TOWARDS BUILDING AN OPEN ENVIRONMENTFOR DESIGN INFORMATION
Hideaki Takeda
Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering (RACE), The University of Tokyo
National Institute of Informatics (NII)ABSTRACTIn this paper, I discuss needs for openness of design informationand methods to realize it. I argue why design information shouldbe open and what benefits will result by opening and sharing
design information. In software design, open source software isgetting accepted as a way of developing software products. I
overview it and analyze how it can be applied to artifact design.
Then I discuss how such an environment can be built.
Identification, representation, and sharing mechanism are crucial.
Lastly I summarize discussion with people in the designcommunity. Many people disagree with opening design
information, but I dispute with their objections.
Keywords: information sharing, design knowledge, knowledge
representation, open source software, ontology, Semantic Web

1 INTRODUCTION
We have designed a very wide variety of artifacts and havefulfilled our environment with such artifacts to make our life
happy. But now a new demand for design arises. Our design
capability is tested by the global environment problems, i.e., weare requested to achieve optimal solutions by design artifacts
with limited resources on the earth. Since we are struggling tomaintain such a variety of artifacts even now, the new demand ischallenging to design community.
In this paper, I discuss needs for openness of design informationand methods to realize it. I argue why design information shouldbe open and what benefits will result by opening and sharing
design information. Then I discuss how such an environment canbe built. Identification, representation, and sharing mechanism
are crucial. Lastly I summarize discussion with people in thedesign community. Many people disagree with opening design
information, but I dispute with their objections.

2 DEFINITION OF OPENNESS OF DESIGNINFORMATIONFirst, I define openness of design information in general. Heredesign information on a product means all kind of informationthat is used to realize it as an artifact. It includes not only
information that the product itself has but also provenance of the
product.
1.
Inherent information: information that the product itself has.
It includes design specifications which show performanceand basic attributes of the product, 2D or 3D drawings
which represent structure, shape, and materials. It can beobtained approximately by the third party with analysis of
the product itself.
2.
Provenance information: information that indicates theprocess of realization of the product, i.e., how the product issuggested, how it is articulated, and how it is gotten its
details. It includes required specifications, design rationale,
Hideaki Takeda
takeda@race.u-tokyo.ac.jp

used knowledge, and design process including decision
makings. It is no way to know this kind of information
except designers that design it.
The former is relatively easy to imagine but it alone isinsufficient as design information because designed artifacts aremeaningful when we know how designers intend and how theintention is articulated.
In addition to design information, we also need manufacturing
information on a product. It is another kind of provenanceinformation, i.e., how it is materially realized. It includes
information on tools and machines that are used andmanufacturing process that is actually done. It is equallyimportant information to design information, but I discuss design
information in this paper to focus on design issues.
Then I refer to openness. Openness of information here meansthat information is publicly available. It doesn’t care where
information is located or who owns, but it is important that
information is permanently available. World Wide Web (WWW,
Web) is now a good practice of openness of information.
Information on Web is basically publicly and permanently
available.

