Innovating Apparel Through Creative Peer-to-Peer Production: This is Not a Guide
--
On the Open Manufacturing Google Group, an email list for people interested in open-source industrial design and commons-based peer production models for physical production, Nathan Cravens raised the question of why peer-production of physical goods has had such a hard time gaining traction as an alternative to the corporate capitalist model:
Open source projects seem to lack the ability to scale, remaining hobbyist or academic. Successful products are “curated” and pounded with marketing, yet, a community focus on making a product intuitive and beautiful, while demoing the product as a lifestyle, because it is worth having, would be ideal.
To this, I would like to locate this possibility of open-source and commons-based peer production models of physical production specifically to the outdoor fashion and lifestyles industry, a community that implicitly and explicitly preaches cultures of togetherness, cooperation, environmentalism and sustainability yet never dismisses individualism, creative expression, nonconformity, dissidence, self-defiance, customization and remixing. Tobias Redlich and Franz Bruhns define open production as: “a new form of coordination for production systems that implies a superior broker system coordinating the information and material flows between the stakeholders of production,” and which will encompass the entire value creation process for physical goods: development, manufacturing, sales, support, etc.” Jeremy Rifkin argues that open production through 3D printing “will eventually and inevitably reduce marginal costs to near zero, eliminate profit, and make property exchange in markets unnecessary for many (though not all) products.” The important points of open manufacturing can be seen in the following socioeconomic implications:
- a democratization of (the means of) production,
- a decentralization of production and local value creation (global cooperation — local manufacturing),
- the possibility to produce high quality prototypes and products in small quantities at moderate (to increasingly low) prices,
- the closing of the gap between the formal and informal sector and opportunities for bottom-up open innovation,
- and a transition from consumer to producer for manufactured goods.
In the context of socioeconomic development, Sissyve Basmer suggests that open manufacturing has been described as a path towards a more sustainable industrialization on a global scale, which promotes “social sustainability” and provides the opportunity to shift to a “collaboration-oriented industrialization driven by stakeholders from countries with different development status connected in a global value creation at eye level.”
In actuality, the outdoor fashion and lifestyle industry has led towards this approach of commons-based peer production and if not at least hinted at this approach for decades. Moreover, the innovation of products and the constant emergence of new companies has been founded in the spirit of repurposing and finding new ways to utilize already manufactured products. Local surf shapers have constantly reinvented new boards and fins. The original local skate parks and terrain parks evolved from groups of enthusiasts adding kickers, rails and graffiti. In fact, it is in these examples, I argue, that the fashion industry should understand what it does best and lead all of us into a sustainable, liberating future that never compromises the potential for innovation or the speed at which we can reach such potential.
As Cravens points out, open-source product design is still practically implemented, for the most part, within a capitalist paradigm of production for profit in corporate-owned facilities. Commenting on the difficulties of the open-source model in physical production Kevin Carson theorizes:
Open-source organization is ideal for the design of industrial products, because digital design can be done stigmergically (the same modular, granular approach to leveraging small contributions that characterizes Wikipedia) by self-selected individuals designing components to plug into a larger platform ecology. Physical production, on the other hand, is a cooperative venture that requires at least some degree of administrative coordination by a number of people engaged in a common process. Members of an open-manufacturing ecology can’t just manufacture components and sub-assemblies when they feel like it, and let them lie around until other groups of people also feel like producing the remaining necessary parts and assembling the final product.
Many companies in the outdoor fashion and lifestyles often market to sustainable and cooperative living yet centralize power under trademarked materials and technologies such as GORE-TEX® and Polartec® or close their ecosystems altogether like GoPro. But perhaps our current system of patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights might not only impede competition but also fosters potentialities of oligarchic monopoly. Ownership of intellectual property becomes the new basis for the power of institutional hierarchies and the primary buttress for corporate boundaries. Intellectual property also serves as a bulwark to planned obsolescence and high-overhead production.
As it is now, outdoor fashion and lifestyle related products such as electronics are generally designed to thwart repair. When the repairman tells you it would cost more than it’s worth to repair your GoPro or drone or watch, he’s telling the truth. But he fails to add that this state of affairs reflects a deliberate design: The machine could have been designed on a modular basis, so that the defective part might have been cheaply and easily replaced. And if the manufacturer were subject to unfettered competition, the normal market incentive would be to do so.
In the meantime, the shelves are being stocked with goods — of designs with capped potential and artificial prices though they may be — that are made to order in a timely fashion. So the question is, what’s the catalyst that will drive cooperative production of physical goods on a P2P model at the local level, so organized as to meet the real material needs of real enthusiasts in a timely and efficient manner, and to provide an alternative preferable to shopping?
Ultimately material implementation of open source design projects will come from local network nodes composed of people colocated in physical space, who are driven by their own immediate material needs. While this has generally been the case in the fashion community, a collection of open-source tools and methods like 3D printers, value-based movements (such as the maker movement), networks for manufacturing (such as Fab Lab), open-source software for modeling and computer numeric control (CNC) for fabrication, costing several months skilled blue collar wage and housed in a neighborhood shop, can produce the kinds of goods that once required a million-dollar factory. For instance, we can print a new surfboard or mountain bike part when one becomes irreparable or even shoes, boots and apparel when needed (see Outside Mag’s “3D Printed Gear Guide” for more possibilities). The increasing prevalence and imploding cost of small-scale distributed production machinery, along with the rise of “crowdsourced,” distributed means of aggregating capital from small donors, means that physical production can be governed by the phenomenon similar to what we’ve witnessed in digital design to a considerable extent. In fact, 3D printing is certainly revolutionizing R&D at outdoor companies already. As Mina Hochberg writes:
In 2010, designers at Trek decided to create a new road bike for pro-cycling’s spring classics. A key feature they envisioned was a suspension system that would allow the seat tube to flex independently of the frame, so riders wouldn’t bounce around on cobblestone streets. At their Waterloo, Wisconsin, headquarters, the development team drafted a three-dimensional model on a computer, then used an Obet500 Connex printer to print — yes, print — a working prototype. Notes were taken, tweaks were made. Over the next few months, additional prototypes were printed and tested, until a successful design was cast in carbon. A process that would have taken a year using traditional manufacturing methods instead took a few months. The result, the popular Domane 6 series bike, debuted last spring and was the first to include Trek’s innovative IsoSpeed suspension system.
The increasing prevalence and imploding cost of small-scale distributed production machinery, along with the rise of “crowdsourced,” distributed means of aggregating capital from small donors, means that physical production can be governed by the same phenomenon we’ve witness in open-source software design to a considerable extent.
Absent legal constraints, it would be profitable to offer competing generic replacements and accessories for other companies’ products. And in the face of such competition, there would be strong pressure toward modular product designs that were amenable to repair and interoperable with the modular components and accessories of other companies’ products. Absent the legal constraints of patents, products designed to thwart ease of repair through incompatibility with other companies’ products would suffer a competitive disadvantage.
Governments, corporations and other large institutions will never truly represent us or be accountable to us. We need to create horizontal, cooperative institutions of our own that serve us, instead of bleeding us dry. In other words, the outdoor fashion and lifestyles industry needs to lead our society and economy by example in how we will shift to more liberating, decentralized and abundant ways of organizing and producing physical things. This can only happen when people see them as the obvious solution to real and immediate problems.
