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Project Application
Contents Introduction
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Common Goals
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Common Inspiration
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Common Systems
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Common Precedents
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Common Criticism
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Bibliography
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“In the last few years, do-it-yourselfers have gained access to a myriad of new tools and
services to help them design, prototype, fund, manufacture and sell the things they make. Most of these tools are free or very inexpensive and they hint at a future in which individuals and small collectives will offer viable
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alternatives to mass-produced goods.
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Wikihouse
RepRap
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Introduction A growing resource for architects, designers, programmers and experts in many other fields, is the culture of open source design and information sharing. Up until recently, good design has tended to be a luxury, but it shouldn’t be. Organizations like Paper Houses and Opendesk who publish complete building and furniture design plans free for download believe that the world should have access to design, to experience it in its own way and to apply it to a range of global design issues (Paperhouses 2016). Therefore, the aim of this manifesto is to communicate how encouragement and investment into collaborative systems is not only beneficial, but necessary. The growing access to open source projects can enlarge artistic freedom, work towards solving environmental issues, and increase the productivity of production networks to result in much more contextual and user guided products. Open source information is a free networking system that increases the general knowledge of its users by sharing ideas across disciplines, facilitating design adaptability, and with more viewers, design faults in projects can be found quicker.
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Figure 1. Wikihouse Open Source Hous-
Common Goals Throughout the history of open source collaboration, dating back through the 1980s and 90s, there appears to be two main motivations for using open source systems: •
Public interest can encourage designs that lack funding, commercial interest or specialized expertise for products that may not produce enough profit incentive for a company. Therefore, it’s up to the users to fill the gap in the market.
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Also, some large-scale products require resources larger than those attainable by individuals or individual companies. Therefore, additional collaboration is necessary for the completion of a product, which can be facilitated by an online shared network system.
Now, a third motivation is evolving, regarding the necessary collaboration required to solve impending global issues like climate change and associated effects like displacement and sustainable housing. These problems require design, and their complexity warrants the collaboration of multidisciplinary experts united by common goals. Solutions can then be made public to enable users to copy and modify designs in order to produce contextually relevant, user-guided outcomes. Producing fewer products that are more adaptable can also lead to a reduction in the consumption of non-renewable resources. For example, applying a template for sustainable housing designed for a temperate climate wouldn’t be efficient if it was applied to a tropical climate.
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Figure 2. Reconnecting with Technology
Collaborative systems can also facilitate similar social and economic benefits. Economically, it can promote more productive processes, where design efforts are focused solely on innovation and improvement on an established solid base of shared design resource. Similarly, it can concentrate intellectual and material resources on issues that are supported by users to reduce production time and waste through the elimination of unnecessary products and planned obsolescence. As the globe becomes increasingly connected through the advancement of technology, the opportunity for collaboration increases. Forte and Lampe (2013) argue that these new tools enable socio-technical systems for organization and communication that would give unforeseen opportunities for users to design and create things together. They identify that the most efficient systems occur through online environments that support and mediate collaborative processes, present low barriers to contributing while ‘supporting the emergence of persistent but malleable social structures’ (Forte and Lampe 2013). Hollan and Stornetta (1992) recognize open source information to facilitation new modes of interaction as “Beyond Being There”. These additional social benefits include community reconnection through a media associated with isolation, improving international and local communication, innovation, design precedent and design potential. New online social structures facilitate communal data storage, communication records and access points as well as open connections with other projects.
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Figure 4. Melbourne Maker Locations
Figure 3. Opendesk Designer Connections
Similarly, Opendesk facilitates an ‘Open Making’ global platform where they can connect site users with designers and makers around the world. Designers get their products distributed globally, makers get paid work, while users get great furniture by either downloading free designs and making it themselves or taking it to a local maker (Opendesk 2016). This platform structure activates different community hubs by publishing locations of local workshops, local makers, and a connected network of people sharing their DIWO (Do it with others) and DIY projects.
“It’s easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits.” -John Maynard Keynes
Open digital communities like Opendesk can transact information in increasingly easy and sustainable ways (Opendesk 2016). Download design ‘recipes’ allows user and context adaptability and therefore, more efficient products. Rather than shipping a large physical product, a design team can send files internationally to manufacturers identified through the provided global maker maps to fabricate a product locally to its user, resulting in a stimulation of local economies while eliminating all freight and transportation costs and resources.
