I just wanted to present a speculative design concept for this. Your feedback would be most interesting.
Can I open up a…?
Go ahead.
Sorry, [inaudible 0:16] .
It’s fine. It’s air-conditioned here. [laughs]
We’ll cool down.
It’s very brief.
My name is Tim. I recently finished my doctorate. I’m associated with RMIT University. I did my research project in Taiwan, associated with [non-English speech]. Very good students that would help me. I’m interaction designer. Interested in my PhD, applied design-driven innovation and meaning-driven innovation methodologies.
I believe there’s a gap in innovation ecosystems. I’ve been working on a concept that I’m calling an open, design-driven relation society. The notion is that it’s a blockchain-managed platform to support…
Not human-managed.
Well, humans, of course. [laughs]
Oh, OK. Just to make sure.
Basically, with the notion of open innovation, in terms of the design situation, I think there’s a bit of a design problem in that the way in which the Internet is being used today with geek economy is very reductionist in the design industry. People compete in terms of time and price. The platforms that exist don’t seem to encourage speculative design risk [inaudible 1:54] .
It encourages speculative AI… I just read about a Russian design agency passed as human. [laughs]
I’m speaking in very much general terms.
In my design career, what I seem to have noticed is that one, there’s a lot of underutilized design capabilities. What you learn as a designer is your best design is only as good as your client. Occasionally, great ideas are often circumvented by clients that don’t have any particular vision.
I know.
Also, in terms of a lot of startups and what have you is that it very much relies on teams rather than concepts necessarily. Existing open innovation platforms, although they say it’s outside in, it is still initiated by the company.
Of course.
Essentially, they put out calls, and they are looking for…
Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, whatever.
Exactly. In my experience, teams are often formed either at university when people are going through formative years and their peer relationships, or it’s people who’ve worked together. Actually forming a team is quite difficult [inaudible 3:18] . Also, designers have a lot of commitments. You have daily commitments. You need to earn an income. To actually commit to a startup is a very onerous task.
What’s more is that if you decide to commit to a particular concept or innovation proposal, it requires you to commit to that one, where it doesn’t really encourage diverse innovation.
I’m from originally a film background, and I’ve always viewed film as the most collaborative creative exercise. Indeed, you have sound designers, fashion designers, cinematographers, script writers, and they bring them together.
What I’m interested in is a platform that actually harnesses underutilized design talent, accommodates career flexibility, facilitates team building, and encourages independent [inaudible 4:23] .
Proposals.
Innovation proposals [inaudible 4:26] very quick on that. Also, a method of providing equitable recompense to designers. Often, a designer may come up with an idea, but unless you have a startup, and even then if you get bought out, you’re not necessarily rewarded appropriately.
What I’ve been working on is a notion of an online platform that actually encourages outside-initiated design-driven relations. It’s an idea that formalizes in kind investments in the development of innovations in that in the film industry, if you’re trying to get a film out, often, people work without pay with the promise of receiving royalties [inaudible 5:18] .
Yeah, so they provide their services, and/or products, and/or infrastructure as an investment.
Yes. Their skills, etc. The notion is I designed a royalties platform.
Formalized as in a contract?
Well, the idea of a society is based on the notion of what happens in the music industry, for example, is that you have your artist, and the income from commercial users goes to a collection society. In the music industry, there’s labels and publishers that then distribute the royalties.
The notion is that by setting up an innovation society, design-driven innovation society, that income that could potentially be generated by licensing, or selling product ideas to companies would actually be managed by the platform and distributed to the designers that provided in kind.
But design is far more bespoke done art when it comes to the companies.
It can be, yes. I suppose that this is where some companies…The typical example that’s used by Roberto Verganti is looking at Alessi and how they actually outsource to architects to actually design products, etc. They actually encourage a speculative design process [inaudible 7:00] .
Where design borders on art. [laughs]
It can do. It depends very much on the application. I would also say this platform is not necessarily just designers, but it allows for marketers, for business strategists, what have you, to also engage with the project at the very early start.
I see.
I would see the market as, for one level, is a whole lot of dissatisfied and disengaged design talent.
Cognitive surplus.
