swissmiss

November 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Parsons The New School for Design
Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, NYC

BurdaStyle.com – The road to collaborative fashion design / a talk by Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Karaisl

Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Karaisl, founders of Burdastyle.com, will share their experiences building an active, creative community based on open source sewing over the past three years. The BurdaStyle community consists of over 260,000 registered members who have uploaded almost 25,000 designs.

BurdaStyle is a collaborative, DIY fashion platform inspired by the open source philosophy of sharing intellectual property and allowing the public to adapt it to their specific needs. BurdaStyle encourages its members to remove copyright restrictions from their designs. These open source sewing patterns are then free to be used as the basis for new designs that can later be sewed and even sold by other community members. In sharing their stories, Nora and Benedikta will discuss their successes and failures in building a platform for a creative community to share instructions and techniques, in creating a balance between open collaboration and authorship, and in enabling a true, networked design process.

About the Networked Design Talks: With the rise of the Internet over the past few decades we have witnessed the rise of networked culture. The effects of this transition extend far beyond the use of tools: they change the ways we communicate with each other and the ways we manage, construct and perceive our individual and group identities. This cultural shift requires the creative industry to reexamine its use of messages, symbols and aesthetics and to study their function within a constantly changing networked environment.