Open manufacturing, also known as open production, maker manufacturing, and with the slogan "Design Global, Manufacture Local" is a new model of socioeconomic production in which physical objects are produced in an open, collaborative and distributed manner and based on open design and open source principles. Open manufacturing combines the following elements of a production process: new open production tools and methods, new value-based movements, new institutions and networks for manufacturing and production, and open source methods, software and protocols. Open manufacturing may also include digital modeling and fabrication and computer numeric control of the machines used for production through open source software and open source hardware. The philosophy of open manufacturing is close to the open-source movement, but aims at the development of physical products rather than software. The term is linked to the notion of democratizing technology as embodied in the maker culture, the DIY ethic, the open source appropriate technology movement, the Fablab-network and other rooms for grassroot innovation such as hackerspaces.
Principles
The openness of "open manufacturing" may relate to the nature of the product, to the nature of the production machines and methods, to the process of production and innovation, or to new forms of value creation. Jeremy Rifkin argues, that open production through 3D-printing "will eventually and inevitably reduce marginal costs to near zero, eliminate profit, and make property exchange in markets unnecessary for many products".
Socioeconomic implications
The following points are seen as key implications of open manufacturing:
a democratization of production,
a decentralization of production and local value creation,
the possibility to produce high quality prototypes and products in small quantities at moderate prices,
In the context of socioeconomic development, open manufacturing has been described as a path towards a more sustainable industrialization on a global scale, that promotes "social sustainability" and provides the opportunity to shift to a "collaboration-oriented industrialization driven by stakeholders from countries with different development status connected in a global value creation at eye level". For developing countries, open production could notably lead to products more adapted to local problems and local markets and reduce dependencies on foreign goods, as vital products could be manufactured locally. In such a context, open manufacturing is strongly linked to the broader concept of Open Source Appropriate Technology movement.
Views
According to scholar Michel Bauwens, Open Manufacturing is "the expansion of peer production to the world of physical production". Redlich and Bruns define "Open Production" as "a new form of coordination for production systems that implies a superior broker system coordinating the information and material flows between the stakeholders of production", and which will encompass the entire value creation process for physical goods: development, manufacturing, sales, support etc. A policy paper commissioned by the European Commission uses the term "maker manufacturing" and positions it between social innovation, open source ICT and manufacturing.
Criticism
A number of factors are seen to hamper the broad-based application of the model of "open manufacturing" and / or to realize its positive implications for more sustainable global production pattern. The first factor is the sustainability of commons-based peer production models: "Empowerment happens only, if the participants are willing to share their knowledge with their colleagues. The participation of the actors cannot be guaranteed, thus there are many cases known, where participation could only be insufficiently realized". Other problems include missing or inadequate systems of quality control, the persistent paradigm of high-volume manufacturing and its cost-efficiency, the lack of widely adopted platforms to share hardware designs, as well as challenges linked to the joint-ownership paradigm behind the open licences of open manufacturing and the fact, that hardware is much more difficult to share and to standardize than software. In developing countries, a number of factors need to be considered in addition to the points above. Scholar Waldman-Brown names the following: lack of manufacturing expertise and informality of current SMMs in emerging markets as an obstacle to quality control for final products and raw material as well as universities and vocational training programs not apt to react rapidly enough to provide the necessary knowledge and qualifications.