Great description. Also, organizations that are actually seeking design research capabilities that are beyond the realm of their business itself. In my experience, although design research is talked about in the development of product, very few design organizations actually acquire the appropriate resources to conduct the appropriate research.
The big companies ideas and frogs, and things like that, yes they do, but when a company goes to product design agency, for example, they’re relying on the knowledge and the interpretive abilities of the existing staff. Often, it doesn’t [inaudible 8:23] .
I’m aware of that.
This is a notion for a royalties-based platform. There is a recent precedent where FilmChain is established, whereby they’re using blockchain to actually administer royalties towards those films that are developed.
I suppose what my interpretation is is that currently in various innovation ecosystems, it very much relies on teams and a commitment towards a business, rather than a commitment towards a particular product or innovation.
That’s the notion, and I’d be interested if you think it’s a concept worth considering.
Why not just use FilmChain?
That’s a very good question.
[laughs]
I would consider certainly approaching them in terms of using them as a model. My background as a designer is that appropriation is the…
Flattery.
[laughs]
I’m a designer that can’t draw, can’t play a musical instrument, but I’m a creative director and I appropriate from [inaudible 9:50] .
I’ve discussed something like this with the two founders, of LikeCoin and the platform “Matters”, which is a blog community, I guess, and it’s using also distributed ledger technology to make sure it’s censorship resistant.
While being Hong Kongers, they, of course, have a strong motivation to be censorship resistant, and also distribute the creative energy in a way that is rewarded both financially and also in terms of teaming up through another Ethereum project called LikeCoin from [non-English speech] .
LikeCoin is very similar in shape to what you just described. Basically, people press like and the like signifies both that I’m willing to pay a monthly, like Spotify, subscription fee toward the creator so that they can create more works, but also that I am interested in participating in the governance part, which is setting up more coalitions between different creative media, I guess, workers to make joint projects. It’s in its very early days.
I’m not personally involved, but because my current startup, which is a not-for-profit, is with Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum. We are very interested in funding also such infrastructure. There’s an infrastructure called Gitcoin that definitely looks into the model where people can crowdfund, but there is also a matching fund that matches the more people join the crowdfunding.
Basically, the idea is that if you have a lot of money, you cannot dominate, like in traditional crowdfunding models, the governing shares. Getting a lot of people is roughly equivalent of putting in a lot of money so the social and economic incentives would balance each other, rather than having like in a traditional co-op that’s one person, one vote.
In a traditional shareholding company, that’s one share, one vote. A quadratic fund finds a balance between the two using Ethereum technology.
Likewise, in film, you have above the line and below the line.
The notion that I was exploring also looks at the notion of voting shares versus non-voting shares in terms of a commitment to a particular project.
Right. The design I just mentioned is that everybody got voting shares, but the votes that you can allocate is proportional to the square root of our share. That ensure that if you put in a lot of money, you don’t get linear voting and expel other people. If you get a lot of small, creative teams joining, they can together control more voting shares as compared to one large.
It’s a weighted system.
Right. It’s a mathematical balance, and it’s in a book called “Radical Markets,” I think. That’s a direction that pretty much everyone in the Ethereum community is looking for, which is something that we refer to as a club of good. It’s not quite private good like this cup of coffee. If I drink, you cannot drink it. On the other hand, it’s not entirely in the commons. It’s not like air and fishery, I guess.
It’s a film that if we don’t make it, it doesn’t happen, and when we make it, it benefits everybody who watches the film, but not like fishery, not like everybody. It’s a small number of people but large enough so that they can be incentivized in funding this project to completion. Figuring out the incentive structure of a club of goods all the way to the public goods, I think that is really important.
I’m glad to hear that there’s a trend of approaching things this way. From my perspective, the first wave of geek economy platforms in design are not particularly equitable.
No, it’s not. It’s one dollar per share. Workers do not have any negotiation power. It’s like the capitalist system before the invention of labor unions and cooperatives.
Correct. It doesn’t offer anything secure.
That’s right.
And it doesn’t offer an incentive to experiment or take risk.
Exactly.
Are you aware of…You mentioned Gitcoin and LikeCoin. Are they applying that to the design field?
