Semi-professional design series presents the ancient phenomenon of DIY from a new perspective through digital devices and communication technologies, exploring new social contexts and technical means of making things. The second part of the series maps out semi-professional design practices that have evolved around technologies and platforms, and within communities interacting with systems and each other.
TileToy is an open source project that applies the flexibility of digital software to physical led tiles for imaginative uses.
2. Semi-professional design practices
Semi-professional design activity can be seen as design on demand; people getting exactly what they want by designing it for themselves. It can also be seen as pure enjoyment brought to some through problem-solving processes or aesthetic challenges. Whichever, rather than helping companies, semi-professional designers primarily help themselves and learn from each other online.
Developing artifacts and artifact modifications, semi-professional designers are comparable to lead users, characterized by Eric von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation (2005) as people who are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many. Operating in non-institutional contexts, they re-use, enrich and review predominant practices. From this viewpoint, semi-professional designers are also comparable to artists with courageous and hypersensitive qualities. Like artists, or scientists, they are looking for something that’s not there yet.
“Like artists, or scientists, semi-professional designers are looking for something that’s not there yet.”
A custom of endless reconstruction can be detected within semi-professional design practices, where nothing ever gets ready but keeps on developing over time in various different hands and minds. Semi-professional design ceases to exist when it turns into definitive products. Instead, it strives for prototypes; or fantasies materialised.
A certain aesthetic of incompleteness applies to semi-professional design. Tuomo Tammenpää also uses the expression ”clumsy aesthetics”, when talking about the design of DIY electronics and his TileToy project with Daniel Blackburn. “The clumsiness or the unfinished nature of artefacts underlines the act of crafting,” he points out. “Also, it refers to bringing forward the contents of devices, and thus opening them up for further examination and development.”
This is what Tammenpää and Blackburn’s TileToy project is essentially about: providing an open, versatile platform for people to develop imaginative means of use. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a set of physical led tiles that people can touch and play with. Both the source code and the hardware are available via open licences, allowing anyone to create their own applications and share them online.
In my classification of semi-professional design practices, TileToy falls into the category of open design. Promoting the ideals of free culture, open design builds on transparency and public collaboration – sharing ideas and know-how while receiving peer review and best practice techniques in return. The other four categories later to be explored in the Semi-professional design series are genotyping, personal fabrication, creative misuse and innovative repair.