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This method of fabrication can be incredibly fast where CAD files can be drawn, sent, milled and constructed almost immediately at very little costs comparative to traditional factories. Cameron Sinclair argues that ‘all problems and all solutions are local’, where it’s only the lack of social and community infrastructure that prevents collaboration (Sinclair 2006). However, the growing accessibility and affordability of modern digital fabrication techniques like 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC milling can help to reconnect members of dislocated communities to shared online networks. Shared projects mean shared precedent and invention, which ‘requires access to existing bodies of human knowledge’ (Rimini 2007). As originality, can be an important feature of open collaboration, reusing and remixing open information provides an important vehicle for people to build upon one another’s ideas (Tuite & Smith 2012).
Figure 5. The Four Brothers Figure 6. No Waste Design Template
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Common Inspiration Fabrication is always a large part of any architecture student’s life, but my interest in hands on design methods led to the collaborative construction of a small-scale CNC machine. In an industry of constructing full scale spaces, prototype and fabrication processes need to become much more collaborative and multi-disciplinary, where the design of a real building can start from something real and interactive (Banzi 2012). As well as providing an insight into open source information, this manifesto documents an ongoing collaboration with Luke Dempsey, a Master of Mechatronics student at the University of Melbourne. With a shared interest in real scale product design and manufacture, we researched and ordered a complete CNC kit which was assembled and gradually optimized with the aid of online tutorials.
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We also were after a warmer aesthetics which contrasted the plastic or metalic precedents we found. Therefore, we started experimenting with MDF board as well as PCB milling. A lot of our process was modeled off ‘Doug’s Word Clocks’ (Figure. 9) and project outlines listed on Instructables which were the most thorough instructions online at the time. 20
Figure 7. Etsy Word Clock Figure 8. LED bleed problem
The production of the word clock began with researching existing projects and available instructions. There are a few designers selling word clocks on Etsy (Figure. 7) at around $180, but we though that if we could optimize the production process, we could improve the design and produce a better product for cheaper. For example, we found some designs resulted in light bleeding between letters which we wanted to avoid (Figure. 8).
Figure 9. ‘Doug’s Word Clock’s
Research:
Once completed, we began searching for a small-scale project to help calibrate and learn how to use the CNC. We thought of making a word clock, which we produced based on emulating, modifying and improving existing open source information based on our own expertise in design and electronics. Because a lot of existing information only covers dislocated parts of the process, we aim to record and republish a complete set of production process instructions, contributing information to the open source culture and communicating its value as part of the design process. This process also exhibits the benefits of multi-disciplinary collaboration, engagement between design and technology as well as the resultant creative empowerment of DIWO ‘self-building’ to personalize production processes (Furtherfield 2016).
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Process: 1 Building the Waffle Layer We designed the layout of the 11x11 letter clock face in Solid Works to get a good idea of the size of the face, the size of the font and the necessary arrangement of letters to form the right words in the right order. Then we started prototyping a 12mm framing waffle layer that would prevent the light from each individual LED from leaking into the next letter. We built the layer in Solid Works and transferred it into Mesh Cam, a CNC path mapping software. The dividing layer was the first cut we tested as it seemed more straight forward than the face design. We had a few initial problems in the first trial runs due to drill speeds, drill paths and board thicknesses. But these were gradually ironed out to produce the final waffle board prototype (p24). 22
Common Systems Open source information can often link together different disciplines, engaging designers, creating communities and empowering people at smaller, more independent scales than ever before. For example, GitHub, which houses open source code from Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook recognizes that more heads are always better than one where designers, programmers, engineers, and even health professionals, economists and biologists can work together to solve common problems. GitHub’s project platform facilitates the involvement of users on different levels; the owner of the project, maintainers driving project direction and general community members who are actively connect with the project. Owners often include a shared document entailing the specifics of how a maintainer should contribute features, including code syntax’ (GitHub 2016).
