InsideOpen :

Trigger Happy 1998 - THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD

Françoise Détienne writes the following in ‘Memory of past designs: distinctive roles in individual and collective design’; “Empirical studies on design have emphasised the role of memory of past solutions. Design involves the use of generic knowledge as well as episodic knowledge about past designs for analogous problems: in this way, it involves the reuse of past designs. We analyse this mechanism of reuse from a socio-cognitive viewpoint … linked to the problem solving activity itself…”  

[Published in International Journal of Cognitive Technology, 2003, 1(8), p 16-24]

With InsideOpen the collaborative is addressed by the proclamation of identities constantly being readjusted (webblogs accumulate post after post, profiles are adjusted, images updated) through the notion of these reuse mechanisms linked to cooperation, even confrontation and finally (possibly) integration of viewpoints.

InsideOpen is set as a framework to appropriate and study these mechanisms of reuse. In doing so, two important aspects need to be identified; access or source of information and the target this information is used for vis a vis a particular design task. In short; source and target situations.

Individual webblogs, when they are used to describe a design discourse, can accommodate the construction and representation of target situations (setting out a design task) yet at the same time act as source situations for others (someone reading-around accumulating inspiration). As such the retrieval and selection of source situations can and will be analogous to particular target situations. Indirectly one could therefore expect bloggers, through the use of comments on someone else’s work, to start engaging in the adaptation of their source situations to accommodate their target situation signaling the birth of a collaborative.

Here, reuse is bipolar and not just one person seeking inspiration by looking at the work of others but becoming actively engaged with the work of others just by the nature of the webblog.

Does this coinciding of source and target situations through the network of webblogs indicate a new type of author? Or does it eradicate authorship altogether?

Article by Ephraim Joris