Dissertation Defense
WHAT: Nitin Sawhney: COOPERATIVE INNOVATION IN THE COMMONS: Rethinking Distributed Collaboration and Intellectual Property for Sustainable Design Innovation
WHEN: Monday, November 25, 2002, 11:00 AM EST
WHERE:
E15-070
Bartos Theatre [map]
Wiesner Building
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA
WEBCAST:
Archived Stream.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE:
Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Director, Media Lab Asia
Program in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
Bish Sanyal
Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning
Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT
Mitchel Resnick
LEGO Papert Associate Professor of Learning Research
Program in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
Mark S. Ackerman
Associate Professor, School of Information and
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT:
Addressing global design challenges in the environment and underserved
communities requires a cooperative approach towards sustainable design
innovation, one that embraces multidisciplinary expertise, participatory
design and rapid dissemination of critical innovations in the field. How
can a rural farmer in Botswana cooperatively develop appropriate solutions
with students and domain experts at MIT for his community? How can a
doctor in Sao Paulo access a network of medical device companies to help
manufacture and disseminate her design innovations widely? While there is
a great emphasis on large breakthrough R&D innovations, there is often
little support for developing and disseminating small-scale, affordable,
and locally sustainable designs.
The Open Source phenomenon has been influential in the software community,
however distributed collaboration in knowledge-intensive engineering
design requires widely accessible design tools as well as novel mechanisms
for supporting social communities of practice, intellectual property
rights and field deployment of product innovations. ThinkCycle has been
developed as a Web-based collaboration platform that provides community
tools and shared online spaces for designers, domain experts and
stakeholders to discuss, exchange, construct and peer-review evolving
design solutions in critical domains. Over 1,500 users worldwide access
and contribute hundreds of design concepts, resources, projects and
publications on the site. ThinkCycle is emerging as a collaborative
platform, open design repository and global community for innovations in
sustainable design: http://www.thinkcycle.org.
Studies were conducted on the nature of design interaction, learning and
intellectual property emerging from open collaborative design, in studio
courses run at MIT over the past 2 years. Peer-review by experts not
co-located with design teams and lightweight asynchronous interfaces with
existing modes of communication, better sustain the "social process of
design" in online settings. Social inquiry into notions of intellectual
property reveal a typology of patterns with different levels of public
disclosure as well as both formal and informal property rights adopted
under different conditions, including patents and open source. However,
there is much ambiguity and conflict regarding how to deal with
cooperative innovations as they evolve from being subpatentable learning
experiments to functional and commercially viable solutions with
potentially large social impact. The thesis provides a framework within
which we can begin to answer these questions.
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