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2 Building the Clock Face After experimenting with the letter composition, we began designing clock face prototypes which involved solving problems to do with material furring and bit speeds. After modifying drill bit sizes and speeds to cope with the letter detail, a cleaner prototype was produced using 6mm MDF which lined up with the waffle board layer. The grid displays an updated time every five minutes, requiring the following interval words: FIVE TEN QUARTER TWENTY HALF These can either preface ‘PAST’ or ‘TO’ to facilitate each required interval. This system is a combination between researched precedents which display ‘FORTY’ and ‘FIFTY’, increasing the clock size or those which compromised time accuracy by only displaying intervals of fifteen or thirty minutes. 24
Project leaders or Owners have been identified as a critical factor in the success of open source projects (Weber 2004). However, this leadership can be shared amongst many or even all participants to result in increasingly decentralized systems. For example: • Crowdsourcing (Distributed Repositories) An open system where tasks are pre-defined and users can interact with emerging social structures that are defined and maintained by participants. Small or large contributions can be made to a single or multiple projects that are (Forte and Lampe 2013). • Wisdom of the Crowd (Shared Repositories) Workers contribute individually to a set goal without the possibility of influencing a shared community or other individuals (Surowiecki 2004). The structure of open collaboration systems often depends on the goal, and how best the people involved can work together to produce that goal. For example, sites like Reddit create persistent user identities for social structures to emerge. However, in cases like GitHub, the contributions can be monitored and filtered by a project owner, rather than being modified by other users.
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3 Building the Arduino Controller While we were waiting for CNC cuts, we started programming the Arduino board in order to dim the LEDs at night. A photo-receptor senses local light levels, which we tested using the shadow of a finger. We also set limits on the brightness between 10pm and 7am. Learning how to program the Arduino board was easier than anticipated due to the wide range of open source instructions available in addition to Luke’s expertise.
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Common Precedents Open source projects exist at all scales and mediums from collaborative online based artistic production to sharing small scale building documentation. Furtherfield, a nonfor profit organization, campaigned the idea of ‘DIWO’ to make and distribute artwork across networks, ‘using the internet as an experimental artistic medium to foment grass-roots creativity’ (Furtherfield 2016). This resulted in an exhibition of ‘DIWO Email Art’ (Figure. 12&13) in 2007 which demonstrated the progressive accumulation of graphics in a single image to create extremely innovative artworks, emulating the process diagrammed by GitHub (Figure. 10). The Ana White ‘Tiny House’ (Figure. 14) is at the other end of the scale, with an incredible set of open source resources including tool lists, skill level guides, and step by step instructional videos in addition to documented construction plans. With such a comprehensive set of instructions, building your own home has never seemed easier. White also advises viewers to consider adapting their designs to their own climate and needs and repost their ideas to contribute to the open source culture.
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Figure 10. Open Source Production
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Figure 11. Design Transitions through Collaboration
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Figure 12. DIWO Email Art
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Figure 13. DIWO Email Art in Progress
Figure 14. Ana White Tiny House
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3 ... Part of programming the LED dimming invloved monitoring the local light levels and the speed which the 5volt LED’s would flash to give the perception of brighter and dimmer settings. The highs and lows of the graphs show when a finger was placed over or near the photo resistor. Lowering the local light levels was a simulation of day and night light levels.
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Massimo Banzi’s commentary on Arduino describes open-source imagination as ‘turbo charged DIY’(2012). Arduino’s premise isn’t about over-complicating electronics to discourage users from different disciplines, but sharing it so ‘even kids can use it’. Arduino has had a myriad of applications like measuring data from the Large Hadron Collider to projects like BotaniCalls. This project connects a plant to its own twitter account where it sends personal tweets based on the detected moisture and humidity levels in soils (Figure. 16). BotaniCalls is a totally open source project.
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Figure 16. BotaniCalls Project
4 Designing PCB Panels The next part of the process was designing PCB panel layouts using Eagle, connecting the LEDs of the letters that would light up together to form a word. Some of the words on the nine different panels overlapped, so those solder points were connected together across the boards. 38
Common Criticism Despite the potential success of collaborative systems, there are several key factors that need to be designed and monitored to insure successful outcomes and productive social structures. Open collaboration systems need to be able to attract and socialize with enough participants, especially those who specialize in critical types of activities or fields (Preece & Shneiderman 2009). Similarly, there is the issue of shared information being copied and pasted without being contextualized or improved which dismisses the process of design and results in irrelevant products. Likewise, if the open collaborative systems don’t account for differing motivations and incentives between contributors and project owners, project goals can be interrupted. Different contributors often participate at different levels of activity depending on their motivation, whether professional or personal. Therefore, the socialization and education of new users is important for long-term sustainability of a projects intent, especially in distributed repositories systems (Forte and Lampe 2013).
