What isn’t Collaboration

Quite often I get ideas for small projects which involve many people, but each person working on their own, but in response to another person’s input. This evening I had an idea for a typeface where each letter is designed individually, but to try to match the font of the previous character, by the previous designer. Although this might be a nice consequences style project, it in fact, is not collaborative.

Although I’ve said it and read it many times now, I am still further understanding that true collaboration comes in the sharing and discussing of ideas between people. The technicalities and production are things which can quite easily be done separately, in isolation even, so long as the conceptual process is done collectively.

That, however, can differ if the outcome itself grows from a mass of inputs. The example above is different as it is a domino-effect process (it relies on the previous input and thus the next relies on it) as apposed to a tree-like process (many inputs work alongside one-another but do not rely on each other to feed the organism).

Josh

Sharing is Progress

For a short while now I have been undergoing a personal research into ideas of open-source, data sharing and collaboration, and the benefits of these things. I am still learning a lot—trying to better understand them, the motives and the incentives that people can find in them and ultimately… why?—but I do believe that this is the future. Not just in the design world, but in science, art, mathematics, education an so on; I feel through an open-source culture the world will develop into what can one day be called, a mile stone in cultural and social evolution.

It was not my intention to get so heavy, it kind of just happened. The point I had intended to make is that from now on I think I will put my money where my mouth is. From now on I want to share almost everything, namely ideas.

I am victim, as much as every other human, of the human condition and I automatically feel an ownership of anything I feel may be a good idea, and, as with anything else I own and cherish, I want to protect it. But if I am to act on the beliefs stated above, I must start abiding to an egoless design incentive (studying and occasionally working in the design world, I feel it is a reasonable place to start, but in an open-source culture, a designer could, by all means, contribute to other practices). I will, from now on, publish any good* idea I have. I will publish my ideas on a popular social media outlet, such as Tumblr, and the ideas will free free to use by anyone.

*And as I recently found out, it is not possible to copyright an idea.

This will commence this evening. Why, again, am I doing this?

1. I may have conceived my own ideas, but who am I to say that I am the best person to act on these ideas?
2. As a means of encouraging collaboration and sharing generally.
3. As an experiment.

This is a small move on my part, but as I say, I feel I need to put my money ideas where my mouth is.

This was inspired by Unrealised Projects and Michael Nielson’s TED Lecture about Open Science:

…And many more open-source initiatives.

Josh