Open Design type A - Free initiatives.

Free initiatives are design openness taken to the Nth degree, they are not for profit (directly) methods of getting designs made by giving the means to produce them to the end user.

They can range greatly from blueprint programs such as Precious plastics:

https://davehakkens.nl/projects/

To empowered mum style DIY projects such as lifehacks:

http://www.lifehack.org

Arguably the most successful projects of this type are online NFP's such as openoffice and wikipedia:

https://www.openoffice.org/

I like to view free initiatives as a form of functional communism

By giving the end user the means of production and asking for donations or retaining certain rights for the work the designer is essentially putting full faith in the community to recognise the worth of their work through individual use.

they do not ask for monetary gain equal to the products worth but rather equal to the worth of their contribution.

They are also able to get instantaneous feedback from users in a community meaning improvements can be made consistently by up to billions of people.

Sustainability of Type A Open Design.

By negating the transportation of most of the components of the end product free initiatives are able to produce lower environmental impacts than any other method of design (except maybe virtual).

As far as economic sustainability however many free initiatives shut down due to lack of infrastructure, their goal in the end is to help others rather than gain profit in general. If all companies worked in this fashion many important roles would become obsolete.

social sustainability however has been massively enhanced through the existence of open sourcing. My favourite example is the open source civilisation produced by open source ecology which provides blueprints for all the machines needed to start a modern civilisation.

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/

Open ness Analysis

It could be assumed that this form of open design is in fact the truest connection between the designer and end client but in actuality the designer is so detached from their client in terms of 'one to one' that the task could almost be automated.

With the added labour associated with the end user it is understandable why it poses no real threat to mainstream production. However in future societies and utopias partial open sourcing is fully viable and would serve as a possible job in a post automation world.