Mickey Mouse as a Cultural Battlefield

Mickey Mouse is a legendary symbol in the copyfight. Of late, though, I’ve been noticing a surprising number of Mickey references — in street art, activism, and high-end fashion — that are making me revisit the controversial Disney mouse.

In winter 2008 H&M had a front line of Mickey Mouse clothing, no doubt mainstreaming a sub rosa fashion cue that had inspired the likes of Rihanna and Cate Blanchett. Elsewhere this year, sneak designer Jeremy Scott rolled out Mickey adidas kicks, while Hong Kong had an entire luxury Disney collection, and Louis Park presented a (super-Flashy) tribute to the mouse. Admist all that, fashionistas are posting endless snaps of themselves sporting Mickey gear.

Entering the scene with a twist of critique are the blank-face Mickey Mouse prints by Oh Logo. Their “Do Not Wear” collection is “ripping icons from the collective memory and reducing and diversifying them into a visual experience.”

The Oh Logo motto builds upon the older Mouse Liberation Front, an underground coalition launched in the seventies by cartoonists rallying against Disney’s “corporate seizure of the American narrative”. The MIL is rediscovering itself in the digital age and adapting the cause to the current copyfight. Screenings of RIP! The Remix Manifesto, for example, is one way people learn about Mickey, lawsuits, locked creativity, and the liberation efforts.

These developments interest me because they allude to an intersection of high-end / mainstream fashion with a political movement. Perhaps Mickey Mouse parallels what’s happening already with pirates — those daring outlaws who are stealing the limelight both in fashion and politics.

Come to think of it, pirates are pretty well-backed by Disney, too.

What do you make of the Mickey Comeback?

Suggested reading: Cory Doctorow’s debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Bob Levin’s Disney’s War on Counterculture.

Images: Classic serigraph by Oh Logo, Official member of the Mouse Liberation Front bysukisuki / CC NC SA

Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies for Design

Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies in Design on Slideshare

Last month, John and I gave a presentation about Open Design at the DMY Symposium in Berlin. It was a bright and welcoming audience of young designers from the International Design Festival DMY. We were graciously invited by the event’s organizers (thank you, Ake!) to talk about how open concepts and Creative Commons licensing can help designers realize their ideas, reduce barriers to collaboration, and altogether foster creativity.

So you want to Design?

We started off by outlining a few problems that designers might typically face. My friend Linda, a designer herself, helped tease out some of these issues. Firstly, young designers may not know where to find material they can build upon, let alone where and how to publish thier work so that it too can be discovered.

Secondly, young creators lack what their successful counterparts do not: fame. So while established artists have more clout and social capital, an aspiring designer has to fight bitter battles to just get their work seen let alone purchased. Nowadays, perhaps more so than ever, audience attention is drastically limited and overburdened by digital noise. That’s why Tim O’Reilly’s observation continues to ring true: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” So designers, instead of worrying about someone “ripping off” ideas, you should be more concerned about winning eyeballs and getting people to talk about your work.

Lastly, what other problems might a budding designer face? Basically, anything that’s going to cost them a lot of unnecessary money. Like lawyers and extraneous licensing fees.

A Ray of Hope

These are at least some problems that open licenses such as Creative Commons’ can help solve. For example, all CC licenses require attribution, so each time someone distributes or reuses your work, your name is mentioned. And for anyone who understands how the net works, getting mentioned (i.e. getting linked to) is a good thing. Plus, with CC licenses you can embed metadata, which enables your work to be maschine-readable and indexed by search engines and other tools, which makes it much easier for people to find your stuff.

By granting additional permissions to your work, you’re inviting people to participate in the creative process with you, which can improve your designs and encourage people to become fans and active supporters of your ideas and projects. It’s also important to reiterate that with a CC license, you never give up your copyright. You still retain certain rights, and it’s within the frame of copyright that CC licenses acutally function. What’s more, when you use CC’s free licensing tools, you don’t have to go through the hassle of hiring a lawyer and negotiating a contract for every use. Instead, the licenses are standardized and publicly available, which means anyone can use them to publish a work for which they control the appropriate rights.

Ok, now that there are some arguments for why one should open up their work, but what about some good examples of how?

Open Design in Practice

One elegant story of open design comes right out of Berlin. Ronen Kadushin, a long-experienced designer and adventuring spirit, is pioneering the practice of releasing “source code” for high-end furniture under a Creative Commons license. Students, amaetuers, and competitors alike can download Ronen’s AutoCAD files and build and customize the pieces themselves.

