OPEN SOURCE FURNITURE DESIGN
Site Title
"A Project for self-design".
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Enzo Mari is an indisputable icon for open source design. His release of Autoprogettazione, in 1974 was incredibly far-sighted, his designs economic and accessible, allowing anyone to engage with the design process. The designs require only a saw and hammer and use off-the-shelf pieces of lumber. His designs were well before the term open source had been coined yet his designs were specifically aimed at a now booming creative commons movement, the designs could be accessed and built by anyone except a factory or dealer.
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Intriguingly, his series still fascinate and some of the original 1974 kit series have become, somewhat ironically, incredibly valuable, with an original kit table being sold for $14,400 at auction back in 2006.
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There have been many experiments with the original designs, including building his series out of polished stainless steel another subversion of the original intentions of the series being economic and made from readily available, cheap materials.
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This link is to an intriguing build by Greg Allen, which speculates that the modern equivalent for sourcing the 1x2 and 1x8 cut lumber in Enzo Mari’s original designs is in actual fact Ikea parts which are both affordable and readily available. There is certainly an irony to using elements from a commercial giant such as Ikea to create designs from a open source italian designer. A record of his process and some photos of the final finished product are available here.
From one Ikea Hack to another, there are many online communities such as IkeaHackers and Instructables who seek to share open source designs. They can range from simply adapting Ikea furniture to another purpose to incredible new design creations. The sites are immensely large networks offering all types of creative designs and anyone can contribute.
A few other comprehensive open source design catalogues are included below. They have large collections of open source furniture with sections to upload your own iterations and experiments. Whilst it could be argued that the sites below are not entirely civic or in-line with other ‘open making’ communities, they do provide people with easily accessible designs and encourage people to share their own builds and design improvements.
The open source movement has been strongly influenced by technological advances and it can only be assumed it will continue to be so. As an experiment, type ‘open source carpentry designs’ into Google and note the recommended related searches. At the time of writing, all recommended related searches included the word ‘cnc’ or ‘machining’. When did open source become so strongly connected to these technologies and why?
One of Enzo Mari’s principles was that “Everyone should design: after all, it is the best way to avoid being designed” By designing his Autoprogettazione series to only require minimal saw cuts and a hammer, he hoped to make the series easy to build and therefore accessible to all, allowing people to become exposed to and involved with the design process. Some argue that the use of laser cutters and cnc machines in a lot of open source designs questions this basic principle of accessibility to all. Whilst organisations such as FabLab becoming more and more common arguably these are still technologies that are not widely accessible to all. There is a strong argument that designs in this file format can be easily shared, downloaded and edited, allowing for anyone to contribute to the design process even without access to the fabrication tools.
There are thousands of open source design files available for download and this form of iterative design with anyone able to download and edit the designs can lead to really innovative new designs that can be happening simultaneously across the world. It can be as complex as a large network like Opendesk or as simple as a wordpress blog by an individual open source designer such as Make your pod.