3 REASONS AND BENEFITS FOR OPENING OF
DESIGN INFORMATIONThe ultimate reason to realize openness of design information issharing of intellectual work by human being. Design is one of themost important intellectual activities by human being. It is not
exclusive like artistic activity but ubiquitously exists in oursociety. We have spent a huge amount of effort on designing
artifacts for a long time. But the effort is basically isolated, i.e.,very locally collaborated and inherited. We can learn how towrite novels by reading novels more or less. But designed
artifacts, in particular modern industrial artifacts are by far harder
to learn how we can design from. They are mostly like a blackbox, i.e., understanding artifacts is difficult because of its
complexity and understanding of design intention is by far
difficult because of implicit nature. It is nature of design thatevery effort on design is embedded as a physical artifact, so it has
been reasonable until now. But the situation is changed. One isthat most of design process is digitized. We can preserve all
information on design in computers. The other is that we have theway to distribute information, i.e., Internet and World Wide
Web. So we have opportunity to enhance sharing of design
activities.
The above is the ideal goal, but there are many benefits to enable
openness of design information.
I here picked up six benefits as follows;1.
Benefits for customers:
Customers of products can know more information about
products. It is useful for them to decide which products
they buy. They can understand designers’ intention andcompare it with their purpose of purchase. It is also useful
to increase creditability for products. It is analogous to foodsafety. People prefer not only food without toxic or otherproblematic ingredient but also food of which production
process is clear and reliable. In designed products, itcorresponds to inherent design information and provenancedesign information respectively. It is becoming right forcustomers to know such information on products.
2.
Benefits for designers:
It is clear that sharing design information will increase
productivity of design. Products are rarely created fromscratch. Rather products are created as improvement ofexisting products or use them as reference. It takes a lot oftime to understand such existing products, namely reverse
engineering. If design information is open already,designers can start their new design from the top of existing
design. It will sometimes result in reduction of costs andsometimes result in faster evolution of products. Anotherbenefit is to enhance more collaboration among designers.
One designer may add extra ideas in addition to ideas by
the other designer if they could understand their design
processes to each other. They will be able to collaborate toeach other by integrating their ideas.
3.
Benefits for both designers and customers
Opening of design information makes a new opportunity
for collaboration between designers and customers. As
mentioned in the above, customers can share understandingof designed artifacts with designers. Some advanced
customers can make feedback to designers to improve theproducts, or furthermore they may join design. Such a
process will result in more suitable design to customers’
needs. It is also expected that it will reduce mistakes indesign. It is valuable for both designers and customers.
4.
Benefits for product life cycle
We are now conscious that product life cycle includes notjust design, manufacturing and use but maintenance,
recycle, and disposal [1]. The whole product life isbasically governed by design because other processes are
dependent on products already produced according todesign. Opening design information can smoothen theseprocesses, e.g., it reduces analysis for disassembly andrecycle.
5.
Benefits for society – preservation of knowledge –Designed products are results of our intellectual work. We
spend a lot of time to design various artifacts. We’ve
produced tremendous artifacts but most of them have been
disappeared according to change of our society and often
market. Preserving all physical artifacts is impossible, but
preserving information on them is possible. By preserving
artifacts as information is our heritage for future generation.
6.
Benefits for society – design as commons –The computer technology created a new environment where
people easily operate and distribute information. It doesn’t
simply mean that information becomes public. Rather
information can be controlled more intentionally. Now
there is danger for digital divide between developed anddeveloping countries. Information commons is needed [2].
Design should be also commons. Sharing design
information between developed and developing counties
can help to improve quality of life in developing countries
by designing and manufacturing products by themselves
In above six types of benefits, the first three are directly related tothe current product markets, while the rest are indirectly but the
impact to the society is larger.
Of course, there can be demerits. We will discuss them in Section
8.

4 CONSIDERATIONS FOR ADAPTABILITY TO
INDUSTIRIES
Before going on methods for openness of design information, I
discuss whether openness of design information is acceptabledepending on types of industries in two ways. One is typology by

product architecture and the other is by technology developing
phases.

4. 1 Integral architecture and modular
architecture
Function is the purpose of design and attribute is means to realizefunction. Generally speaking, design is mapping from function toattribute [3]. Since functions required for modern industrial
products are sophisticated, attributes of products are complicated.
They usually consist of some amount of components. So
composition of components is a common feature of modern
industrial products, rather the way of composition is often more
important than components themselves. Ulrich pointed out that
there are mainly two types of component composition in modern
industrial products [4]. He called it “product architecture”. One is“integral architecture” which means functions and structures arecomplicatedly interdependent. It takes a lot of efforts to integratecomponents. It is done by human communication. But the tuningof over all performance is relatively easy. The typical example isautomobile.
The other is “modular architecture” which means functions andstructures are well correspondent to each other. Since interfaces
for components are predefined, composition of components iseasy. On the other hand tuning of performance is not easy. The
typical example is personal computer.
Product architecture is not solely related to products themselves
but it is said that it is also related to organization culture which
varies from country to country [5]. Companies in countries likeUSA often show strength in products in modular architecture, on
the other hand, those in Japan in integral architecture.
Design information in modular architecture is easy to shift open,
since openness of interface is already done. Standardization liesin the same line. So we don’t worry about openness of design
information on this type of products so much. Sooner or later, atleast inherent information becomes open. But concerning
provenance information, we need another system to push towards
openness.
Design information in integral architecture looks difficult to open.
But the effect seems larger, i.e., openness of design information
can compensate the current difficulty in design process. Whendesigners of components integrate their components, a lot of time
is consumed by understanding design to each other. Explicationof not only inherent information but also provenance information
can help such understanding. Software design is exactly this case,and it looks successful as we will see in the next session.

