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UCD Principles
Published in Brian Still, Kate Crane, Fundamentals of User-Centered Design, 2017
Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the open source movement in software, wrote in The Cathedral and Bazaar (1999) about a primary difference between typical software development and release and open source software. In the typical process, just a few developers, working in isolation, create the code and release it to the masses for consumption; only those developers get to decide when it’s ready, and they rarely take feedback during development, release, or even afterward. It is a cathedral approach. With open source, the central tenet is more eyeballs, fewer bugs; in other words, the more people working on software’s development and release means more problems will be caught and fixed. In a bazaar where users and developers intermingle together creating code, then use it and give feedback, the larger community works more democratically to make more reliable software.
The bizarre bazaar: FabLabs as hybrid hubs
Published in CoDesign, 2018
Michael Haldrup, Mads Hobye, Nicolas Padfield
In design publications, there are a variety of metaphors regarding lab-based forms of learning. In his seminal manifesto, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, Raymond (2001) reflected on the new and divergent mode of innovation exhibited by the emergence of Linux and other open-source software. He suggested ‘the bazaar’ as an alternate and advantageous model for innovation, as compared to more traditional commercial modes of innovation (‘the cathedral’). More broadly, reflecting on the benefits for developing and exploring possible new design programmes through concept design and prototyping experiments, Binder and Brandt (2008, 118) consider the lab, the workshop, the studio and the atelier as four different metaphors for design-based learning and research, each providing an opening for particular understandings of design exploration processes. Similar arguments were also proposed by Ehn (1998) in his vision for ‘a digital Bauhaus’ as a model for placing ‘the development of new mediating technologies in their real everyday context of changes in lifestyle, work and leisure’ and as a node in ‘an international network for creative and socially useful Bauhaus design that embraces, penetrates and unites art, science and technology, and that influences research, study, and work’ (211, 214). Today, we recognise this vision as very much coincident with the aims and scope of the FabLab movement.Being a global movement and part of a rising maker culture, FabLabs are central for an understanding of the present (and future) world. The democratization of production that comes along with a ‘democratization of innovation’ by various potential actors. That means that, in FabLabs, everybody can invent, create and modify things and everybody can become an artist. With relatively low constraints, people can design objects that are not only unique, but meet high design standards. Such an approach transforms the fields of arts and crafts, as FabLabs further promote an understanding of modern crafting, making, or DIY, as a response to mass culture. (Walter-Hermann and Büching 2013, 14).By using high-tech design and manufacturing tools (3D Printing, CNC Milling, embedded microcontrollers, etc.), the FabLab provides users not only with basic construction equipment but enables them to meet high design standards with their fabrications. In doing this sketching, prototyping and idea generating is not limited to the format of the traditional academic (or design) workshop where loads of napkin drawings and post-it notes compete for attention. Instead, users are able to fabricate truly functioning prototypes, artefacts and installations to be explored and examined in a diversity of use situations and contexts. Enabling users to experiment with fully functioning prototypes creates an explorative space for evaluating and reflecting on actual users’ performances and interactions with technological installations and objects that moves beyond what may be anticipated from a purely conceptual design process. However, precisely because of the ‘quick-and-dirty’ approach and the scaffolding provided by the experts in the FabLab, users are enabled to focus on the effects of their prototypes rather than their technical detail.