Jahnavi - TU Berlin

Jahnavi Krishna from TU Berlin is working on a Master's Thesis exploring the what properties of product design lend themselves to DIY production. Here is an interview with Marcin Jakubowski, exploring how OSE's methods relate to this. Basic concepts involve simplicity, modularity, multipurpose design, flexibility, construction set approach, and others.

Janhavi's Report

Hello guys,

Here is the notes of my discussion with Marcin today.

The main aim of Open source ecology is to eliminate Material scarcity.

The major features that make an open source design feasible for DIY are:

Good Documentation Easy readability (Transparency) Usage of common tools or standard parts.

Using commonly accessible Materials

Easy design - Easy is defined by the level of Technical skills required to make the product by avoiding complex geometries like curves or complicated shapes. The level of skills required for replicating the electrical components are minimum (E.g Soldering iron) as the instructions are comprehensive enough. Workshops to develop the basic skills are often conducted by the ecology.

Design principles identified:

Taking out all the excess features and simplifying the design. (This was very helpful as we were trying to define simplicity as a feature) Modularity in design - making it more understandable and lego like Scalability - Multiplying or dividing the scale of the machine/Product Construction set approach - This i think was one of the most productive finding in the discussion. Developing a construction set instead of focussing on the development of a particular product. Design for manufacturability - with accessible and simple materials. Designing with builders in mind- another very good point that we missed in our summary. A very important terminology of PART COUNT. Reducing the part count, by using the same component more number of times thereby increasing its DIY ability. Life time design, by adding the feature of recyclability to it.

Comparing with the principles we identified:

Most of them are more or less the same as the principles identified above , but valuable remarks on the following principles: Change configuration using the same design elements - this is a way of increasing flexibility and is in a way indirectly related to Part count. Replacing materials with discarded materials is a huge compromise on the precision and hence not so advisable for a good quality product and it also demands more man power which brings our focus on expanding another dimension of our constraints that is Man power Transportability of the product is indirectly related to scalability and modularity of it. The major limitation of the DIY project according Marcin is the availability of tools which he well phrased it as limitation of accessibility to Open source high power production machines. Though fab labs haven't been of great help, the solution that they have been practising at present is to build them or outsource them.

It was a very informative talk and these were the points i could summarise. I might have missed some more, but will go through the recording and improvise it again.

Thank you very much Marcin!

Best regards, Jahnavi