4.2 Pre-competitive, Competitive, and postcompetitive products
Yoshikawa addressed that there are three different phases intechnology development, namely pre-competitive, competitive,
and pos-competitive phases [6]. Pre-competitive phase meansthat technology is not matured to complete so that stakeholders
like academia and industries are easy to cooperate. Competitive
phase means that technology is well established but still underdevelopment so that competition in the market occurs. Postcompetitive phase means that technology is already matured andno more development is expected so that little competition occurs.
If products are now in competitive phase, it is difficult to impose
openness of design information.
If products are in post-competitive phase, companies may
welcome openness of design information because in this phasecompanies are often continuing production not for benefits but
for social duty. In this case, enforcement by laws and social
consensus can work well.
If products are in pre-competitive phase, stakeholders naturally
exchange information to improve technology.

5 LESSONS LEARNT FROM PRACTISESIn this section, I overview design practices in the open source
culture. Open source design is originated in software design, andit becomes a movement or a culture. It is now spreading out otherproduct design slowly but steadily.

5.1 Open source software
We can learn from the recent movement in software engineeringso-called “Open source” software. Open source software meansthat codes of software products are open and can be re-used. By
opening codes, programmers can develop their own software
products by re-using or modifying existing open source software
products. The most typical example is Linux, but there are moreproducts like Firefox and Apache. Another example is Wikipedia
which is not a software product but a huge knowledge basecontributed by a lot of people who are mostly anonymous.
Open source movement changes the software development
process. A new development process is called “bazaar” style incontract to “cathedral” style [7]. In the bazaar style, software
products are open from the early stage so that everyone cancontribute the development. Frequent release policy is also
included in the list of Web 2.0 features [8]. It is said that it
contributes to improve software quality and users’ satisfactions.
Once open software movement was regarded as enemy ofsoftware industry. It seemed that they claimed invalidity ofbusiness of software industry. But people realized that anyway
the bazaar style could produce nice software products recently.
So many software companies are now collaborative to the open
software community.
We can learn many lessons from success in software engineering.
Firstly sharing design information can reduce design costs withkeeping quality. If we could re-use existing design solutions, we
can focus on more creative part of design. It already happens thatdesign information is shared in a company. If we could extend it
to community-wide sharing, more effects on cost and quality
would be expected.
Secondly design information could be preserved. In open source
software, even if the original developer of a software productlooses interest on it and stop developing it, other people cansucceed to develop it if they like. So software can survive. In
engineering design, death of companies implies death of design
information. There are no ways to access information on productsof which manufacturer closed its business. If design informationis already opened, information can be accessible whichever
manufacturer is alive or not.

5.2 artifact design in the open source culture
As we mentioned, there are many successful projects on software
products. There are already some projects that actually run open
design activities even for non-software products. Most of themare products related to computers. It is called open source
hardware [9]. For example Opencores.org [10] is developing
microprocessors and other chips with open source style [11].
They are mainly inspired by success of open source software andalso technically related to open source software.
There are some exceptions. ThinkCycle, a spinout of MIT student
project, offers an environment for open collaborative design[12][13]. The aim of the project is sharing of design knowledge,in particular design for products needed socially. The project
offers a collaborative environment where domain experts anddesigners discuss and show design solutions. The results arearchived as documents. A typical design case with this project isdesign of a novel low-cost IV drip flow for patients infected withcholera. There are more than 200 documents and many design
results in the site.
There are also other projects like “The Open Prosthetics
Project”[14] in which designers share knowledge aboutprosthetics design.
The main focus on these projects is how to provide collaborativeenvironments among people who work in different domains andspread out geographically. Thanks to recent development of theInternet technologies, it is not so difficult to provide them. The
tackling problem is a social one, i.e., how to involve andencourage people or develop a culture for sharing. If there arises
such a culture in a project, it will continue. Otherwise it will
disappear even if there is a good computer environment forcollaboration.
The other problem is representation. In open source software
projects, information on design is represented as software
products themselves (source codes), documentation, anddiscussion archives like mailing-list logs. The significant featureof software in comparison to artifact design, source codes
basically contain all information on software products. Designers
can understand design of software products by reading source
codes.
In artifact design, it is different. In the projects on artifacts,
information is shared as documents written with texts anddrawing. It just contains partial and ambiguous information about
design.
It is not a serious problem when the amount of information isrelatively small. People may compensate information bycommunicating to each other. But if it becomes large enough, itwould be troublesome and maybe obstacle for information
sharing. We need formal representation for design information
sharing in a large scale.

6 METHODS TO REALIZE OPENNESS OF DESIGNINFORMATIONAs we mentioned, we need a formal system for sharing design
information. Opening and sharing design information on artifacts
needs some new technologies. I pick up three issues here, i.e.,
identification, representation, and sharing mechanism.

