Made in my backyard
Abel, Bas van
Against the background of the technological developments that enable small-scale urban industrialization, our relation to the concept of making needs reviewing. Does urban industrialization have an impact on the relation that we have with our products and our environment? Our current mass production system has created a huge dived between the product and its origin. The production has been divided in processes that are mere parts in a larger chain of events. As Marx already predicted, the worker who cannot add value of his own, and is not appreciated by others about, will alienate from the products he makes, his environment and, in the end, himself. To create, is to give meaning, a reflection on ones' "da sein". In our current digital world, "making" has regained a new and important role. Internet has enabled the developments of new "make"-principles that are based on openness, social involvement and transparancy. New professions arise on the crossroads of virtual and physical realities: the crafts of the 21st century. With digital technologies physical products are created. Fabrication facilities like the Fablabs enable us to globally distribute knowledge and locally produce this into physical products, based on open design principles. Think of open source 3d printers for do-it-yourself product developments. We live in a time in which people can give meaning to products more than ever. It is impossible to imagine contemporary society without the resulting increased transparency and freedom.
 Okay, so good morning everyone. Welcome as well. I'm sorry because of the delay of the laptop. We thought it died but what actually happened is we stacked two laptops on top of each other and there's this little magnet inside that makes it turn off. So my laptop screen was turning off and on and off and on because it was sitting on top of the other one. But anyway, it works now. It didn't die so I'm happy. It's a good start of the day because my computer is still alive. So I'd like to start with what a quote from actually Oscar Wilde, the picture of Dorian Gray, 1890. People know the price of everything but the value of nothing. I think a lot of people can relate to that. But what is value? How does value relate to prices and our economy? Why is it, for example, that water which is more useful than diamonds is a lot cheaper than diamonds? They call this the value paradox. So our empathic values, sustainable values, social values, shared values integrated in our economic systems. I think there are no easy concluding answers to these questions but I think we are at a point in time where we can really shape the economy right now and we can create a more relational economy, a relational system where our values are more based on relations with products, people and the systems we work in. So to achieve these relations we need openness and transparency. So in this presentation I'll show you some context and projects which I'm working on which relate to all these questions but also why it's important that this is something we have to ask now and that we have to deal with now. So is there anyone here who knows what this is? Yeah? Shot really loud? No idea? Now? Toaster, yeah. So I think looking at this product and this toaster has been made by this guy over here, this Thomas Twates and Thomas Twates went into a shop and knew the price of a toaster because he was going to buy one and he was going to buy one for I think three or four pounds and he asked himself how is it possible to make something like this for three or four pounds and what's behind it? What's the story behind this toaster and how do you make it and who's making it and what do you need for it? I think it's a really good question because it's also a question which we don't ask that much ourselves anymore. And what came out of that is this beautiful toaster which looks kind of alienating because we are used to have all these and you see it there in the shop together with all the other toasters. We are used to see these masperduce toasters as objects we use every day and we don't ask about how is it made and what's around it. But with the toaster Thomas Twates made, you can actually see how it's made because he took it very seriously. So what he did, he went into the mines and got the iron ore and he actually found a patent online of someone who found out how to get iron out of iron ore. There was actually someone who was playing around with microwaves to try to get iron out of iron ore. So he used that and from all these steps and getting further into this process, the technical process, he actually learned a lot about the stories behind all these, you know, the people working in the mines. So it became more like this project about the stories around stuff. So the toaster tells a story and it's the beauty of the product I think is that it's transparent, that you can see what's behind it. So it's an industrial product and it's, you know, we kind of got alienated from all these products. And looking at industry when it started, this is around, I don't know, there are probably a lot of people here who know the wealth of nations, Adam Smith, 1767. And Adam Smith is the one, this is the first book that actually describes the economic systems. And Adam Smith was describing the self-regulating market. He was describing the vision of labor and the vision of labor is exactly what happened with the toaster as well. You know, everything became processes. And you have some people working on that aspect, some people working in the mines, some people working somewhere else on having the fuels to make the machines work. So there's another man called Milton Friedman. He's a true capitalist who has a really, I think a brilliant story about a pencil where he explains the division of labor. And I'd like to show you the movie of Milton Friedman explaining this. Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from, or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. People who don't speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met. When you go down the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was a magic of the price system, the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum. That is why the operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world. Well, a true capitalist, I would say. Also, he brings this really romantic story about the free market and people not knowing that they are working together on this pencil, but are connected in a way that creates this social bonding, blah, blah, blah. What he is talking about is the invisible hand, the self-regulating market. The invisible hand is the hand, and Adam Smith was already talking about it. There are some critics about the interpretation of that, but the invisible hand of the self-regulated market became this thing everyone was holding on to, because isn't it beautiful that everything works by itself? The problem with that is that you also, that is an untransparent way of working. If you don't know if somebody is working, you know, the vision of life, somebody is working on a piece there and somebody else is working on a piece there, they don't know. They have no shared value in the whole thing. The invisible hand takes care of that. So what if this untransparent situation creates unfair situations? And I think invisible hands can be really unfair, and I think some British people here might agree with that, because if you look at production and products, they become so complicated and it becomes so impossible to trace all these