Peter Troxler

The Icons of the 3rd Industrial Revolution

Under the title ‘De revolutie in de maakindustrie’ I had the pleasure to open an afternoon packed with experts from that very revolution: Enrico Dini, italian architect and ‘the man who prints houses’, and Thomas Bossuyt who works as a sales engineer with LayerWise (the guys who printed that spring for positioning a telescope … and…

Personal 3D Printing

Today’s issue of ‘The Next Wave of Manufacturing’ is all about how hobbyist 3D printers are not living up to their promise … or is it? Kiet Callies / Foter / CC BY-NC It is not a surprise that currently available hobby 3D-printers are a bit ‘finicky’, as Jessica Leber describes the printing process. I…

The Next Wave of Manufacturing

2012 has literally been the year of all sorts of New Industrial Revolution prophecies. Jeremy Rifkin has popularized his idea of the Third Industrial Revolution and the shift to lateral power at the ‘Mission Growth’ conference in Brussels. Chris Anderson has written about the maker movement and how this would would be the New Industrial…

As A Service

X as a service (XaaS) has been booming in software—but not only. Rolls Royce aircraft engines are available as a service since 1989 (http://rrpf.rolls-royce.com/RRPF/); car leasing (and in fact leasing of industrial equipment) is a normality. But imagine for a second every thing would be turned into a service … what would happen? I think:…

Open Source Design: Disruption, Desire, Destiny?

At the Swiss Design Network Conference in Lugano, I gave this keynote on the impact of the 3rd industrial revolution on design. In this keynote I try two things: to relate open design to the wider context of these similar developments which in the view of Jeremy Rifkin constitute the ingredients for a new industrial…

Lecture @ Digital Sustainability in the Knowledge Society

Today I gave a short lecture in Marcus M. Dapp’s course “Digital Sustainability in the Knowledge Society” at ETH, Zurich. Essentially I was trying to convey the basic ideas of open source hardware and how this development is tied to the notion of the Third Industrial Revolution (according to Jeremy Rifkin). As it happens, time…

Open Knowledge Festival – Helsinki, 18-22 September 2012

There is another Open Knowledge event coming up — 18-22 September 2012 in Helsinki — and I’m a proud member of the advisory board and guest programme planner for a stream on Open Design / Hardware / Manufacturing & Making. This stream covers Open Design in all its various facets (from design as a blueprint…

Open Design Now

My most recent book is “Open Design Now”, edited by Bas van Abel, Lukas Evers, Roel Klaassen and myself. The book is available from BIS publishers http://www.bispublishers.nl/bookpage.php?id=190 Content will gradually be made available at http://opendesignnow.org/; my contributions are: Libraries of the Peer Production Era The Beginning of a Beginning of the Beginning of a Trend…

Libraries of the Peer Production Era

In an upcoming book “Open Design Now — Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive” (to be available as of June, pre-orders now possible, I develop my thinking about Fab Labs and similar places further to call them the Libraries of the Peer Production Era: Mapping the landscape of commons- based peer production, I analyse the arena…

Open Design in Styria

Only two contributions of mine made it into the faboulous “Open Design” brochure of Creative Industries Styria, published in the run up to the Design Month in May this year — an article on FabLabs particularly with consideration for the alpine region (not forgetting to mention FabLab Lucerne that opened on Feb 24) and a…