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.