The animation loops printed on Shogun Kunitoki’s picture vinyl LP can be viewed using a special strobe light that the true fans of the band will build themselves.

With all the different ways of perceiving the world and with all the tools and instructions available to make almost anything, what will we do?

The most maverick manifestations of semi-professional design may be compared with chindōgu, a Japanese phenomenon of creating surreal tools for everyday life. For example, Portable Zebra Crossing is a carpet for pedestrians to fight against the tyranny of cars – the striped carpet can be rolled out across the road in a suitable crossing point. Chindōgu are sometimes described “unuseless” – that is, they cannot be regarded as useless in an absolute sense since they do actually concoct a method for making certain aspects of life more convenient, but in practical terms they cannot be called useful either. However, separated from the constraints of utilitarian application, they can take us into a new world of human invention (see also Kenji Kawakami’s book The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, 2005).

In the spirit of chindōgu, small-scale utopian ideas are being materialised and shared within semi-professional communities where new trains of thought get involved in design processes.

Shogun Kunitoki’s album Vinonaamakasio was released as a picture vinyl LP featuring two animation loops that can be viewed using a special strobe light which the true fans of the band will build themselves. The Shogun Kunitoki Strobe Light Kit containing a circuit board, a 9V battery clip, a blue resistor, a brown resistor, a capacitor, a 555 timer IC, a super bright LED and a switch can be bought online and compiled according to the soldering instructions Jari Suominen, the keyboard player of the band, posted online.

Jari Suominen is a semi-professional designer. He describes his projects as something in between design, art and science; “embedded systems that work magically, hiding their digital nature.” He also regards them as DIY activity because of their exploratory nature and the fact that they are usually inspired by the possibility of making things for oneself within reasonable price.

Typically using the open source Arduino microcontroller and Processing programming environment as tools, Suominen believes that a successful design process either starts from forgetting what’s possible and what’s not or simply from what’s available: ”if you find a bunch of cheap electronics somewhere, then you buy it,” he says.

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.

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.

1. The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.

You have worked on different Access to Knowledge and copyright reform projects. Is that what an openness evangelist does?

I go around telling everybody about the advantages of openness in cultural production. I have worked as a volunteer for the Creative Commons for five years now and people seem to be pretty religious about it – about open licensing. There are even figures like Richard Stallman (a.k.a. rms), the man who invented free software, who’s actually wearing a CD-ROM as a halo on top of his head when giving talks.

But you also have a background in traditional media. How did you get interested in free culture?

I made an interview of Lawrence Lessig on Danish national radio’s cyber culture programme Harddisken, where I was freelancing around the time of the publication of his book Free Culture (2004). I got really inspired by his thoughts as they promoted ideals that I had only been introduced through science fiction and cyberpunk before. Reading Lessig got me into thinking about ways to create agreements that would formalise the “hacker ethic” you see online – and make a system that’s closer to how copyright should be on the internet.

Free culture was also tackled in your documentary film Good Copy Bad Copy a few years ago. The film presents emerging creative practices, which build on remixing. How do you think the internet has affected visual and audio production?

To begin with, we are seeing a change from a society where people produce physical objects into a society designing immaterial products. Unexpected things are going to happen. Most importantly, the idea of a romantic genious starting his/her work from point zero coming up with something completely new and having a sacred right to that work doesn’t apply anymore. The internet makes ideas travel and leaves no one creating in a vacuum. It’s definitely easier for anyone to be creative nowadays. There’s so much shared culture. You take a bit of something from others and remix. The challenging part is “who really owns what”, as one character in the film puts it. It’s very human to want credit and respect for one’s work, but ownership is something different, which conflicts with immaterial works.

“The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.”

Do you see the roles of a professional and an amateur merging within these fields? Furthermore, is the dichotomy even meaningful anymore?

I believe that the difference between a professional and an amateur has to do with money. A professional makes money and an amateur doesn’t – but it doesn’t make either one better or worse at what they do. The concept of money is definitely challenged by the internet. If I think of myself, I’ve learned a lot of things by doing, and I like to collaborate with people just to do new stuff. I don’t need to be rich but I need enough money to have a flat and travel a bit. I think a lot of people are like that. They make some things for money and other things for free. And they are willing to share their knowledge, which makes them richer. Things always come back to them. The problem is that once you start assuming that you are better because you make a lot of money, there will be ten other people who are as good. I think that everyone should be able to communicate on the same level regardless of their income and help each other develop further.

2. Sharing knowledge makes people richer.

You work at Socialsquare tackling new ways of designing digital processes, products and tools. Do you think about the “pro-am phenomenon” (Leadbeater, 2008) in your work there?

At Socialsquare, we support inclusive design that is open for development by many people. It’s inspiring how several mass concepts (e.g. Firefox) have emerged from hackers playing with open source software. Drawing on that, we want to design processes, products and tools to further fruitful participation.

“Processes, products and tools should be designed to further fruitful participation.”

