Hypercraft Economy: bottoms-up for innovation! - Main contents
(I am very pleased to introduce the first of this month’s crowd-sourced blog posts from my team of young advisers- I will try to put up two a week. NK)
Director Creative Learning Lab, Waag Society (Institute for Art, Science and Technology)
Under CC license; Marco Baiwir 2009
We find ourselves in interesting times; we are facing huge socio-economic challenges whilst at the same time we need to look ahead and design a society that meets our future needs. For this we need a renewed understanding of craftsmanship in relation to the design and production principles of the 21st century. Those of us who welcome change, who are able to adapt to changing environments and create new systems of trust, will lead us into a promising future.
We need people who think in a cross-disciplinary manner, act like a network, and embrace emerging technologies and creative forms of digital creation and expression. In order to have this next generation workforce available in the future, we need to invest in education and arrange a system geared towards the development of digital skills. This demands a revaluation of craftsmanship in the 21st century. We should therefore reposition digital crafts in education and strengthen the link between education and creative industries.
The notion of craftsmanship in the 21st century refers to digital crafts such as app developers, web engineers, graphic designers, game developers or interaction designers. These crafts are also known as hypercrafts. Hypercrafts utilize digital communication platforms to empower product development, digital fabrication and distributed production. Hypercrafts lean on new ownership models and alternative forms of value creation.
The hypercraft economy envisions a power shift from the industrialized production hubs and multinationals back to the networked craftsmen. Hypercrafts have low entry costs, quality control takes place in the form of peer review by the public, and revenues are divided between craft and creativity. Hypercrafted products can be produced on a local level, which drastically reduce transportation costs.
An example of hypercrafts in practice is found in the Fablab, a worldwide hub of open design spaces and facilities where you can make (almost) anything. Fablabs connect digital craftsmanship with open source machines for digital fabrication. The underlying open design principles make it possible to easily share and reuse designs and blueprints over the Internet. This turns Fablabs into a networked structure for global collaborative design and production, sharing of knowledge, and economic growth.
Other examples of hypercraft ecosystems are the open source maker community instructables.com, social product development platforms such as Quirky.com or the Open Ecologies Global Village Construction Set: a modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform that enables fabrication of fifty different industrial machines to be used for small, independent, land-based economies. These pioneers of the future are experimenting with new economic principles and they share a window to a promising future.
The Digital Agenda of Europe echoes the importance of research and innovation to overcome our socio-economic challenges. I agree upon the importance of these socio-economical drivers, however I belief we need to further invest in 21st century learning. Investment in education fosters development of new generations of change makers whom will shape a sustainable, networked European economy in which we all contribute and benefit from. This is an open call to European policy makers to empower a new generation to go further and faster than any generation ever has.
Keimpe de Heer
Director Creative Learning Lab, Waag Society