6. 1 Identification
In order to distribute design information on artifacts, artifacts anddesign information should have identification, and then theyshould be associated to each other. Each design should have its
own identification. In the Internet, it can be achieved by URI(Uniform Resource Identifier)[15] . URI is generalization of URL(Uniform Resource Locator) and can work not only as address of
web pages but also as identification of any objects. Any URI is
unique in the Internet. But URI itself is not sufficient because it
cannot carry any information about relationship among objects.
In Semantic Web [16], it is realized as RDF/S (Resource
Description Framework/RDF Schema) [17][18] and OWL (Web
Ontology Language) [19]. A RDF statement is a triple among
URIs and represents a relation between a resource to another witha label (property). RDFS offers modeling mechanism for RDF
statements like class hierarchy. OWL offers more powerfulmodeling mechanism than RDFS. By using these languages, we
can represent not only relationship among design but also
contents of design.
In mass production, many products are produced from a single
design model. It is analogous to class-instance relation in objectoriented programming paradigm. Mass products usually have
manufacturer’s serial number that is unique in a company or
product. Serial numbers can easily be converted into URN(Uniform Resource Name), which is another subset of URI. It canbe associated to class representation by RDF/S or OWL. But

association mechanism is needed. Association can be realized byresolution servers such as DNS (Domain Name System) in
networking and DOI (Digital Object Identifier) [20] in digital
libraries.

6. 2 Representation
The second problem is how to represent design information. I
categorized design information into two types of information, i.e.,
inherent information and provenance information
There are many efforts how to represent design objects such as
3D CAD and product modeling, which is what I mentioned as
inherent information. But it is not sufficient because they are justrepresentation of the final product. We need to represent
information on the other stage like conceptual design. That iswhat I called provenance information.
Concepts in design should be represented in a formal way. It is
the role of ontology for design [21] [22], and Semantic Web
enables to publish representation with concepts in ontology in theInternet.
Furthermore we need information on design process, i.e., howdesigners proceed their design. It is a more serious problem
because there are no general agreements how design process
should be represented. I here show an attempt to publish design
process information. In [23], we represent design knowledge
related to design process with XML syntax. A design document
consists of two parts. One is a human-readable part in which anormal text is included. The other is a logical part in whichknowledge on design is described in a logical form. Knowledge
is described with concepts in predicate ontology, attributeontology, and object ontology. We model design process by
abduction [24] and represent design process as application ofdesign knowledge in abductive inference. Then we can know
design rationale for each design by tracing design knowledge, i.e.,
why it is designed in such a way. It is merely a proposal how
design knowledge and design process can be represented, but weneed to discuss it seriously to make design process moretransparent.

6.3 Sharing mechanism
Another problem is sharing mechanism, i.e., how information is
actually distributed and shared. As I mentioned, it is important
how to involve and encourage people in community of sharing
information.
We can learn from recent development of information technology
such as blogging and social networking services.

7 DISCUSSION
I already talked this idea on a symposium in a design community
in Japan. Many participants, in particular designers in companies,
disagree with opening design information. I summarize theirobjections and my answers to them.
[Question] Secret of design can not be opened. It is corecompetence of companies.
[Answer] Competitive design can be excluded. Even accepting
this exception, there is a lot of useful design information forothers.
[Question] Design information is not understandable for others.
For example, design information is usually valuable with the
manufacturing knowledge. So it is useless to open design
information.
[Answer] I agree that design information is not completely
understandable for others. But even partial understanding isvaluable. If it would be true, it implies that opening design
information would not make direct dangers for companies

because other companies cannot produce copy products easily
even if such information is available.
[Question] Exhibit of design information increases danger for
product-liability lawsuits. Companies should control information
carefully not to crease this kind of risk.
[Answer] I think that it is opposite. Information hiding may
cause a lot of cost, e.g., if serious accidents with products would
happen. Opening design information in advance can reduce suchrisk.
[Question] There are no reasons to bear such cost.
[Answer] Opening design information is beneficial forcompanies.
- Wise consumers trust companies that open their information
more than those that do not.
- Opening design information will reduce future costs to maintainproducts. Products may be maintained by other parties with suchinformation.

8 SUMMARY
In this paper, I discuss the value of openness of design
information. I admit that discussion here is rough and notcomprehensive at all. What I intended is to invoke open
discussion for this issue. Design information is valuable but it is
not solely valuable for companies it is valuable for society. I
believe that openness of design information is crucial for designcommunity just to adopt the Internet era but to unlock the futureof design for the welfare of mankind.

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