While the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism are blurring, new business models are needed. There’s a lot of talk on attention economy, experience economy, sharing economy, local economy and so on. What do you see as the new kinds of currencies emerging from the contemporary creative sphere?

I think that attention is the currency of today. However, people’s attention span is getting shorter as they get more links, tweets and all that stuff fed to them all the time. And they have a habit of swarming to certain topics – that’s what the Slashdot effect is all about. Sometimes they go all wrong. Being required to have an opinion on everything makes it easy to promote the wrong things as well as make misinterpretations. In other words, one can quickly engage with a lot of things yet he or she needs to decide what really earns their attention. So maybe we should talk about value as the currency of tomorrow.

How are people being recognised and rewarded on collaborative media platforms? How can the price of different contributions be calculated in remixed material?

They get respect, like for instance on eBay. On Wikipedia, you can see who’s the main architect of an article. The systems of reward and honour are intricate. It’s really difficult to formulate a good system – especially when it comes to things like films or books where you don’t have the source visible like in open source software. Putting value to ideas is difficult, yet we all need money. Also, people are obsessed with free stuff and many artists just want people to experience their creations. Today, one really has to give up control over copyright in the traditional sense and come up with new logics of earning.

3. Attention is the currency of today.

You are the Creative Commons public project lead in Denmark. Why do you support CC licensing? How do you think that copyright should react to the changes in creative practices and vice versa?

Creative Commons is based on free software licenses (GPL, etc.). It’s the first, the biggest and the most constructive system around. It builds on copyright (unlike e.g. the thinking behind Pirate Bay which has promoted abolition of copyright) and the group behind it is smart. I also like how the Creative Commons changes dynamically. It reflects on the community behind it instead of just fixing a law, which should always be obeyed even if it’s not in touch with its users.

Watch Good Copy Bad Copy, a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture by Henrik Moltke, Andreas Johnsen and Ralf Christensen at http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net.

J.S.: What is the motivation behind Crashroots – producing music in an open-ended way and giving it out for free?

S.W.: I guess it started as part of the free culture movement. We believe that the time has come to apply the knowledge we have of open software design to music. Being open, we can take advantage of immediate release times and feedback as well as statistic-driven analysis of what people really want and what they don’t want. You get totally new views to music through being open about it in the making – wait five more years and it will be the modus operandi of the whole industry.

J.S.: So, Crashroots is all about sharing ideas?

S.W.: What we’re basically doing is that we’re picking up ideas floating around and repackaging them within an open community of music lovers. So, besides openness Crashroots is all about participation. It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.

“It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.”

J.S.: Like Jean-Luc Godard said, “it’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to”.

S.W.: Sure, and we believe that music gets better when people start putting out ideas at an early stage, getting others involved.

M.K.: This brings me to sampling, which is obviously an important part of the music making taking place on Crashroots. I’m intrigued by the fact that you encourage crediting the original tracks behind the samples even though their use is practically considered illegal. What’s your standpoint on the subject?

S.W.: I’m personally against copyright because I see music as a starting point for exploration.
M.T.: I feel like an archaeologist when I pick up a song. But while an archaeologist would place his discoveries in a museum for people to see them, we’re basically doing the same thing, yet bringing it to another level where people can actually rework the discoveries and give them a new life.
S.W.: If you think back, before recorded music a similar process occurred through songs sung to people in order to exchange them.
M.T.: We need to rethink the concept of owning and, through that, copyright. For example, I have been playing the drums since I was a kid. And how did I learn to play the drums? I just put on a Beatles record and copied Ringo Starr. So, basically I was sampling him. And this is how the millions of drummers the world over learned – by copying. Or think of Bernard Purdie, the drummer for James Brown, whose drum break in the song Funky Drummer has been sampled non-stop for 25 years now. Imagine him trying to claim royalties for these eight seconds. In the end, he didn’t come up with the part himself. What he did was that he went to Africa, heard the local music and translated it into his drumming.

J.S.: Crashroots really blurs the boundaries between production and consumption. Would you say that the main cultural product that Crashroots produces is the social process of making music rather than the pieces of music that come out of it?

S.W.: It’s the conversation first and foremost. Music in the end always carries a message whether you want it or not. And reworking culturally relevant things like that really hits the spot. As an example, if we take a track and do a mix in Berlin but someone in Minsk does another one and someone in Mexico does one, too, in between them there’s a conversation going on concerning the original sample – when it came out and all that. And that for me is the most important part. After that come the dancing people.

M.K.: Going beyond the site itself, who “is” Crashroots? For whom is it a brand or an umbrella to work under, in regard to, for instance, live shows?

S.W.: The thing is Crashroots completely turns around the closed old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time. We have planned to do Crashroots concerts based on the idea that wherever we’re playing, we will invite all interesting Crashroots contributors from that part of the world to join us. And obviously get paid as well.
M.T.: There’s also another touring concept that we came up with which is something totally opposite: having a seven piece real life band playing the best songs from Crashroots live.
S.W.: We believe that these types of concepts are bound to be successful as the Crashroots fan base is really close to us, consisting mainly of people who make the music.

