I spent a couple of days last week at LIFT in Marseilles. Amongst many other enjoyable encounters, I discussed with Anders Sandberg the ethics of giving people a dose of Oxytocin before going into a meeting with them, with Adrian Bowyer the pleasure of being able to print a printer for a friend on a printer you built for £300, and with Alma Whitten and Adrianna Lukas about if we should be keeping our data ourselves or whether Google should keep it all.
The theme of the conference was bringing the ethos of the web into the real world. I spoke about how the web has proved that we have a powerful ability for mutual aid at a large scale but that many of the systems that we operate by have designed this ability out. I tried to describe a world in which our every interaction was designed to support our desire to support each other; I used the examples of thinkpublic’s EBD approach and The Good Gym to show how mutual aid can be a primary design principle for the formats by which we live our daily lives.
If this became a reality and we all had one of Adrian’s printers we could go beyond just designing together and actually add physically to the services we are using. Printing new beds for our hospitals or printing new equipment for our parks (perhaps even using recycled plastic). Co-production would be a reality in a way it never has been before. What fun.