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Towards A New Design Commons

Ellen Lupton said of her book Thinking with Type that it was a book for everyone because everyone deserves good typography. I think that everyone deserves good design and so we need to make design tools and content available to everyone at the highest level. If design is for everyone, then we need a much more equitable way for us all to access tools and recipes and resources. This is what “A New Design Commons” embodies.

David Bollier defines the commons as “all the things that we collectively own and believe that we should maintain for future generations.” This means that we will have some sort of moral or personal or community attachment to these “common” things. Nobel Prize winner Eleanor Ostrom expands on this and says that the commons isn’t just these resources that we’re attached to, but it is the self-organizing social systems around those things that are what actually help govern and preserve them.

If we apply this to design, then it’s the fonts and images and tools and the frameworks that we need to make design. It is then also the social and technical systems that are required for preserving and sharing the fonts and images and frameworks, as well as returning to an ideal where designs and designers are able to freely build upon the works that have come before.

Something that will popup over and over again, is an acronym FLOS(S), which stands for Free/Libre Open Source (Software). And this is software that you are free to do with what you will. This does not imply that it has to be free as in price, but that it is free as in freedom. This is another component of a design commons: you must be free to remix and reuse materials and tools. Again: It does not need to imply that these things are free as in price. Europeans refer to this as “libre, not gratis” noting this IS a difference in the free software communities. Free as in freedom, not free as in price.

OLD NEWS (Sept2022): While I’ve been working on this presentation, Adobe announced that they’re acquiring the online prototyping tool, Figma. And while this is just normal in our technocracy, that the big fish eat the little fish, Figma, if you have used it, it’s one of the most fun collaborative design tools that I have ever used, and it also has built into it a community feature where if you have modified Figma yourself, that you can share that modification back to the community. And everyone can just add that to their version of Figma using a community portal. Adobe says that none of these things are going to change, but I think that that will remain to be seen. They don’t have the greatest track record with these sorts of things. (This ended up being stopped by the EU)

NEW NEWS (June2024): Adobe has frustrated people w/ its most recent TOS which basically say that if you utilize any of their cloud features, your work will probably be spied on for term violations, used to help train the Adobe machine learning-based image generator, etc. (See the Verge and Cnet)

In 2019 to point this out, Adobe turned off creative cloud access to anyone in Venezuela as part of the US sanctions. We could argue if this is okay or not within what an American company should do based on US law, but it signals pretty clearly that we DO NOT own these tools anymore, we just rent access to them, and that even paying our rent isn’t enough to KEEP access to these tools. As a design educator, this is troubling. We are supposed to be creating NEW knowledge. But we are training our students to use things that tech aristocrats can wall off from them at any time in the future. Our files and programs could just become inaccessible. This is a form of intellectual enclosure — like the walling off of public lands as a metaphor.

Looking for an alternative? You could try using more open source software in your classrooms and practice. And these are tools that even if they end up being acquired or the developers who are working on them decide to stop working on them. Their source code is still available, and there are examples of programs where a different community takes over upkeep of software in the realm of F/LOSS.

If you haven’t ever used Blender, but you do 3D rendering, you should download Blender and give it a try! Blender is actually free — libre AND gratis, and it has an amazing library of tutorials and all kinds of extra addons and extensions…

What’s great about these softwares though isn’t just that they are, that the freedom but that they have communities that are actually working on them.

A designer at Adobe, Garth Brathwaite, who has been inspired by his collaboration with open source software developers wrote a design manifesto about a decade ago for how designers might open up their practice a little bit more — how designers might “open source” more. And he outlines these ideas that are really mostly about being less self-conscious and being more open to sharing and being more collaborative on purpose. And what he’s really describing is just how human creativity has traditionally worked. We’ve taken each other’s things, we’ve copied them, we’ve improved upon them, and that’s how cultural production happens (until recent history).

So what makes design HARD to open? hard to liberate? why is this harder as a designer than as a developer? One issue is just the way that copyright has evolved in the United States and Europe, and the way that we protect intellectual property in our contemporary society.

The New Design Commons takes a different approach to contemporary copyright to try and work around this. F/LOSS uses different kinds of licenses, A New Design Commons needs to reconsider copyright. Creative Commons is a way to say, instead of the binary of all rights reserved (traditional contemporary copyright/IP law) or no rights reserved (the public domain), that we can say we want some rights reserved and I want to control how people use my creative cultural production. My favorite Creative Commons license is the BY-SA, which stands for by-attribution-share-alike, which means you have to credit where you got the work from (by attribution) and then also share your work in the same way (share alike). It creates a kind of design bibliography where we can then see where design ideas have come from and where they’re leading to and I think this is an important aspect of a design commons. This is how we help MAKE the resources and tools we’re using available and usable.

If this intrigues you, and you’d like to use resources that are licensed and released this way, there’s a variety of resources already waiting for you to take advantage of. Creative Commons used to manage a search that was called CC Search, but is now run by Automattic, the company that makes WordPress and a variety of other open source software. They’ve renamed it Openverse, and it searches a whole bunch of different resources that are public domain and Creative Commons, and then links you out to the correct place to actually go download the image or content and get the correct citation for those things.

Flickr also maintains a site called Flickr Commons that pools research institutions and cultural institutions who have public domain work that they’ve decided to photograph or scan and share.

There are also plenty of typefaces that fall into this category. Google Fonts helps to fund designers and developers to make open font license fonts. There’s also some interesting type foundries like Velvetyne in France and the League of Moveable Type in New York who all of their fonts are open source.

And if you are looking for design classroom materials that are Creative Commons, the AIGA Sponsored a project called Digital Foundations — Intro to Media Design where Xtine Burroughs and Michael Mandiberg translated Bauhaus werker’s style visual fundamentals courses to use digital tools instead. One version of this, is the Adobe Creative Cloud version, but Xtine and Michael then collaborated with a community of open source design software enthusiasts to rewrite all of the projects for using open source software too.

We as Design educators, we’re all doing this as well. The AIGA DEC teaching resource is a kind of commons where you can share your classroom projects with everyone else. What’s missing is this idea that we want to encourage people to modify and reshare: if you’ve changed these things, share them back! And that we make sure that we then cite the history of who got inspired by whom and what new things that has led to.

A Design Commons is perhaps a bit of a utopian vision. However, I’d like to think it’s pragmatically utopian because all of the things required for making a New Design Commons exist already — nothing new needs to be invented. We just need to change our behaviors. Though that’s perhaps the most utopian vision: that people would change. We need utopian thinking so that we aren’t constrained by the present possible. The present possible has led us to things like a climate crisis and social injustice and designs that focus on made up market needs, not necessarily what benefits real people in their real lives. And so perhaps we need some kind of commentary on the status quo that critiques that design is for the market and instead that design is for everyone.

Thanks.

This is a transcript of a presentation I gave at the 2022 AIGA Surface conference … Slides can be found here: https://design.penpot.app/#/view/e8ad58f0-356f-11ed-a332-c67f7655c7b3?page-id=c63c8660-4640-11ed-9172-27bf6a7e9f0e&section=interactions&index=0&share-id=293a2d3f-de7f-80de-8004-8161553768c9