I am currently working with the rest of the Mycelia team to develop the Creative Passport and get it running for Imogen’s upcoming world tour. The concepts of Mycelia and the passport are well documented elsewhere what I wanted to do here was touch on where it goes beyond the music industry.
I tutor at Central Saint Martins on the MA Industrial Design course, on aspects of digital and IoT related design, how does this model, work for product designers, or say, fashion designers? This differs from photography or music, or even fine art.
So to start the thinking I have gone back to Papanek, in The Green Imperative, he wrote about designing a small trailer for a client, to help in a small waste collection service that he had started. The trailer was a success for them, so they wanted to buy the design so that they could manufacture more and sell them to other such groups.
Papanek agreed with conditions, they could make no more than 200 units a year and only sell them in a 200 mile radius.
IF they found someone who wanted to do the same elsewhere they could re-approach Papanek to get the rights to do that.
Over the next couple of years, there were trailers made in more than thirty small communities and with adaptations to the original designs made according to local environments.
In a world of local manufacture and the possibilitiy of ‘smart contracts’ (or programmable transactions, because at the moment these blocks of code are not smart, nor are they contracts) this model tried by Papanek could be tried out.
Its not prefect, how do you enforce things at the end when the purely digital part of the transaction is finished? This is where work by the likes of Mattereum on the design of the contracts and the linking between code and existing legal structures will come into play.
This model can also extend and support alternative licencing, like Creative Commons and Open licences (Open Hardware etc). The Creative Passport is designed as a way for the individual creative to assert and manage the rights they wish to express and protect over a work, to be transparent on the collaborative aspects of much creative work, where support in, co-production happens, and how this is acknowledged and revenue shared.