Collective invention: a travelling artist's perspective.

People travel because they are searching. They are not content to download experience through mediated internet platforms, or to find themselves curated into a vat of preserved content, steeped in academic salt. Travelling is free of the dreary imperatives of everyday life; we step into the world to enlarge our frame of reference, not to be poked into another grid of curated meaning. Tourist hotspots everywhere have been heating up as fast as the climate, and unique cultural sensibilities and practices are perishing in the glare of the demands of the modern tourist. The researcher uses The Water Systems and the Stencil project as case studies in relation to the elements of effective workshop creation.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus is a paradigmatic institution of 20th-century art, in some contexts synonymous with the aesthetic and discursive institution of modernism itself. Founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus school of design (Staatliches Bauhaus) was formed through the merger of the Weimar Grand Ducal Saxon schools of fine and applied arts by its first director, the architect Walter Gropius. Having attracted controversy and persecution in the tense political environment of the Weimar Republic, the Bauhaus was forced to relocate twice (to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932) before it was finally shut down by the Nazis in 1933. The move to Dessau, however, gave Gropius an opportunity to design and build a new headquarters for the school, which became one of the most iconic contributions to modern architecture. The Bauhaus also lived on in a constellation of attempts to revive its pedagogical and design principles in a range of geographical contexts through the century. More than that, the “Bauhaus” has entered the lexicon of modern art as a formal and conceptual entity, a “style” and an “idea,” with a profound impact on the visual culture of our time. The Bauhaus school was a wellspring of boundary-breaking experiments across the arts, including architecture, industrial and typographic design, theater, photography, textiles, painting, and sculpture. Through the full array of its initiatives, the Bauhaus emerged as an extended interrogation of the changing status and social role of art in the age of industrial production. At its core, however, the Bauhaus was a collective invention of many gifted instructors and students, who shaped the institution as a laboratory of cooperative living, working, and learning. Studies of individual artists and designers, many with distinguished careers beyond the school (Josef and Anni Albers, László and Lucia Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Itten, Marcel Breuer, Oskar Schlemmer, Marianne Brandt, Gunta Stölzl, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Herbert Bayer, and many others) have done much to complicate Bauhaus historiography, demonstrating that its pedagogical philosophies and design approaches shifted with patterns of individual influence and undermining the notion of a cohesive and singular Bauhaus “idea.” The scope of scholarly interest in the institution is matched by the range of artistic disciplines and approaches it encompassed. This means that the extant Bauhaus literature in a plurality of languages and formats could fill a small library building. The 2019 centennial of the school’s founding has provided a fresh infusion of up-to-date scholarship.

Has the Promise of the Internet Been Realized? Internet Access and Collective Invention among Independent and Organizational Patent Inventors

The Internet provides individuals with new avenues for knowledge sharing and collaboration, two key ingredients for the production of novelty. Despite the unprecedented access to information and potential collaborators provided by the Internet, however, organizations remain the preeminent site of invention, presumably due to the tremendous resources, technology, and expertise at their disposal. Given the presumption that improved access to the Internet cultivates connectivity and novelty among individuals, on one hand, and the resources organizations can leverage to create novelty, on the other hand, we ask whether Internet access plays a role in the incidence of collective invention for independent inventors and organizational inventors in the knowledge economy. Regression models based on a sample of metropolitan areas in the United States predict that increases in household Internet access increases collective invention for organizational patent inventors, but not independent patent inventors.

Open-source projects as incubators of innovation: From niche phenomenon to integral part of the industry

Over the last 20 years, open-source development has become an integral part of the software industry. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to develop a systematic overview of open-source communities and their socio-economic contexts. I begin with a reconstruction of the genesis of open-source software projects and their changing relationships to established information technology companies. This is followed by the identification of four ideal-type variants of current open-source projects that differ significantly in their modes of coordination and the degree of corporate involvement. Further, I examine why open-source projects lost their subversive connotations while, in contrast to former cases of collective invention, remaining viable beyond the initial phase of innovation.