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Open Source Hardware Communities: Investigating Participation in Design Activities

Part of: Innovation Engineering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Jean-François Boujut ,
Franck Pourroy ,
Philippe Marin ,
Jason Dai  and
Gilles Richardot

Abstract

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Open source design of hardware products is an emerging phenomenon that takes more and more importance today's in the society. However, open source (hardware) design implies a tremendous change in both design practices and philosophy because it is partly related to the movements of creative commons and the sharing economy. From this perspective one could think that participation is crucial in the success of open source design projects. In this paper, we analyse 9 case studies in the light of 3 hypotheses. If many studies highlight the potential of the crowd as a resource for design tasks, our study shows that for open source design communities the participation is not massive. In this study, we used an activity-based approach to build our model. As open source design processes are fairly unstructured and based on voluntary participation, it is impossible to adopt a classical task-based model. With the help of this model, we were able evaluate the overall size of the active community, the participation rate with regards to the activities. This study paves the way to deeper and extensive studies on how to support communities engaged in open source design of hardware products.

Keywords

Open source designCollaborative designOpen innovationDesign processOrganisation of product development
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 2307 - 2316
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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