Generation Open: Contested Creativity and Capabilities

Abstract

ABSTRACTOpen design has emerged as a topic generated by a new logic of thinking: the internet with its rhizomatic creative networks and open software. Over the last decades the network has become a new conceptual technology by which to think and describe the world in a new way, and collaborative networks have also become the main actors in the new economy, generating questions of what ‘open’ actually means. As a new generation of knowledge and design workers set out to engage with networked and post-Fordist labour they also generate new forms of conflict. The power over standards and protocols guides the use of the creative platforms, both enabling collaborative and co-creative design as well as shaping it according to the aims of those setting the standard. Similarly, on an organizational and political scale it seems open design may ‘bite back’ in an increasingly conflicting form of ‘immaterial labour’, fragmenting any organized resistance and making every creative act freely exploitable under the irresistible slogan of ‘open’. Today, we may be seeing a new class of precarious and ‘free’ creative work being produced by a ‘cognitarian’ or ‘hacker’ class, revealing the creative industries as the low-wage sweatshops they are. Open design may make us feel free, yet that does not mean we are not controlled. It may be obvious, but open does not only mean free or shared, but also exposed, unsettled and contested.