IDFuel, the Industrial Design Weblog - Post details: A Bonus Onus

A Bonus Onus

04/27/05

We designers create objects to be possessed. And it seems that we can forget what that means. A design can be possessed by an individual, as is often the case, but it can also be shared by a society. In fact, that society can collaborate to design their own particular object. This cooperative design yields efficient, functional, and beautiful products.
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One of our favorite examples of cooperative design exists in the communal ovens of Europe. Baking is a simple concept, but not everyone had access to timber [fuel] and stones [building supplies], not to mention space. So, many villages had a communal oven. Neighboring villagers would trek into town every week or so to bake their bread. Mountain villagers might bake an entire winter's worth in one shot. Just imagine sopping up your stone soup with three month old bread!

Communal ovens made the most efficient use of the materials at hand and brought together neighbors, who socialized over proofing breads in the warm queue. These common ovens also encouraged diversity for the "loaves going into the oven were slashed with distinct patterns so each family got back its own--really its own, since the grain from which it was made was grown on their farm."
The reality of the communal oven is a little less rosy (politics will do that). For in the beginning, the ovens were owned by lords of the land. Peasants paid a fee to use the oven and might even be fined for using another! But bread is important in France, so they revolted late into the 18th century in order to secure free public use of their ovens...(though there may have been some other reasons too).

In rural Japan before World War II, subsistence villagers built their own rural houses called minka. They developed community help organizations, called yui, to assist each other in laborious tasks. Rethatching a roof, which could be an interminable solo job, goes quickly with two dozen neighbors. By collaborating they efficiently produced all their necessities by hand from locally available natural materials while still retaining individual design idiosyncrasies.

But we needn't look to the past to find this kind of design. A contemporary example of collaborative design & execution exists in Alaska. The Oomingmak Collective is a group of 250 eskimo women spread across coastal Alaska who knit goods from Quiviut, the spectacular down of the Musk Ox. The women pattern their knitting on accepted traditional designs; each village has its own. They then ship their work to Anchorage where it is inspected and distributed. In this way they connect their isolated coastal towns back to civilization all the while supplementing their subsistence lifestyles.

A far cry from hand-knit stoles & tunics is the internet's own ThinkCycle: a non-profit resource dedicated to open-source design solutions for the "underserved communities and the environment". ThinkCycle provides an online forum allowing designers to discuss problems & projects, solicit suggestions, and disseminate results. This MIT-based initiative along with companion class: Design That Matters avow that selfless design is a powerful tool; particularly effective in the third world.

Cooperative design is an important and often overlooked technique to add to our quiver. In the case of communal ovens and rural houses, communal design is a way to conserve resources and unite societies. The Oomingmak Collective and ThinkCycle both function to unite designers regardless of location: pooling resources across the globe to accomplish a common goal. All four offer inspiration for efficient, social-minded design.

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A Bonus Onus

04/27/05

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