Fab City Store and DDMP activities were hosted as part of the festival Makerspace, a collaborative hands-on space for festival participants to explore the concepts of digital society.

THE FESTIVAL

More than 19 500 participants from 80 countries come together to discuss current issues of digital society at this three-day festival. Participants represent a cross-section of (digital) society, which includes professionals from economics, politics, business, hacker culture, NGOs, media, and marketing, as well as bloggers, activists, artists, and social media experts. Roughly 50 percent of re:publica 18 speakers were women, ranking the event as one of the most inclusive of its kind.  

DDMP and the Creative Europe program co-funded activities inside Makerspace.

Makerspace has been a fixture of re:publica since 2014 welcoming creative minds, designers, inventors and coders from the maker scene at re:publica.

It provides room for creativity, exchange of knowledge and asks festival goers to create something new for our digital future. With sustainability in mind, its about creating something big that will last even after re:publica, and something small that anyone can take home with them. Across the workshops, exhibitions and installations participants made robots together, statement flags and paper GIFs, worked on a sustainable biotech future with medical open source devices and designed boats out of plastic waste.

DISTRIBUTED DESIGN

Featured in the Makerspace, was Fab City Store. A Fab City Grand Paris initiative and DDMP member, that brings an ethical charter to shopping hand-made. The store, represented by the young and innovative team from Paris, showcased a selection of some of the best designs that manifest the values of the Fab City Store.

BOLD DESIGN

Bold Design is a scenography studio from Paris who have collaborated with MIT Media Lab, Centre Pompidou and Kataba. The 3D forms displayed at re:publica were locally designed and produced in Paris using 3D printing. The team have recently launched a collaboration with DDMP friend from London, Batch.Works to create 100% PLA batch-printed homewares.

KATAPOSTE

Kataposte fuses music and digital fabrication to make portable music players. Open source designs make repair, upgrade and customisation easy and community enabled. Kataposte has been chosen by Fab City Store to attend the DDMP Summer School this June.

DISTRIBUTED DESIGN AND BUSINESS MODELS

DDMP project leader Kate Armstrong and re:publica’s Sandra Mamitzsch presented a brainstorming session on Distributed Design Business Models. As digital means and the Maker Movement merge, new markets, and hence business models begin to emerge based primarily on a mix of product and service delivered in a distributed manner using digital means. The discussion at re:publica centred on the availability of new income streams which are collaborative, diversified and often cross platform, but also highlighted the shifting value generated by these income streams – many models prioritising the building of strong value-centric communities as part of their core strategy. Amongst the many innovative business models which arose during the discussion were Aquapionners, Smart Citizen Kit, Wikifactory, Flowalistik, Open Desk, Wikihouse, Field Ready, Careables, Open Dot, Faberin, Open Source Beehives, Precious Plastic and Farmbot. The knowledge harvested during the workshop will be collated and added to the resource hub of distributeddesign.eu and will be worked on further as part of the DD Summer School in Eindhoven in June.