Overview
The rise of the internet age has seen the cre- ation of a digital “design commons”: a vast pool of knowledge and blueprints—for everything from farm equipment to malaria drugs—that is freely accessible to communities around the world, for use in local production and economic development.
Small steps, multiplied by millions. That’s where we can win our battle.
— Precious Plastics
Imagine a community of farmers trying to find more sustainable and effective ways to produce. Through prototyping, they begin to develop equipment specifically suited to low-cost organic farming. As they experiment with designs and test equipment, they refine their knowledge of what yields results for their community. Instead of keeping the fruits of their intellectual labor to themselves, they decide to share them with the world, publishing their designs online for any internet-equipped farmer to adapt to their local context.
“Cosmolocal production” is a term for the process in which globally shared knowledge and designs enable communities to meet their needs locally. The growing knowledge commons includes designs for farm equipment, medicine, food-processing tools, and renewable energy tech. The three main motivations that drive cosmolocal production include livelihood, problem-solving, and sustainability.
When designs are shared, anyone can be a participant, a contributor, and an agent of change in creating a better world.
First, cosmolocal production has the potential to catalyze a livelihood revolution. For instance, L’Atelier Paysans is a cooperative that conducts farm equipment prototyping and design workshops throughout France, then shares its designs freely. Farm Hack is an association started in the northeastern United States that does similar work. Shared designs for tools like irrigators and cultivators can dramatically lower the costs of equipment that might otherwise be too expensive for small-scale entrepreneurs. This model, applied not only to farming but also to other industries, can revolutionize how people earn a living and provide for one another.
Cosmolocal production is also about problem-solving through production at a small scale. The international humanitarian relief organization Field Ready uses portable molds and 3D printers to support the recovery efforts of disaster-hit communities across southern Asia. Here, specialized medical equipment—or even basic tools like buckets to fetch water—can take weeks or months to arrive at a disaster zone. Field Ready’s approach moves production to sites of disaster to address the problem without delay.
Similarly, Open Source Malaria uses shared knowledge and community contributions to develop malaria-fighting drugs, which can otherwise be prohibitively expensive for people in poor countries. The Open Insulin Project in Oakland, California has adopted a similar approach to insulin production in the United States, where the drug is exorbitantly expensive due to price gouging and predatory patenting. What if these and other medications, once proven effective, could be produced by any sufficiently resourced lab in any country?
The third main contribution of cosmolocal production concerns transforming the destructive logic of industrial production into something regenerative, something that can drive a transition to emission-free production, carbon drawdown, and local control. Netherlands-based company Precious Plastics, for instance, designs machines that recycle and upcycle plastic waste into new products. It has cultivated an international community of designers and volunteers to develop the systems, and its machine blueprints can be freely downloaded so that any locality can build its own solution to the plastic crisis. In the Maharashtra area of India, Solar Urja freely distributes its design for a cheap, repairable solar lamp that can replace dirty-burning kerosene lanterns. In conjunction with Solar Urja’s rollout of the new lamps to villages, repair centers have been established to fix broken ones, creating local employment opportunities. Additionally, a cooperative run by local Indigenous people produces solar panels for the lamps.
Global challenges like the climate crisis are too urgent to allow profit-oriented intellectual property regimes to hinder progress. Patents on critical technologies can take decades to expire, and most people cannot afford to pay excessive royalties for the technologies that are fundamental for planetary survival. Open access to knowledge and design can enable communities to adopt low- or no-carbon technologies with minimal obstacles. When designs are shared, anyone can be a participant, a contributor, and an agent of change in creating a better world.
