In the first part of our interview with Open Design City co-founder Jay Cousins we spoke about his own background and his relationship to Open Design.

In the second part we wanted to know about Open Design City itself, and so, somewhat logically, started by asking about the background to the project.

Jay Cousins: The whole space started really by accident. During Social Media Week last February we were asked to participate with an Open Design event, which took place in the betahaus cafe. We had a Makerbot in one corner, a laser cutter in another plus we were making some bio-plastic, which is a material you can cook in your own home, because we had started to explore Open Design processes from a material perspective and we were interested in the whole question of open materials.

Subsequently DMY Berlin and Etsy approached us. Etsy were looking to better connect the Berlin maker scene and DMY were looking to establish a Maker Fair as part of their Berlin festival. And so we all met up and decided we wanted to take things further and my view was that we needed a space and money to make things happen.
And so DMY said we’ll give you 200 square metres and Etsy gave us Euro 3,000 towards materials.
And then everything escalated until we had 30 groups wanting to do something within the space which became the MakerLab at DMY Berlin 2010.
And somehow betahaus became aware of what was happening and said “We want to set up a FabLab in our space”
And three weeks later we moved in.

minimumblog: And how many active users do you have?

Jay Cousins: Its hard to pinpoint exactly as it is very fluid, but we have between 10 and 20 regular active members and then we have a network of around 500 to 800 who come in and use the space for events.
The space is more about meeting in a physical space and exchanging ideas and we’ve grown five or six communities over the past year just through supporting others and helping them grow their own communities.
And so we’re more a community of communities! You can’t say Open Design City is any one thing. It’s like a city. If you try and define Berlin do you define it by its history, or its architecture or its populace? Its not one thing, its many things.

minimumblog: You mentioned that you were researching bio-plastics here. Is that something you are still doing?

Jay Cousins: Over the last year we have principally focused on building the city, but the materials research is something we’d very much like to come back to.
What we have done however is organised a series of workshops around this material and every time we hold a workshop we expand the knowledge pool. For example we had real problems making solid objects because of the shrinkage during drying. And during the workshop we found a solution that reduced the shrinkage through adding wood chips. And so through the workshops we advance our own learning in an open manner.

minimumblog: Open Design is principally about CNC cutters, 3D printers…

Jay: …I’d disagree with that…

minimumblog: …in…?

Jay: …. because yes they are probably the most used tools, but that’s a process issue, that’s an Open Design process, but for me Open Design is actually the permission. Its the ability to look at something and know that I have the permission to copy it, to change it, to hack it and to make it my own. That for me is the key factor. Everything else is what makes it easier to do.
CNC and digital production techniques make it easier to download the files and access them but there are also other means of making something open.
For example we produced some starch plastic lampshades and we shared the recipe as to how you can produce it yourself. Its made from ingredients you can buy in the supermarket. You just need some old fabric, an old bin and you can copy the process and copy the design. And of course you can add your own ingredients, you can mix it, you can twist it to suit your needs.

minimumblog: That’s us told! Coming away from Open Design City per se. As someone who is heavily involved in the Berlin design scene. How healthy is “design” in Berlin at the moment?

Jay Cousins: What we have here in Berlin is an incredibly passionate and social community that’s really experimenting and pushing at the boundaries with a real pioneering spirit. I think the biggest challenge is simply one of money. And this is one area I’m currently interested in, namely how the Berlin community can support itself more effectively so that it doesn’t have to compromise itself continuously in order to pay the bills. Because what inevitably happens is there is a period where you are able to experiment but then ultimately this freedom is curtailed because you have to put food on the table. And the creative scene in Berlin is looking at ways to achieve such. We’ve not broken through yet, but I think it will happen.
And I think its very exciting to see projects which are challenging the existing models, such as betahaus or Prinzessinnengarten projects which are pushing at the margins and doing something different and doing something very interesting.
And so I think that to a degree Berlin is better off than the rest of the world in this respect because we constantly put ourselves in insecure situations. We’re financially probably not better or worse of than the rest of the world but were not as reliant on a business or an industry to keep us afloat.

More information on Open Design City Berlin can be found at: opendesigncity.de

Tags: betahaus, Jay Cousins, open design, Open Design City

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 08:39 and is filed under Design Berlin, Open Design City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.