News: Nokia has become the first major manufacturer to give consumers access to its  3D design files so they can create their own versions of products, according to open design pioneer Ronen Kadushin.

"I'm pretty sure they are first global company to have a go at open design," said Kadushin, following last week's news that the Finnish mobile phone brand released digital files allowing users to alter and 3D print their own shells for the Lumia 820 smartphone.

Berlin-based designer Ronen Kadushin, who has been making open design templates freely available for download since 2005, says Nokia's move is timely.

"I think they did it because they are in a business situation that pushes them to try this new model – not to make money, but to focus their brand identity as up-to-date and in tune with the 3D printing and maker culture," Kadushin told Dezeen.

However, Kadushin doubts that Nokia will be able to control who downloads and uses their templates. "You have to register as a developer to download the files, but tomorrow it [will be] on The Pirate Bay for anyone to download anonymously," he said. "But in any case, they will create a community of developers that will generate designs, new ideas, solutions and creativity."

According to Wikipedia, open design is "the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information". Enthusiasts see it as an alternative to the "closed" product development model employed by major brands, that jealously guard their intellectual property.

Electronics company Teenage Engineering began offering replacement parts for its synthesisers as downloadable 3D print files last year, but Nokia is the first major manufacturer to allow users access to its designs.

Last April, Domus editor Joseph Grima talked about the birth of "the era of open design". In an interview with Dezeen, Grima said: "More and more design is resonating with the spirit of the social media era where it's much more about sharing ideas, collaborating, being completely transparent, completely open, rather than the secretive model of the past."

Grima curated an exhibition in Milan last year called The Future in The Making: Open Design Archipelago, which explored how designers were harnessing digital design and manufacturing technologies to share information and manufacture products without having to rely of large-scale industry or major brands.

Dezeen's editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs interviewed Kadushin during Vienna Design Week last year, where he warned that 3D printers could soon enable people to print ammunition for an army.

Kadushin also discussed open in a video filmed at the launch of a book on the subject in Berlin in 2011.

The book, called Open Design Now, claims that design is "undergoing a revolution" thanks to new technologies like 3D printers and accessible software.

"Anyone can be a designer today," the book adds. "Professionals and enthusiastic amateurs alike are using open design – the creation of products using publicly available blueprints and instructions – to share their work with the world. Consumers are designing cars, restaurants, even prosthetic legs."

Kadushin's previous open-source products including a contraceptive device made from a copper coin and a mallet for smashing up iPhones – see all designs by Ronen Kadushin.

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News: mobile phone maker Nokia has released open-source files that will let Lumia 820 smartphone users 3D print their own customised case.

Nokia has published mechanical drawings for the phone's back panel and shell that will allow users with access to a 3D printer to customise and print their own case.

John Kneeland, community and developing marketing manager at Nokia, explained the move in a blog post: "We are going to release 3D templates, case specs, recommended materials and best practices – everything someone versed in 3D printing needs to print their own custom Lumia 820 case," he wrote. "In doing this, Nokia has become the first major phone company to begin embracing the 3D printing community and its incredible potential."

"In the future, I envision wildly more modular and customisable phones," he continued. "Perhaps in addition to our own beautifully designed phones, we could sell some kind of phone template and entrepreneurs the world over could build a local business on building phones precisely tailored to the needs of his or her local community. You want a waterproof, glow-in-the-dark phone with a bottle-opener and a solar charger? Someone can build it for you — or you can print it yourself!

"

Nokia's move adds to a growing database of 3D templates available to ordinary users from websites like Thingiverse, run by 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot, which provides digital designs for a variety of everyday objects such as toys and jewellery.

Dezeen has been following the rise of 3D printing with reports on 3D-printed electronic devices that use a new type of plastic to conduct electricity and the introduction of 3D printing on the frontline in Afghanistan.

We also met with MakerBot CEO Bre Prettis, who told us that 3D printing would bring the factory back into the home – see all news about 3D printing.

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The machine was first devised by Howard and Lommée of Intrastructures, a design studio that makes and uses components from the OpenStructures open source construction project. Read more about the OpenStructures system in our earlier story.

Unfold developed the original design by replacing its plastic bottle with a glass bottle, which has been cut in half to hold the water filter. The ceramic water filter has extruded pockets filled with activated carbon, which acts as a natural purification device, and attaches to the OpenStructures system via a 3D-printed adapter designed by Fabio Lorefice.

