Lately so much has been going on in Berlin that has to do with the whole field of open design, tinkering, DIY – and last week was another highlight. I had the chance to drop in at the Open Design Workshop at Betahaus. (Sadly I could only pop in for a few minutes, but that was enough to see – among many other things – Jay Cousins cooking up bioplastics from some starch and Martin Bauer doing some serious laser cutting. Awesome stuff, all of it!) It was the latest, but certainly not the last congregation of the whole cluster of tinkerers and makers and builders in Berlin. It’s a trend that has been going on for awhile, and all over the world, but it seems that Berlin is a very fertile ground for this kind of maker culture. (We also noticed that by the massive positive feedback as we were putting together the atoms&bits Festival last year.)
The Open Design workshop was a part of Social Media Week and organized and attended by a very diverse and cool group of people, all of which are extremely fine folks (and some of which are close friends of mine, so I’m totally biased here).
These two videos emerged from the workshop:
Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.
I can’t find a good link except a Facebook page, so here’s the list of organizers taken off the Facebook page:
- Michelle Thorne (http://thornet.wordpress.com), free culture advocate, works for Creative Commons, where she coordinates international CC activities.
- Ronen Kadushin (http://www.ronen-kadushin.com) is a designer and educator pioneering “Open Design” as a concept and also as a company.
- Luis Berríos-Negrón (http://www.luisberriosnegron.org) is an artist/architect and will contribute thoughts on his ongoing project ‘The anxious prop’
- Jay Cousins, Mendel Heit, Chris Doering (http://jaycousins.wordpress.com) are part of the palomar5 network, material specialists and upcycling pros.
- Martin Bauer (http://lasernlasern.de) is an expert at the lasercutting machine. He has used it to produce nearly everything imagineabe.
- Philip Steffan (http://bausteln.de) is the founder of Bausteln, a network and platform for tinkers to meet, exchange ideas, and build things.
- Nadine Freischlad is community manager at jovoto and involved in the open_sailing network (http://twitter.com/texastee)
- Gabriel Shalom is a filmmaker and founder of KS12 studio, currently working on the collaborative (film)project (http://www.postcardsfromberlin.com)
- Erik Nap and Arne Hendriks (http://waag.org) are representatives of Waag Society who’s hosting Amsterdam’s Fablab. Bas van Abel is representing Creative Commons Nederland, where he coordinates the open design program.
This is great stuff indeed. Props to the organizers, and thanks for the videos!