I think so. They are certainly in the media field. If you look at Gitcoin, you can see a lot of open-source projects going on. The other one that I work with is Open Collective, which also works on this. Technically, you can look for Gitcoin grants. That’s where the distribution comes from.
I don’t want to take up too much of your time.
No, it’s fine.
To your knowledge, with those sorts of systems, there’s that initial phase of actually funding the development of a product, or project, or what have you. Do they also manage the income distribution of the…?
Yeah. If you can see, there’s various different categories. There’s the technology. There’s the community category. In the community, you can see things like organizing specific empowerment communities. You can see a foundation that’s the foundation that I just mentioned. You can see making an educational resource together. Then the virtual reality gaming platform – what was that about – and so on.
If you look at the community category on the Gitcoin grant, you’ll probably see more design-ish things. Of course, there’s also a lot of technology related things, which is about more like making the infrastructure and the building materials for that kind of like the cybersecurity guarantee, the decentralized finance, so that if you don’t have a bank account, you can join this kind of schemes, and so on.
It’s broadly speaking to track. This is dollars. The more people join, the more matching fund is there. As you can see, if you have 80 contributors, you get a larger than crowdfunded match, but if you only have a few people joining, and then even though the number may be high, the match would be smaller than the crowdfunded portion.
That’s one experiment. It goes in rounds. It’s currently in round 7.
Most of these projects, are they being sponsored? Are they being uploaded by businesses or startup teams?
All sorts. It may be worth checking out, because it’s a large-scale experiment of trying to find the right balance between one vote per share versus one vote per person.
I suppose I was…It’s very consistent. When you say…Sorry, I’m trying to show a tag here [inaudible 19:35] . You have contributions?
The DAI is…
The same as dollars.
Dollars in…
US dollars.
Where does this cash come from?
This comes from the grant, and that’s the infrastructure from the Ethereum founders…
The Ethereum actually…
Rewards this kind of economies on top of the Ethereum system, because that’s what Ethereum is built for, otherwise we might as well just use Bitcoin. The use of Ethereum is the formation of smartphone checks that can be made with this new social goods. Whereas…
My knowledge of blockchain is not…I have a basic concept, but I part rely on others.
Where you see DAO here, it’s the decentralized autonomous organization.
Decentralized autonomous organization. I’m also certainly interested in other [inaudible 20:57] . I would say such a thing had [inaudible 21:02] Ethereum. In terms of it being a non-profit situation.
It’s the Ethereum Foundation. The other one is Open Collective, which I also personally subscribe to. It’s more about transparency and also participatory governance. It’s more social-oriented. We were trying to make a social impact in a relatively short timeframe. It’s also backing development projects as well.
There’s a lot of collectives trying to organize local support communities on mutual aid, on coronavirus care, and things like that. This is the project track. There’s also many others that’s more things on encoding-oriented. Many of these are important building blocks of the open source coding projects.
Basically, what it’s trying to do is to get more coders and designers. For example Mastodon, that is a Twitter alternative that is open and that can be set up by anyone. People who care enough about their contributions end up participating in its governance, and a fiscal post would be a not-for-profit or really a collective.
Great. One last question as I’m packing up. My particular interest in my PhD, my particular design interest is in actually enhancing planned recreation spaces in urban environments. I’m wondering what your take is on that progress in Taipei or Taiwan.
The C-LAB is set up for this.
The which lab?
C-LAB. The lab you’re in.
The Social Innovation Lab.
Yeah, and also the Contemporary Culture Lab, which used to be a walled garden, literally, but we tore down the walls.
I suppose what I’m saying is would this be a good environment to approach about…
Setting up such…
…enhancing playgrounds and play spaces in Taipei?
Yes. There is also the PfC movement, the specialty parks and playgrounds for children by children.
Yes, I know.
You know them?
I’m certainly aware of their formation. I suppose what I’m…In my time in Taiwan, I love Taipei and Taiwan, but I’d say that there seems to be, compared to Australia where I’m from, the use of open spaces for recreation…
Yeah, just beginning.
Good, because that means there’s opportunity to continue my journey. Very nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.
Thank you.