Jérémy Bonvoisin

L'essor des services et des technologies de l'information et de la communication (TIC) est généralement considéré comme le marqueur d'une dématérialisation de l'économie – phénomène grandement attendu dans le cadre des discussions sur le développement durable. Nous nous plaçons dans le débat autour de cette hypothèse en questionnant la matérialité des TIC et des services à travers le cas des services informationnels – activités de génération d'information répondant à un besoin décisionnel. Nous examinons plus en détail les services d'optimisation basés sur les réseaux de capteurs – services offerts à l'aide d'informations collectées par des capteurs intégrés dans un réseau sans fil, permettant de surveiller un processus dans le but de l'optimiser, et par là-même de diminuer ses impacts. Nous proposons ainsi une méthode intégrée d'analyse environnementale et d'éco-conception des services d'optimisation basés sur les réseaux de capteurs. Celle-ci permet de déterminer la pertinence environnementale d'un service, c'est-à-dire sa capacité à générer moins d'impacts qu'il n'en évite, mais également de le concevoir avec cette pertinence en vue. Notre apport scientifique réside dans la proposition d'un modèle d'impact pour les services informationnels et d'un modèle de cycle de vie des réseaux de capteurs, ainsi que dans le développement d'un outil d'analyse basé sur la simulation réseau. L'application de la méthode proposée au cas d'un service d'optimisation de la collecte de déchets nous permet de conclure que, si des marges de manœuvres importantes sont identifiables, la pertinence environnementale de ces services ne doit pas être considérée comme acquise, tout comme le potentiel de dématérialisation des TIC et des services.

Open source hardware (OSH) is hardware for which a free right of any use is granted to the general public and whose technical documentation is completely available and freely accessible on the internet (DIN SPEC 3105). While OSH has the potential of facilitating participation in product development on a broadly distributed scale, the need for physical production adds a layer of complexity compared to the development of free and open source software (FOSS). More evidence is needed on the transferability of open source development processes from software to physical products. This cross-sectional study therefore takes a closer look at the transition of open source practices from bits to atoms on the activity level. It investigates the issue of how practitioners work together to design OSH products as well as associated limitations in practice.

Recent years have seen the rise of citizens as contributors to hardware product creation. This trend has increased attention to open source hardware (OSH): a phenomenon that extends the intellectual property management and development practices in open source software (OSS) into the design of physical objects. OSH projects are different from OSS projects due to product type, and distinct from traditional closed source new product development (NPD) ones due to their openness. These differences challenge the degree of applicability of existing project success definitions in the OSH context. To investigate project success in OSH, we conducted a qualitative survey with practitioners. We report characteristics of successful OSH projects through three identified themes: (a) value creation – the big-picture impact, (b) quality of output – the quality of the hardware and accompanying documentation and (c) project process – activities that contribute to success. We contextualise by comparing OSH with selected literature on the success of OSS and NPD project management. While our study confirms a similarity between OSS and OSH in defining project success, it also highlights themes that are uniquely important to the latter. These findings are helpful for OSH development practice and could provide lessons for OSS development and closed source NPD.

‘Openness’ is one of the key concepts brought forward by postindustrial narratives questioning the modern repartition of roles between industries and customers. In these narratives, citizen participation in design and intellectual property management based on open source principles are the promise of more sustainable production models. In this context, openness in product design and development has been the object of growing interest and experimentation from academia, businesses and grassroots communities. As a result, numerous concepts emerged that attempt to grasp the essence of this phenomenon, unfortunately leading to overlapping, conflicting or speculative depictions. In this article, we share the understanding we gained throughout 6 years of research on Open Design and Open Source Hardware and attempt to make the difference between myths and facts. We depict an enthusiastic but realistic picture of Open Design and Open Source Hardware practices as we could observe them and deliver a structured framework to situate concepts and their differences. From this, we share seven observations leading to seven corresponding research questions and establish a research agenda to stimulate further investigations into this socially relevant and potentially ground-breaking phenomenon.

Open design (OD) is a promising approach to address global sustainability challenges. At the same time, however, the increased use of OD brings new challenges. To understand the potential of OD in a specific context, we adopted the concept of a residential rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) as a case study. We first identified the critical design features of the RWHS. After that, we analysed the potential for local reproduction of these features at the grassroots level of low-income communities in developing countries. This analysis revealed that varying limitations related to materials, skills, and manufacturing tools may hamper the adoption of OD by local communities when trying to improve their water management. In the light of our findings, we argue that OD processes are likely to face challenges if replicability, substitutability and adaptability are not successfully integrated into the design. We suggest a design-for-frugality mindset and adoption of parametric design processes and design parameters as key strategies to boost OD processes in low-income communities. We also stress the importance of safety and liability aspects in the studied context.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is shared online so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell it. In spite of the increasing popularity of this alternative IP management approach, the field of OSH remains fragmented of diverse practices seeking for settlement. This challenges providers of groupware solutions to capture the specific needs of open source product development practitioners. This contribution therefore delivers a list of basic requirements and verifies them by comparing offered functions of existing groupware solutions.

The CubeFactory2 is a self-sufficient and luggage-sized production unit illustrating the concept of sustainable manufacturing through circularity and resource conservation. It is circular in the sense that it can create new products out of waste. It embeds a Fuse Filament Fabrication 3D-printer whose input material is supplied by a recycling unit producing filament out of thermoplastic waste. It saves resources in the sense that it embeds renewable energy and material supply to recycle and 3D-print without the need for further infrastructure. In its current state of development, the purpose of the CubeFactory2 is primarily illustrative and to support awareness on sustainable manufacturing. If offers an experienceable application of the concepts of circularity and resource conservation. The long term vision is to take advantage of its compactness, portability and autonomy, in order to enable fabrication in areas of low infrastructure. The CubeFactory2 combines off-the-shelf and custom subsystems, the four mains of which are a 3D-printer, a recycler, an energy supply unit, and a casing. The present hardware meta-paper describes the design rationale of these systems and offers complementary information to the published open source hardware design files. Great care has been paid in the design process to enable replicability by using standard components when possible and releasing all documentation of bespoke elements following open source standards. This article should contribute to make this functional proof of concept ready for replication and for further development towards a market-ready product.

Open Source Hardware (OSH) is an increasingly viable approach to intellectual property management extending the principles of Open Source Software (OSS) to the domain of physical products. These principles support the development of products in transparent processes allowing the participation of any interested person. While increasing numbers of products have been released as OSH, little is known on the prevalence of participative development practices in this emerging field. It remains unclear to which extent the transparent and participatory processes known from software reached hardware product development. To fill this gap, this paper applies repository mining techniques to investigate the transparency and workload distribution of 105 OSH product development projects. The results highlight a certain heterogeneity of practices filling a continuum between public and private development settings. They reveal different organizational patterns with different levels of centralization and distribution. Nonetheless, they clearly indicate the expansion of the open source development model from software into the realms of physical products and provide the first large-scale empirical evidence of this recent evolution. Therewith, this article gives body to an emerging phenomenon and contributes to give it a place in the scientific debate. It delivers categories to delineate practices, techniques to investigate them in further detail as well as a large dataset of exemplary OSH projects. The discussion of first results signposts avenues for a stream of research aiming at understanding stakeholder interactions at work in new product innovation practices in order to enable institutions and industry in providing appropriate responses.