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5 PCB Milling After all the PCB’s were milled and the holes for the components were drilled, LED’s and resistors were soldered in place. Depending on the row and the surrounding letters, each LED is connected to each other or straight to ground. After testing local connectivity, the components were trimmed. We soldered the LED’s and resistors by first blue tacking all the components in to be more efficient with PCB assembly.
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Some open source issues regarding designer profits are starting to be addressed through the manufacture of premade design kits, assembly fees, and additional fees for products developed beyond the base designs (Paperhouse 2016). It’s important that these issues are solved because open source collaborative systems must be encouraged to facilitate design evolution in order to solve modern issues that require global experts working on common goals. Carlo Ratti claims that collaboration has become necessary to achieve quality and credibility due to the acceleration of complexity (2015). He suggests the role of the architect should be modified to a position more like a gardener who tends to the users, orienting design frameworks and outcomes around user involvement to facilitate agency in designed environments. Perhaps this role is more like the project owner seen in the GitHub community.
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6 Connecting the PCB’s to Arduino Code Next, the Arduino board was connected to a bread board to prototype the clock code and component circuit in the terminal strip. At this point, we programmed the Arduino to turn on different LED sets at 5 volts in order to test if the connections were all working. It was really exciting to see the increasing pace of progress after the bones of the project were milled. Now that all the LED sets work with the Arduino code, the ground wires are connected. the lights need to be programmed with a clock timer controller to light up each word at correct times.
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The growing application and availability of adaptable open source information, from small scale DIWO and selfbuilding projects to large built environment projects, can help to encourage global participates in all fields to engage with design. Incorporating ‘dynamic and participatory fabrication processes’ in lieu of static form finding solutions will prevent the demarcation of users and their products (Ratti 2015). People need to be more in touch with the design of the products they use to optimize functionality, performance and resources. Therefore, the role of the architect could become a conduit between open design networks, collecting and encouraging information sharing around the globe to spark innovation, invention and solutions to increasingly prevalent problems regarding the quality of human life and our place in the digital age.
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7 Designing Controller Component Layout The schematic diagram shows the connection of all the LED terminal groups, the circular clock component, power supply, photo resistors and the micro controller. The design was drawn up using Eagle, and then the components were attached to the controller. This system determines when each LED terminal receives power and at what level depending on the time of day in addition to local brightness levels. This system also requires a power supply to run the clock timer which calculates time and word intervals based on the time displacement that occurs after power is connected. 44
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8 Re-cutting the Clock Face While setting up the Arduino controller, we realized that the word ‘half ’ was omitted from the clock face letter layout which prevented the display of each ‘half past’ time. Therefore, another face was milled and sanded to produce the final cut.
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9 Assembly Once all the wiring and Arduino programming was complete, the word clock layers can be assembled to produce the final project. We were experimenting with transparent materials and thin layers of paper or Perspex to further dim the LEDs and found that water color paper and even paper towel had a nice textural effect. An MDF back was milled to hold the Arduino board and the controller, resulting in a design around 30mm thick. Conclusion: In future designs, we would like to use a better grade timber for the clock face. Additionally, different kinds of varnish could be applied to stain the timber in different ways.
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Material List: 6mm MDF 12mm MDF Paper Towel 87 white LEDs 87 Resistors 3 Shift Registors 9 PCB Modules Clock Module Arduino Mega Breadboard Electrical Wires Alligator Clips Sand Paper Solder Solder Wick Pliers CNC Soldering Iron Solder Sucker Oscilloscope Arduino Program Eagle Solidworks
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Bibliography
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Cameron Sinclair: My Wish: A call for Open-source Architecture 2006, video recording, TED Talks video
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Commons 2016, Online Documentary, Open Desk, London 5:12, accessed September 15
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Da Rimini, F, 2007 A Handbook for Coding Cultures, Campbeltown Arts Centre, Sydney.