We recently reported on another Unfold project presented in Istanbul, which explored how 3D printed objects can be as unique as handmade ones.

See all our stories about Unfold »
See all our stories about 3D printing »
See all our stories about open design »

Here's some more information about the project:

The OpenStructures WaterBoiler, originally designed and composed by Jesse Howard in collaboration with Thomas Lommée, was passed on to the Antwerp based design studio Unfold.

The WaterBoiler is based on the OpenStructures design principles. In Unfold's adaptation, the water recipient, a salvaged, PET bottle, was replaced by a cut-through glass bottle that holds a ceramic water filter 3D printed using one of the machines that they developed. It further contains OS compatible parts designed by Fabio Lorefice (3D printed adaptor piece).

The water filter is a prototype, part of a recently started research project on the potential benefits of ceramic 3D printing for the production of water filters in the developing world.

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News: cheap 3D printers mean manufacturing can again take place at home as it did before the industrial revolution, according to MakerBot Industries CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis (+ audio).

Above: MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis talks to Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs

"Before the industrial revolution everybody did work at home; there was a cottage industry," said Pettis (pictured above), who spoke to Dezeen today at 3D Printshow in London, where his company launched a new desktop printer costing $2,200. "Then you had to go to the factory to work. Now we're bringing the factory back to the individual."

Pettis was in London to unveil MakerBot's Replicator 2 3D printer, which he claims is the first affordable printer that does not require specialist knowledge to operate. "We've just put the factory in a microwave-sized box that you can put on your desk and have at home," said Pettis.

Brooklyn-based MakerBot was founded in 2009 with the goal of producing affordable 3D printers for the home and it has become one of the best-known brands in the rapidly expanding 3D printing and open-source design movement.

Pettis claimed that 3D printing was now advanced enough to produce consumer items on demand; last month the company opened its first store in New York, selling MakerBots and products printed in store on the devices. "This bracelet I'm holding took fifteen minutes to make," he said.

3D Printshow is the UK's first exhibition dedicated to 3D printing and runs until 21 October at The Brewery, London EC1.

3D printing and open design have been hot topics recently, with several projects at the Istanbul Design Biennial exploring possible applications for the technology and gun enthusiasts releasing blueprints to print guns.

Here's a transcript of the interview, conducted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs:

Bre Pettis: "I'm Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot Industries and we make MakerBots. We just came out with the MakerBot Replicator 2. It's a desktop 3D printer, which means you can have ideas and make them too. You can create models and 3D print them. And it's an exciting time because this technology used to be really big machines that were inaccessible in elite institutions and now you can just have one on your desktop or on your coffee table at home and you can just make the things."

Marcus Fairs: "Do you think this is the first machine that's consumer friendly? You don't need to be a geek, you don't need to be an expert programmer to buy and use this machine – have we got to that stage yet?"

Bre Pettis: "Yes, the thing that's most exciting for the average user is that we just launched a whole software suite called MakerWare, and it's makes it so much easier. You literally just drag and drop, you position it how you want it and you press make, and it just does it for you. So it's gone from a command-line tool, which is kind of hard to use, to a super easy, really nice software package that makes it easy for everyone to make the things they want."

Marcus Fairs: "People are getting very excited about 3D printing and other types of open-source manufacturing. Is that excitement a bit premature or is there really going to be a revolution in the way that objects are designed and manufactured?"

Bre Pettis: "Well, it's interesting. Before the industrial revolution everybody did work at home, there was a cottage industry. And then when the Jacquard loom and these kinds of things came along, you had to go to the factory to work. But we've just put the factory in a microwave-sized box that you can put on your desk and have at home. So it's an interesting kind of cycle of life of manufacturing now that we're bringing the factory back to the individual."

Marcus Fairs: "And how much do you think this will change the existing structure where you have a designer who designs a product and a factory or brand who manufactures it – how will that existing top-down model be changed by this kind of technology?"

Bre Pettis: "So industrial designers, engineers and architects are actually the ones [whose] whole workflow has changed by this. They used to have to have an idea, send it off to a modelling house, have it take a couple of weeks or a month and then iterate on a monthly cycle. With a MakerBot you iterate on an hourly cycle, in some cases minutes – this bracelet I'm holding took fifteen minutes to make and I'm just cranking them out all day here.

"So for the people who are making products, this just changes their life. It makes everything so much faster, so much easier, so much more accessible. If you have one of these on your desk you can actually try making the things that you're working on, and if you don't like them you can throw them away, you don't have to sign up for a service or have to stress out about how much it costs; it's inexpensive. You can fail as many times as you need to to be successful."

