All people design and think about the future. Some people materialise their ideas through sketching, crafting or customising. More and more people hack their electronics, make things on personal fabrication platforms and share their innovations online. Semi-professional design series aspires to understand the possibilities in this kind of non-institutional design, aiming at material artifacts and operating with digital tools. It is an exploration in free form and multidisciplinary approaches to artifacts straddling the categories of work and leisure, and of production and consumption.
Botanicalls is an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between plants and humans.
1. Introduction
Empowered by digital takeover, the mass of intermediated ideas and social creativity entering the everyday life is making anyone a semi-professional in anything and broadening the field of design. Instead of concentrating simply on the interaction between a ready-made artifact and its user, design has increasingly spread out to domains facilitating semi-professional, interdisciplinary design initiatives in order to gain new insight – “design for designability”, as described by researcher Kari-Hans Kommonen.
Working with finite knowledge and an increasing variety of tools and networks, semi-professional designers often surprise with ingenious answers to questions only children would ask (see also Ulla-Maaria Mutanen’s Play Time column for Craftzine). For example, when Robert Faludi, Kate Hartman, Kati London and Rebecca Bray came up with the idea of Botanicalls, an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between thirsty plants and their owners, a more utopist version of it, Growduino, was soon introduced on Makezine’s blog. Growduino is the work of a hobbyist who wanted his plants to water themselves automatically when he was away for holiday.
The open source development from Botanicalls to Growduino illustrates a spontaneous design process among strangers, possibly inter disciplines, and definitely somewhere in the borderline of the real and the imaginary. It shows how people with different skills and interests can come together online to share their work and to provide building blocks for other projects. Given some thought, in the right (or unexpected) hands, and with the right tools, ideas like Botanicalls or Growduino might eventually lead into something essential.
Semi-professional design practices are characteristically open and innovative. They are motivated by utility or recreation, and they range from developing things to modifying things. Looking at the evolution of artifacts within communities of people who are not full-time designers by profession or assemblies of design amateurs and design professionals, the Semi-professional design series attempts to acquire a better understanding of the effects that digital technology has and will have on design. It examines digital technologies firstly as means for sharing how-to knowledge, secondly as means for making custom artifacts and eventually as means for reaching new spheres of design thinking.
The Semi-professional design series is based on Jenna’s MA thesis (2008), Semi-Professional Design Catalog, at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki.