What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

什么是“开放式设计”，谁能说出来？在有关开放设计的新兴文献中，与自由文化以及开放源代码软件和硬件的价值观和实践有着明显的一致性。然而，同样的文献包括技术实践和研究的多个，甚至是相互矛盾的领域。这些不同的观点可以追溯到1970年代至1990年代的自由文化倡导者，他们提倡将互联网的理想定义为固有的赋权，民主化和反文化。但是，最近的方法包括对黑客和制作活动的女性主义和批判性干预，以及将最终用户和消费者带入设计过程的“开放式创新”企业战略。今天剩下的似乎分为两种思想流派。一方面，我们在技术和设计上都得到了“开放性”的庆祝认可。另一方面，我们对这些理想和问题有持续不断的批评，其中批评指出了种族，性别，年龄和基于阶级的排斥的持久形式，以及关于开放式设计，劳动力和权力之间关系的问题。基本上没有答案。