"Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets [GICMs]: The Political Economy of Innovation" by Peter Cowhey et al (from MIT Press) is THE book to read if you want to understand how digital innovation and dissemination is going to differ in coming decades from the past. And in turn, if you want to know how oligopoly producers and states are going to be being advised about how to play the game of GICM development, which will itself become the infrastructure enabling most future economic development (be it digital, or hard goods).
Essense: The phase of GICMs where digital technology is first implemented in the most advanced countries and then dissemintated/forced downward and outward by those leading countries and their high tech oligopolists is over. Future innovation in digital technology and infrastructure will emerge where ever there is the least political economic resistance and most political economic support for it. It could start in China, because of markt scale and dictatorial government streamlining its introduction. Or Singapore or Scandinavia, because of their already great advantage in wireless activity. Or India. Or in Israel, or any one of a number of countries in South America and Africa. It doesn't have to start in North America or Europe anymore. It can start elsewhere and spread there.
Why?
1. Because modularity and integratability and globalness of digital technologies and infrastructures has progressed sufficiently that proprietary bottle necks are not going to be able to stop innovation starting in the hinterlands, and then spreading willy nilly much longer.
2. Because states large and small are going to be turned into competitors bidding for digital innovators to start the latest techno legacy in their state. Lesser states can play and win in this game, because they often offer the least complex and most malleable state regulatory frameworks in which to start up. And because of the integration and modularity of GICMs, start-ups in a lesser state can spread to greater states almost at will.
Design Relevance: The authors don't comment on industrial design/architecture, but it does not take a rocket scientist to foresee that digital content, and conventional products, will inevitably be pulled along by this process into a more decentralized and horizontal pattern of innovation and dissemination. There are probably going to be more and more tiny Milans form around the world and they are going to have better and better chances at riding the GICM horizontalization of innovation.
Post Script: Think of this book as the technological and political economic underpinning of the platitude for the masses of "flatness" by the likes of Thomas Friedman.
This is a link to the online version of the book...
Essense: It is yet another indication of the market dynamics driving global information and communication markets in the new era that the hard copy of the book is available for a price, while the online version of the book is free. Clearly, this is a scholarly work for policy wonks and so has a modest market relative to a best selller, but it indicates the long term benefit of the book for both authors and publisher is to establish a global presence for the book, rather than make money directly off book sales. In short, why write/publish a book, and seek the least possible market through direct sales, when the greater long term value to publisher and authors lies in making more persons, firms and governments aware of their technical prowess in the field.
Relevance to Design: Designers, like others, over time will likely begin to emulate this model, of covering costs with small runs of certain designs to cover up front costs, and then a larger run maybe given away in the form of the design file for the product given away for others to emulate exactly.
It is a very strange concept, but essentially it involves the designer taking indirect control of the knocking off of his product by making it freely available to anyone, who wants to reproduce it. This is not a new idea, but the current global information and communications markets enable the process, where as they used to impede it.
http://globalinfoandtelecom.org/
cont.
The designer might even make use of his name, or a version of it free. By making it free to all those who would knock it off anyway, the designer is creating competition for the knock-off artists. Competition thins their margins. It forces them to seek to cooperate and bargain with a designer for preferred treatment. The designer esentially begins building a production network in which others bear all the costs of production and pay the designer a cut in order to be given preferred treatment to sustain tolerable margins. A designer might even, or a design organization might encourage, the online equivalent of Consumer Reports for industrial designs being produced by designer. Which knock-off producers are doing the best work and producing the best products. By increasing competition for his designs around the globe, the designer is turning himself into a globally known and recognized designer. He is designing for an enormous market, rather than a tiny one. In fact, he is designing for a market much bigger than even the biggest producers, or retail chains. He is leap frogging them and forcing them to follow him to a larger market with smaller margins but greater and greater economies of scale for any one willing to begin to buy up the archipeligo of knock-off producers. And of course the designer can encourage ownership concentration through cooperation, or he can discourage same by enabling still more knock off competition. Former knock-off artists will increasingly find themselves in the game of having to produce a better knock-off for less price, not just a cheaper knock off. This means lower and lower margins over time. Over time the knock-off producer becomes a tool of the designer rather than a violator and exploiter of the designer. The knock-off producer begins to work for free for the designer in some what the same way that anyone who writes content for any web site is working for free for the web site and producing content that helps them get advertising clicks and market penetration.
Look at the business model of DA, or of any of your favorite web sites. It is a give away model. Rupert Murdoch wants to change that, and so have many others before him, but all have failed. Why? Because the owners and producers for the global information and communication markets still make more money off expanding the infrastructure and increasing use of it, than they do by tighening it down and charging for it. At some point there will be a tipping point. Until that time, the model is give what you can away in ways that amplify your market share and lead to more provision of for pay design services for others. And when the tipping point comes, a vast network will shift into the business of selling what you do to a vast global market.
This is the concept that informs the future of the economy increasingly.
cont.
But that does not mean that it will make all designers winners and rich. It is a vastly more difficult and complicated game to play. But it is nevertheless an emerging game that some will play and win at, because the global information and communication markets have apparently reached a stage of enabling it.
I am rather old fashioned. I like the idea of thinking about making a thing and selling it for a fee that is profitable at the volume that I choose to and can produce it at. I do not like thinking about the clicks it will generate and working back from that to what I can afford to make. But it is a rather provincial and old-fashioned approach.
I have not cared that it worked for digital information, because I do not really like digital information as much as I like concrete goods. I still like bits more than bytes, though I consume my share of bytes.
Good design is good design, whether it is consumed by the classes for a high fee, or the masses for a low one, or for free.
If a designer is going to be knocked off, why not get in some control of the knocking off. Why not make the knock off producers, and they exist at all pricing levels of products, why not make the knock-off producers your producer network, instead of just those that rip you off.
Bring them into your regime. Let them work for you for free.
If you need any help, please contact us at – info@designaddict.com