Bruno Giussani, journalist and the man who kept us posted on the happenings at the European Futurists Conference in Lucerne via his blog, picked up on the recent wave of endeavours into applying the open source model to the design of physical products, more specifically cars (read his fascinating article here). OSCar is the brainchild of Markus Merz who, together with a group of friends and worldwide volunteers decided to reinvent car design and production according to the principles of the open source community. Their common goal is “Building a car without an engineering center, without a boss, without money, and without borders. But with the help of the collective creativity of the Internet community…”.

The materialization of the open source, p2p and (creative) commons models may prove to be among the most disruptive of trends shaping our world today and tomorrow (check out our interview with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation).

Efforts and experiments in the areas of open hardware, open design etc. are showing a serious potential to shift powers and drivers, or rather values, of business, innovation, welfare, well-being etc. In ever-increasing numbers, people are posting detailed guidelines complete with videotutorials on how to create ‘low(er)-cost’ alternatives to marketplace products such as home HD projectors, graphic tablets, camera stabilizers, beer etc. Along with magazines such as MAKE this is taking the DIY phenomenon to a whole other level. Knowledge, abundance and access open up many models we are currently taking for granted.

Via Businessweek

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 12:35 and is filed under design, projects, technology, trends. 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.