project, which she's posting so Jeff can get to work on the piece. I was still interested in the fact that the first instance of OAN being utilized the way AFH wanted it to was virtually.

What do you guys think about exploring this in the piece? Does a virtual re-creation do what AFH does. How effective was the event (I know they raised money for real housing down in SL). Is it possible that the sharing might stay on the web and not filter into real life? Should we include this in the piece? And, er, does anybody want to gather a little more info about the Second Life event?

We're going strong here. The two interviews we need--Gapp Architects and Biloxi Model Home folks--are in progress. The other, with Cameron Sinclair, is in the can, and we've gotten the okay to use photos. Soon, all that's left is, well, the writing and editing of the piece. No big deal, right?

The wonderful Alex Padalka has joined our team, and he's made arrangements to interview folks from the Biloxi Model Home Project. That means all we need is for someone to step up and interview Gapp Architects about the Shoebox Homes project, and we're well on our way to getting the article written. We'll check in with our writer/reporter extraordinaire Jeff Muckensturm to see what else he wants us to track down for us.

Jeff Muckensturm and I had the honor of interviewing Cameron Sinclair at the AIA today. Most of my skepticism melted away and I felt ready to pony up a donation 10 minutes into the talk.

Jeff and I decided that we needed two wildly different OAN projects to profile, to ask them why they're participating and what they hope to achieve. We've settled on the Biloxi Model Home project, and we'd like something in the developing world, too. Take a look on their site and see if something interests you.

A few highlights for me:
The Open Architecture Network has the potential to shift the sort of weather pattern of design. Whereas the West often exports its aesthetics and standards--suburbia leaking out all over the developing world--OAN allows the West to pilfer from the East. Sinclair's example was that folks in New Orleans might be able to look at housing in oft-flooding areas in Bangladesh, say, and learn from them.

You only build it once, anyway, Sinclair says, so why be proprietary? They offer several licensing options, from public domain--it's uploaded and it's everyone's--to various kinds of control. You can limit usage of your designs to only developing nations, for instance.

Jeff will transcribe the interview and give us more, and he'll be writing the full report. We've decided to start with talking about open source design as a kind of activism, and so we'll report on non-archittecture projects as well, though we'll be focusing primarily on OAN. Join us!

Actually, we don't know much yet about the legal aspects of open-source design. I created an assignment (which I'm pasting below), hoping someone will comb through what's already been reported on AZ and can quickly summarize, so we can touch on it in our article.

Part of our report on crowdsourced design needs to include the legal angle. I don't think we need to do any research ourselves in the design team, but we can link to what the href="http://zero.newassignment.net/assignmentzero/creative_commons_explosion_production">legal folks have uncovered. Can someone gather a little more info about ownership of design when it's generated communally?

Also, John Eischeid posted this earlier:

The legal terms strike a good balance between the interests of the site and the interests of those who submit ideas. To wit: "The participant will keep ownership of the submitted design. The participant may display or archive the design in a portfolio or personal collection, but may not sell or reproduce the design for commercial purposes for ninety (90) days after the design has completed scoring." (See the "Legal Terms" link at the bottom of the page at http://www.threadless.com/submit .) Threadless can profit from the design for a specified period, while those who submit maintain ownership.

This type of license stands to gain popularity in crowdsourcing communities, since it protects the interests of both parties, but still allows them to work together. The owners of Threadless.com can still (presumably) turn a profit, and those who submit their designs aren't signing away all of the rights to their work. Designers who win even get paid, so they are, in effect, working for the company as freelance contractors. Any struggling artist will agree that two grand for one design -- be it a painting, silkscreen, or just text -- is a pretty good haul.

The loose plan is for me to join the amazing Jeff Muck in interviewing Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity's founder, on the 26th. All we need for this portion of the story is for folks to profile a few of the Open Architecture Network projects--to let us know what they are, how they're doing, if they're successful because of or in spite of their collaborative nature.

I contacted folks from a couple of my favorite design blogs to help recruit folks, or weigh in themselves. Here's what I wrote to Josh from Cool Hunting.

"Each of the section editors are charged with recruiting participants, both professional and amateur, to weigh in—report, suggest topics to cover, write, critique, whatever. Not unlike blog life, but with a specific goal, which is to write a series of small pieces on individual crowdsource and open-source design projects or companies, then have someone write a larger piece on open source design generally...and that will be part of the larger article on crowdsourcing in general. It’s starting to sound like those Russian Matryoshka dolls. Virtual Matryoska dolls?"

As of now, we need dolls of all sizes. Please join us.