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Forte, A and Lampe, C 2013, ‘Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons from the Literature’, American Behavioral Scientist. 57(5): 535-547.
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Frauenfelder, M 2010, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, Penguin, New York.
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Halavais, A, & Lackaff, D 2008, ‘An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(2), 429-440.
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Hollan, J & Stornetta, S 1992, ‘Beyond Being There. Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors’, Computing Systems (CHI) pp. 119-125.
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Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is Open-Sourcing Imagination 2012, video recording, TED Talks video.
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Preece, J & Shneiderman, B 2009, ‘The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation’ AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), 13-32.
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Ratti, C and Claudel, M 2015, Open Source Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London
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Surowiecki, J 2004, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Societies and Nations: Anchor Books, New York.
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Tuite, K & Smith, A.M, 2012, ‘Emergent Remix Culture in an Anonymous Collaborative Art System’, Workshop on Human Computation in Digital Entertainment, AIIDE
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What We Do 2016, video recording, Paper Houses video.
Images: •
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Figure 9. ‘Doug’s Word Clock’ Design Doug’s Word Clocks, 43cm Customized Word Clock, 2016, photograph, viewed 30 September 2016, <http://www.dougswordclocks.com/ shop/43cm-customisedwordclock/>
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Figure 10. Open Source Production Diagram Programmers, Shared and Distributed Repository 2013, diagram, viewed 10 October 2016 <http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ questions/96915/using-git-in-enterpriseenvironment>
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Figure 11. Design Collaborative Adaption BomberStudios, How Git Works, 2013, diagram, viewed 5 October 2016, <http://bomberstudios. com/post/61497125839/best-ever-graphicdepiction-of-how-git-works-via>
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Figure 12. DIWO Email Art Furtherfield, 2010 DIWO at the Dark Mountain, email electronic art, viewed 13 October 2016 < http://furtherfield.org/projects/diwo-do-itothers-resource>
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Figure 13. DIWO Email Art in Progress Furtherfield, 2010 DIWO at the Dark Mountain, email electronic art, viewed 13 October 2016 < http://furtherfield.org/projects/diwo-do-itothers-resource>
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Figure 7. Etsy Word Clock Sunflower for Home, Handmade Word Clock, 2016, photograph, viewed 30 September 2016 <https://www.etsy.com/listing/200024974/wordclock-led-clock-wood-electronic>
Figure 14. Ana White Tiny House Ana White, Tiny House, 2016, photograph, viewed 10 October 2016 2016, <http://www.ana-white.com/tiny>
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Figure 8. LED Bleed Problem DRJ113 Project, A Word Clock, 2015, photograph, viewed 30 September 2016, <http://www. instructables.com/id/A-Word-Clock/>
Figure 16. BotaniCalls Project BotaniCalls, Twitter DIY, 2016, photograph, viewed 5 September 2016 <https://www.botanicalls.com/>
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Unreferenced photos are authors photos.
Figure 1. Wikihouse Open Source Housing The New Stack 2016, An Affordable, Sustainable, Opem Source Smart Home. viewed 11 November 2016, < http://thenewstack.io/wikihouse-opensource-sustainable-house-designs-that-anyonecan-build/>
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Figure 2. Reconnecting with Technology Gongos, 2016, Open source connections diagram, viewed 10 November 2016 <https://gongos.com/tl/data-scientists-convertingbig-business-to-open-source/>
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Figure 3. Opendesk Designer Connections Opendesk, 2016, Designer Connections Website diagram, viewed 30 October 2016 < https://www.opendesk.cc/open-making>
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Figure 4. Melbourne Maker Locations Opendesk, 2016, Designer Connections Website map, viewed 30 October 2016 < https://www.opendesk.cc/open-making>
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Figure 5. The Four Brothers Munseungji, 2016 Four Brothers Chairs, viewed 10 November 2016 < http://www.munseungji. com/four-brothers> Figure 6. No Waste Design Template Munseungji, 2016 Four Brothers Chairs, viewed 10 November 2016 < http://www.munseungji. com/four-brothers>
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