Marcus Fairs: "But you're talking about prototypes. I mean, how far away are we from finished products being printed on demand for consumers?"

Bre Pettis: "So in New York City we just opened a retail store, and we do two things there – we sell MakerBots, and we sell things made on a MakerBot, and we literally have a bank of MakerBots that just make things 24 hours a day for the store."

Marcus Fairs: "And what are the best-selling products that you make?"

Bre Pettis: "Right now the best-selling products are jewellery and we have this little contraption that's like a heart that's made out of gears, and people really like that too, it's made by a designer named Emmett."

Marcus Fairs: "So it's still sort of small products, sort of novelty value products – what about the huge industrial applications, the mass applications, the larger products?"

Bre Pettis: "The true MakerBot operator has no limitations. This machine we just launched has a massive 410 cubic inch build volume, which means you can actually make really big things, you can make a pair of shoes if you want to. The cool thing is that if you want to make something bigger, you just make it in component parts, and then you either make snaps, so it snaps together, or you glue it together and you can make things as big as you want, if you make it in components."

Marcus Fairs: "So this has just come out and how much does it retail for?"

Bre Pettis: "This retails for $2,200, and it's really a great affordable machine that's also just rock solid. We're really proud of it."

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Created by Walter Nicolino and Carlo Ratti of Carlo Ratti Associati, the plotter updates the text as the Wikipedia page changes.

The project began last year when Joseph Grima, editor of Domus magazine and curator of the Adhocracy show, asked Ratti to write a manifesto for open-source architecture.

"I said yeah sure, but let’s do it in an open-source way," Ratti told Dezeen. "So we set up a page on Wikipedia."

Ratti, who is director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, invited contributors including Nicholas Negroponte, John Habraken, Paola Antonelli and Hans Ulrich Obrist to contribute to the page to create an evolving document that was published in Domus in June 2011.

"It’s funny because the editors of Wikipedia kept erasing it until it was published in Domus, and then it became kind of 'legal'," says Ratti. "So now it is a page on Wikipedia and people keep on adding to it, changing it and so on. It keeps on evolving."

In Istanbul the suspended plotter writes the manifesto on a large whiteboard mounted on the wall on the staircase at the Adhocracy exhibition, crossing out and overwriting passages as they are edited on Wikipedia and starting afresh as soon as the text is completed.

The plotter is based on similar principles to Hektor, a wall-mounted plotter that paints with a spray can. "There was a prototype of a similar plotter called Hektor – there’s a couple of them online  that were doing things on a piece of paper," says Ratti. "But here the idea was to do it on an architectural scale, on a big wall."

See our interview with Joseph Grima about the Adhocracy exhibition and read more about open design on Dezeen.

Here's some text from Carlo Ratti Associati:

Open Source Architecture Manifesto

2012 / Istanbul TURKEY

When Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of opensource architecture he responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented in an article published in Domus in June 2011. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas — a 21st century “manifesto” of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.

A year after the article’s publication, in the summer of 2012, the idea of recapturing the text in its current state of mutation was born. However, it was not to be envisaged as a new publication, but rather a piece of the exhibition, Adhocracy, curated by Joseph Grima for the first Istanbul Design Biennal. The studio carlorattiassociati envisioned a canvas on which a free flowing pen writes, erases and constantly rewrites the different versions of the Wikipedia page, indicating corrections, deletions and development of the manifesto in its continuous state of change.

A vertical plotter on a large whiteboard welcomes visitors to the exhibition; its contents are generated in real-time from a script that constantly compares the various versions of the Wikipedia page. Starting each time from one of the numerous updates written online, the pen retraces its steps to incorporate all the users’ contributions. Once it reaches the end, it begins once again, relentlessly in pursuit of the latest version of our open source manifesto, OsArc.

For more information, and to read the article published in Domus (June 2011) visit: senseable.mit.edu/osarc

For details of the exhibition Adhocracy, part of the Istanbul Design Biennal running until December 2012 visit: istanbuldesignbiennial.iksv.org/adhocracy

Team: Carlo Ratti, Walter Nicolino, Pietro Leoni (project leader), Antonio Atripaldi, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Enrico Gueli, Franco Magni

Special thanks to Officine Arduino / FabLab Torino

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by Carlo Ratti Associati appeared first on Dezeen.