Ronen’s beautiful and playful designs, as well as innovative approach, have won him much attention and fans. People often send him design remixes and purchase completed pieces from his online retailers or gallery exhibitions. Ronen says he enjoys the adventure of going open source and seems quite pleased with the results so far.

Open fashion is another field of innovative design in Berlin. Cecilia Palmer, founder of the open source fashion label Pamoyo, recently unveiled The Red Shop in Kreuzberg, where she sells finished pieces made from organic materials. You can also download her patterns and make the clothing yourself. As with Ronen’s designs, people are encouraged to unleash their creativity on Pamoyo’s collection and drop Cecilia a line when they’re done.

Arduino is of course another cool example of how openness can inspire  creators and reinvigorate design. This low-cost electronics platform runs on simple yet powerful hardware and software, and it’s been the darling of design and circuit communities since it hit the market. Users can buy completed boards or build their own from Arduino’s freely available CC-licensed files. The applications for Arduino are nearly limitless: robotics, game design, visuals, interactive sculpture, energy monitors, you name it. But one of the most fun ways to learn about this open tool is to hack it in collaborative geek-glee at an Arduino workshop. As for the economics and social trends around the platform, Clive Thompson’s analysis in WIRED is certianly worth a read.

A final key component in many open design circles is community. Thingiverse, for example, is a lively online community for digital fabrication: 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, and the whole lot. They share their projects online under open licenses so that people can play, comment, build upon and improve the designs. The same is true for cadyou, Flexible Stream, and Open Draw Community.

Looking for more?

A number of these example and more are documented in the Creative Commons Case Studies project. We’re always looking to expand this resource, so if you’d like to share your experience in Open Design, please consider adding your story!

Images: Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies in Open Design by Michelle Thorne / CC BY, Bird Table by Ronen Kadushin / CC BY NC SA, Pamoyo / CC BY NC SA, Replicating Rapid-Prototype by Ethan Heim / CC BY NC SA

Illegal Street Knitting

Walking around Kreuzberg a few months ago, I spotted my first “illegal street knitting”. Masquerade, the playful rouge knitters behind the guerrilla action, document their stitched streets bombs on their site and share their thoughts about the craftism movement. You might also catch their work on commuter trains. Apparently, the Masquerade crew likes to embroider messages like “kram” (Swedish for “hug”) into the fabric of the seats.

Check out the tourist map to see if there’s any unruly sewing your neighborhood. Better yet, grab some needles and spread your own yarn!

Art + Arduino = Artuino

If you haven’t yet played with Arduino, the low-cost open source hardware that’s captured the imagination of geeks and artboys alike, then you should really try one out (Berlin retailers: Tinkersoup and Fritzing). The chip is incredibly versatile and easy to use, and you can customize it will a million different components and do tons of cool hacks.  If you’re a n00b like me, then just getting the LED light to blick is satisfaction enough.

On June 20 – 21, Anton (Tinkersoup) and Arnon (Artuino) organized an Arduino workshop at IMA Design Village in Berlin. Over 100 musicians, designers, and hardware hackers came to play with wires and circuit boards. Each group was given some design goals, and from an assemblage of old electronics and nimble Arduinos, we built mini games and toys. Our group ended up gluing together an inverted pinball game made out of CPU cooling fans and a retro switch controller. The goal of the game was to blow a balloon into a wire hoop, which triggered a digital camera to take a goofy picture of you.

There were a lot more sophisticated projects at the workshop, including two musicians exploring how to tear away from hunched over, laptop-bound harddisc jockeying. Instead, they wanted to build instruments that allow musicians to move around and perform, while having all the electronic techniques available like looping and filters. Onyx Ashanti (video) wowed the crowd with his “beat jazz”, a blend of dance music looped live from a MIDI clarinet. The instrument is hooked to a mixter and laptop steered by a Playstation controller and iPhone — incredibly complex but wonderful to listen to. Marco showed us his “Ast / Tree Branch”, a handmade free-standing instrument that the musician controls by sliding his fingers along the branch’s neck. Very cool sound and a real chance for artists to compose electronic music while having analog interaction.

Hopefully there will be more opportunities for all these creative folks to get together again. I know I certainly had a lot of fun and learned a lot. Thanks so much to the organizers and to the participants!