Wouldn’t it be great if all us designers got together in an organised fashion in a way the software programmers have and design products in an open source fashion to help social or environment problems ? Or is it that designers inherently need to own their creativity in some way to make a living ?
Just a thought
start it up.
I know vb6 lol
vb6 ?
Software can e distributed for free over the net, no need to pay a manufacturer, materials, etc…
Unless you have an idea on how you can download your great new design online, I think your outta luck.
download great idea online ?..all I’m talking about is collaboration between designers who feel they con contribute a small portion of their time to something much bigger.
I don’t think it’s anything considerably difficult to do.
I think it would mean getting involved in signing a not-for-profit document or something so that people don’t run off with the best ideas to make money out of them.
maybe I’m just too idealistic
There are alot of people out there with great ideas who don’t know how to push it a bit more to make it viable…including me
“Unless you have an idea on how you can download your great new design online, I think your outta luck.”
Just wait til 3d printers hit the home market. Im thinkin a "napster"esque type of website where you pay $10/month to download free products…Otherwise, I think you’re gonna have a tough time, but if someone starts it up, I’ll jump on the wagon!
You could always have a central not-for-profit organization (run by one, two, or three brave designers) and then create design criteria supplied by retailers, other not for profit org., educational instutions, etc., post it on the internet for any designers to tackle and then when/if the product is released, give the designers responsible, full credit through the same website… just a thought 
vb6 = visual basic 6 (i assume)
and this is coming. i’m actually peripherally involved in something along these lines. not the first time this idea has been floated. ID will be no different than music before long. d/l an .stl for a nominal fee.
go back to older posts where we had some discussion of these kinds of things (“URGENT: …” thread comes to mind). i’ve mentioned the split in ID. this is part of it.
I thought about this a lot last summer. I would be willing to be one of the few brave designers to tackle the start up. As i see it, the main problem lies in intelectual property. Right now, that is really tough territory.
First,
In order for a firm or client to sign off on this concept, you would have to guarantee some sort of protection for their ideas. The idea is what will make money, actual designs, prototypes, manufacturing coordination, etc…, are all subordinate to the intellectual property.
Second,
It is my philosophy that the more people you have working on a design, the better that design will be. Unfortunately, the more more people you have, the harder it is to agrigate everyone’s opinion.
In the end, those are pretty big obstacles. How can you reassure a client that his idea will not be leaked to competitors? How can you organized and select the “best” concepts without alienating the designers? I think it is possible, and I’m interested to see what people think.
Open source is by definition free from intellectual property ownership
Would it be possible to make collective decsions by majority vote ?
Or even let the group framgment dependng on which way their preference would swing in the event of a split decision on something…thus a product would be developed simultaneously with another.
I wouldn’t know what to start with organising something like this, how do they do it with Open Source software, is there one person who draws everything together ?
so the design is open source and free but the people who sell it or make get what,… nothing? this will not work.
why design for free, but allow a store to sell it?
this works with software, it wont work for this.
nice idea, but it wont happen
there’s open source design projects out there now so it’s both a nice idea and happening already. contributors do not get monetary reward. people can make money off these projects or not. just like Linux.
Yeah, isn’t there a group of designers out there working on the “ideal NYC taxicab?”
It might be a good first step to start identifying those things which can benefit from such an open-source initiative. Defining International Standards come to mind…
how about just finding a solution to humanitarian problem…
that way everyone would be happy to contribute
and a NGO or something could pick up production if they wanted
if the intellectual property is in the public domain no one company could go into production and make serious money from it…that way just the people in need of it could produce for themselves…they get years of talented design for nothing.
beautiful