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I just got back from a short visit with fuseproject, the San Francisco design consultancy headed by Yves Behar. They gave our group from SFSU IDSA a quick tour of the 29-person office, which is (as one would expect) nicely laid out and clearly geared towards collaborative work, favoring long, shared tables over individual desks and cubicles. Following the tour we spent about an hour speaking with senior designer Bart Haney, who provided us with an insightful look at the inner workings of this new yet high-profile design firm.

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This is a project for one of my design seminars, for which we were asked to create a 5″x7″ postcard that reflects our “cultural identity”. Rather than taking the obvious route of addressing my mixed ethnicity, I decided instead to focus on the parts of my identity that relate to hacker culture.

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I have been interested in the idea of “open source design” since my introduction to the field of design, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the concept itself remains somewhat nebulous in definition. My ideas about open source design are founded in my understanding of open source software and that development model’s applicability to the design, manufacture, and use of physical products. In recent weeks I have been pleased to come across a number of direct and tangential references to ideas which help to solidify this concept.

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The Whirlwind Wheelchairs project at San Francisco State University, led by wheelchair design pioneer Ralph Hotchkiss, conducts research in wheelchair design specifically targeted towards local manufacture in small factories around the world. Initially conceived as a reaction to the poor quality of wheelchairs produced by Everest and Jennings, a company that held a virtual global monopoly on wheelchairs from the 1950’s through the early 80’s, Whirlwind wheelchairs are designed to not only to withstand the rough environmental conditions of use in the third world, but also to be produced and repaired using commonly available materials and tools in those markets. I believe that Whirlwind serves as an excellent example of the success of participatory design for low-income communities in the post-industrial product design world.

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Since I’m starting to use a laptop more frequently these days, I decided to reconfigure my home network a bit so as to centralize my work files. Previously I had kept my work files on my desktop PC and used the Offline Files feature built into Windows 2000 and XP to synchronize a small number of files with an older laptop that I used only occasionally. That scheme worked fine at the time, but since I’m now planning on doing an increasing amount of work on my laptop instead of my desktop I didn’t want to require that my desktop machine be turned on to synchronize files.

Since I have a third machine running linux and MythTV that is on all the time anyway, I decided to set up a Samba share on that machine and make that my work files’ primary repository. An added advantage of the Samba configuration is that I can use rdiff-backup for easy remote backups of the repository. Configuring Samba was relatively painless, and far simpler than I remember it being from a few years ago.

Problems arose when I attempted to set up Offline Files on my laptop to create a local mirror of the files on the Samba share. (more…)