TU Delft : May 9th, Open Design Hackathon focused on home appliances

Created by: goscommons

We are running two different events, one physical at TU Delft the 9th of May. We will be also available for the Global sprint of Mozilla running 10th, and 11th of May, from 9:00 to 17:00, CEST timezone.

Welcome to the GO!Commons repo and initiative. In the last 10 weeks we have been coached by the Mozilla Open Leaders (Awesome)Program, to learn how to work open and become better impact makers. We are a group of designers and engineers interested in Open Source and Sustainable Development. We are part of a network of communities and organizations that have amazing experience in open source. We are also inspired by amazing initiatives like Open Source Ecology, Precious Plastics, RepRap, Open Source Circular Economy days and many others.

1. How to participate and prepare for the hackathon?

  • See our Sprint Hackathon Board to get an idea of how we will work using a Kanban/ Scrum/ Agile board.
  • Read the documentation below and get an idea of what this is about.
  • Make a github account and mention below in the comments you would like to participate. You can also mention your background so that we can orient and facilitate better your contribution. We will also help you in using the command line.
  • We will be from 13:30 to 18:00 in the Norbert Rosenburg room at the faculty of Industrial Design in Delft, official time to start is 14:30.
  • Let us know also what questions or thoughts you have about the project and the event.

What is this hackathon about?

We will focus on documenting designs of consumer goods like washing machines, dryers, microwaves, etc. Is the topic or theme of the hackathon if you like . Check this video to see why this theme is so relevant

What will happen in the hackathon?

We want to get inspiration from you, and hopefully you will get inspired this day. We also want you to get out of the session, with some collaborative tools on your pocket like git and github. We will work on a case study: a vacuum cleaner. We will disassemble one vacuum cleaner, study and document its design together. goc1_disassembly

By the end of this event you will:

  1. Learn the value of open design and its proper documentation.
  2. Collaborate in an open design documentation exercise and learn github in this process.
  3. Get an idea of how to use open licenses and why they are important.
  4. Hopefully join our open design community and become a contributor.
  5. You will get our awesome e-Book on p2p, open source and sustainable development.

The impact of having open design documentation

The impact of this project is multifaceted, and has advantages from all kinds of aspects from practical and industrial, to intellectual and spiritual. Think of it as a common resource that facilitates sustainability in many ways.

  • Students and hobbyists can become highly skilled designers, makers, engineers and facilitators by joining as contributors to the community.
  • Designs can be more universal, modular and standardize so that repair is facilitated, quality guaranteed and eventually lead to ecofriendliness.
  • Manufacturers and entrepreneurs can share and use their contributions under open licenses
  • Can you think of other advantages?

Who is it for?

  • Anyone interested and willing to participate in developing common industrial design resources for the benefit of all.
  • Anyone interested in learning from others by working in collaborative decentralized processes.
  • Anyone interested in teaching and bringing their core expertise to make this happen in the context of highly concurred and collaborative processes. You could be a technologist, designer, illustrator, marketer, project manager, among other many roles.

How the open design repositories work:

To have a clear idea of our collaborative workflow see our contributing guidelines. But basically interactions take place in specific open design repositories. Follow the issues which are basically tasks posted for people like you to take over and return a valuable increment to the design repository. For instance if you go to the issues section of the open source microwave, repo you will see tasks, but you can also propose new tasks.

The designs documented can be your own version of a machine or a module, but also could be existing versions. These way people can see how things work, and also how professionals work collaboratively. Making our repo open for the public allows that any person can study, and learn from others by doing and seeing others doing.

Leave a comment if you want to join the event!