A data-driven approach for understanding Open Design. Mapping social interactions in collaborative processes on GitHub

Abstract

Abstract:The development and adoption of digital technologies in the past decades has modified existing working conditions and introduced new ones in many fields and disciplines. This process has also influenced the field of Design especially with the Open Design and the Maker movements. The article proposes a software library for analysing networks of social interactions over time on Git projects hosted on GitHub. Such software may be useful for understanding social interactions over time on GitHub, enabling thus an overview of participation in collaborative processes and therefore advance our understanding of how platforms connects and influence makers and designers in their collaborative work on Open Design. The article show its application to three cases of (a) discussing the nature and concepts of Open Design, (b) teaching Open Design to interaction design students, (c) the development of a platform for Maker laboratories and Open Design projects.

How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining

“…(2016), Piccolo et al. (2017) and partially in Menichinelli (2017). The versioning metadata delivered by the GitHub API is post-processed in order to produce file co-edition networks (as defined in Asri et al.…”

“…An interaction between two project contributors is defined as the edition of a common file in the course of the project. The subsequent edition of the same file by two contributors is therefore considered in this article as the reference unit of observable collaboration, as in Gopsill et al (2016), Piccolo et al (2017) and partially in Menichinelli (2017). The versioning metadata delivered by the GitHub API is post-processed in order to produce file co-edition networks (as defined in Asri et al 2017).…”

“…By analysing the network of interactions between departments through their sequential edition of the same documents, they were able to identify phase transitions as well as bottlenecks in the development process. Menichinelli (2017) proposed a similar approach to measure interactions in development projects using repository hosting services, without however applying it to hardware projects. Ball & Lewis (2018) investigated the role of individual contributions in the success of design processes based on the computation of six topological metrics (closeness, betweenness, eigenvector, degree, diameter and density) on a fictive and randomly generated network of collaborators.…”

Fabricação Digital, Resíduos E Meio Ambiente: O Caso Da CNC Fresadora

“…Nas últimas décadas, o avanço tecnológico digital alterou a configuração de trabalho, adquirindo a possibilidade de atuar em novos campos, incorporando o caráter interdisciplinar em sua utilização (MENICHINELLI, 2017).…”

The Decentralization Turns in Design: An Exploration through the Maker Movement

“…The turn of Open Design (2) is an extension of the first one, as developing projects independently is often based on the sharing of projects, tools and documentation, including the Openness, Openness and P2P turns.After the pioneering work of individual designers like Ronen Kadushin[29] and of experimental digital platforms like Thinkcycle[30], now Open Design is a The Decentralization turns in Design: turns and dimensions , AI common practice thanks to makers and well established platforms like Thingiverse[31].The often collaborative and collective dimension ofOpen Design brings the category of a 3) Network Science approach to Design, mainly for research purposes at the moment, with the aim of uncovering how the social interactions influence design processes and projects, for example platforms such as Github[32] or Thingiverse[31]. Network analysis is typically implemented inorder to understand 1) structural dependencies within products and systems, 2) communication, cooperation and competition in design processes, 3) social, economic, institutional environment of design processes [33].…”