“Crashroots completely turns around the old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time.”

J.S.: What if a song becomes a hit, how do you recognize and reward the people who participated in making it?

M.T.: Well, the best case scenario for the contributors would be that a label calls them up and signs them because they like what they’ve heard.
S.W.: And get the attention and publicity this other label can provide as this is what record labels are now – marketing channels. Additionally, on every release we give an opportunity for the artists to link to different kinds of support schemes: their Beatport accounts, online shops that sell their t-shirts etc. So basically, what we’re trying to do is to steer the flow of attention towards the artists who can then make the best out of it. We could obviously build an in-house shop but I think third party services are the way to go on the internet – don’t reinvent, just link it in. That’ll let the artists have their accounts and get the attention through us.
M.T.: And then there are the gigs and all that.

S.W.: We use the Creative Commons license so if one makes a hit from Crashroots taking my beat, Miguel’s bassline and his own melody, and gets signed to a major label, he’s obliged to ask all the parties and find a deal. And that is a human kind of process – not from lawyer to lawyer. I hope we can encourage deals like this to take place and get a community language going on – have records where you have literally ten people involved.

J.S.: Have you developed some kind of a business model for Crashroots?

M.T.: We only started Crashroots a couple of months ago so the business model isn’t quite set yet. However, we have been talking about the freemium model – giving all music files away for free and focusing on selling something physical, not meaning a CD or vinyl but some other means of embodiment.

M.K.: You see the freemium model applicable to musical content?

S.W.: Yes, we strongly believe that. For example, now we’re building up a community of people who take our music and actually use six hours reworking it in Ableton Live. Six hours is a huge time dedication! I mean you don’t even dedicate that much time to your partnership these days. So, that’s a really close relationship that we’re building. And if you give these people something of value, they’re actually very willing to pay for it. Think about a situation where we collaborate and I offer you something physical to put on your bookshelf as a token of the work. It looks amazing and has a purpose, and I think I can make you pay for it even if the price was a bit higher than a normal CD. I think that in order to make these models work, one needs to collaborate with artists and designers who can make physical things valuable and interesting. This model has been proven to work with software and even books but we have to prove it works now with music as well.

J.S.: At the moment, using Crashroots requires software for making music as there are no simple tools on site. So, the participation requires at least some knowledge and interest in music making. Do you see that as a good thing or would you rather like to see the roles of an amateur and a professional blurring or mixing within Crashroots?

M.T.: Some people have come up to say that they’re doing something with music for the first time on Crashroots, and I think that’s really cool. These people approach the subject with no preconceptions and might come up with something very interesting in the end.
S.W.: Apparently it takes a bit of literacy to do music and we would like to have semi-interested people doing it. Crashroots also has an underlying theme of cultural mash-uping. Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.

“Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.”

M.K.: How far does your personal influence as founders and “curators” of Crashroots reach regarding the end product, the music itself? What if the musical output of Crashroots turns into something you would consider bad? I mean, maintaining personal quality control must become impossible once the community grows beyond a certain scale.

M.T.: That’s a key question here: who decides what’s good and what’s bad. To be honest, so far 99% of the music has been good – to us and the community. And ‘good’ meaning also the things that were improved through the feedback of the community.

S.W.: The great thing about the platform we are using and building are its community-based voting tools. If you are constantly offering something the community considers bad you will be put on ‘pending’. But at some point, with, for instance, a thousand active users we will probably need to close down registration for a while. On the internet you need to keep your signal-to-noise ratio extremely high.

M.K.: But wouldn’t the closed community start to resemble the ‘closed label’ from the past again?

S.W.: With a thousand artists? That’s a huge difference. The thing is, the material itself is in the public so you can take our songs and start a new Crashroots with another community. But what we are trying to do here is not just about the music itself, but also the conversation. And conversation is small scale. When you go over ten thousand people you will end up in MySpace type of interaction, which is bad – it’s just too big. That’s why Twitter is so good: they manage to get down to those little groups of people. I would be proud to have an active community of ten thousand, not more. If you imagine every record label mutating into an open source music community, there will be thousands of them. Then you can specialize in hip hop, me in whatever type of dance music and so on. We just need to find a way to interact with each other.

M.K.: Compared to software, however, you are dealing with a much more culturally sensitive product.

S.W.: Yes. Even though it shouldn’t be. The thing is, looking twenty years into the future I strongly believe music will be generative. We will all be putting out our stems, all the parts a piece of music is built of, tagged with metadata. You could already build songs using algorithms saying “I need an aggressive bassline, a beat that is this and this tempo and this and this mood etc.” I, as a listener will bring my profile with me and the computer will adjust the music according to my listening habits. We won’t be listening to the same tracks anymore. And this is not that far; it’s already technically possible. It’s more a question of cultural adaptation. Then it will really be goodbye to Michael Jackson – the end of the superstar.