parts, because look at this car. It's a beautiful car, but it's an old car, and it's actually a very simple car. The cars right now are much more complicated. Can you even imagine that all these pieces have suppliers, and all these suppliers of these pieces have suppliers, and those have suppliers again? So it's exponential, it becomes exponentially complicated to trace where stuff is coming from. So the cars right now have electronics as well, and when you put electronics into the equation, it becomes even more complicated. And there's also a lot of stuff going, you know, being unfair about these electronics we use. I can show you that in the next short movie. I'm on my way to the eastern Congo, one of the most dangerous places in the world. Congo has been a major source of natural resources for the mobile industry the last 15 years. I've heard that in mind, Steven the Jungle, children are working under horrible conditions. I want to see where these minerals are coming from, and to see with my own eyes if they are financing war. This is chance. He's 16. He says that for the last three years he's been working in Besie, the biggest illegal mine in Congo. He wants to take me there. You see, this is horrible, what they are living is really horrible. Four years ago this place was nothing but jungle. Today 15 to 25,000 people are working here. Different armed groups are fighting to gain control over the mine. These teenage boys stay down here for several days, digging out minerals essential for the mobile industry. Mines like these are few years away. In the last 15 years more than 4 million people have died. These minerals end up in mobile phones, like my Nokia. Does that make me responsible? We are all responsible, and you know that all this is going into you. We must be revolted by this situation. We are a human being. Get out of the mine, Nokia. Okay so, of course this is through the eyes of a documentary maker. There's a lot of drama in it, but there's definitely a point here I think. Looking at the situations we create around these products, making these products, it's so complicated to even know where stuff is coming from. Nokia for example in this movie is one of the targets of the documentary maker. Nokia cannot say they have conflict minerals, conflict free phones. There's not one phone provider, phone developer in the world that can actually say that they have conflict free phones. Because it's impossible to trace. You see here the difficulty of the tracing in the Congo itself. It's not only, you know, this is about the mobile industry, but it's not the mobile industry itself. It's the whole electronics industry. You know, tantalum, one of the minerals they showed here in the movie as well, is used for capacitors. And capacitors are in all electronics. So, also cars. So I went to this website called slavery footprint.org. And I don't even have a mobile phone actually, but I do have a computer. I do have a lot of electronics in my house. So what you do, you fill in all these electronics devices you have. And the website then calculates how many slaves are working for you. So I got 60 slaves working for me. Well, obviously most of them are working in China. But some of them are also working in the States, South America, Africa. It's all around the world slaves are working for me. But the problem with, you know, slaves and the whole term slaves is that, you know, what makes a slave a slave? And what is slavery? And what is the opposite of slavery? Because when you look at the opposite of slavery, I think we're talking about liberty. And what, you know, if you look at one of the brightest people ever lived tells us about liberty. He actually says, it's a term whose meaning is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist. So what does that say about fairness? What does that say about openness? If even liberty is so porous that you cannot, you know, you can make anything out of that. But there's one thing I do know. And I'm a designer and designers like to think in solutions. And not so much in question, because we have had, you know, I've been putting out all these questions and all these abstract terms which are really hard to answer. But if you look at unfairness, so you take the opposite of what is fair, I think everybody believes that you have to have action when you have unfair situations. So one of the projects we did is creating a fair phone. And we're still working on it because that's not something you do within one year. But fair phone is a project we started two or three years ago. And what we thought is okay, so if the mobile industry cannot say that there is conflict free, that there are conflict free phones and they cannot, you know, vouch for fair phones, then we're going to make one ourselves. Because how hard is it to make a phone? Phones are being made already. The hardest thing is to make them fair. So we started doing that. And of course you cannot do that yourself. Because I'm not a phone developer. I don't know electronics and I don't know mines. I don't know minerals. I don't know where you can go on and on. But together, if you put it up as a platform, I think we can come quite far. So that's what we did. We started step by step. And one of the things we did was also go to Congo and find out if it's possible to work with mines and corporations where you can actually contribute. Africa. Fairphone is the world's first collective non-profit technology company developing a phone using minerals mined and sold under equity conditions. Recently, Fairphone undertook effect-finding mission to Katanga, the most southern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Katanga's soil is full of copper and cobalt, the letter being used in batteries for mobile phones. The Fairphone crew visited various parties in the mining industry, from high-ranking officials to artisanal miners. This short film shows you some highlights of a very successful bill, Bumpy Expedition, towards the heartland of Congo's copper belt. We are in the Camillombé quarry where artisanal miners produce cobalt. So there, we have a very deep pit that can be 60 meters high, and there are ramifications that people can go through. And to protect themselves against rain, artisans put their cows. So when it rains, the rain can't attack them from inside. And there, they are working. And generally, in such cases, they don't come out immediately. They make reserves there, and the days of their work, they come out with the same day. One has to work to change phone a party on Kongo. Yes, I was wondering if you would take my phone to Kongo. It's not a product. It's a gift from me. It's a gift from me. I'm not going to take it from you. I'm going to take it from you. Okay. The answer is that our objective is to be honest. We have a channel. We have a phone call. We have a phone scandal. We have a phone call. We have a phone call. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to lie. No kidding. I'll leave you because if you leave, I Constitutional Jeent빈 men can hear something chocolate So, I work for a media lab in Amsterdam. It's a non-profit organization called Vax Society. And Fairphone is one of the projects we do. If you want to know more about the project and look at what we're at at this point, you can go to the website and look it up. At Vax Society, we have a mission. And our mission is to give social cultural meaning and value to technological developments. In a way, it's looking at social innovation. And when you look at the projects we do, one of the principles we work on a lot is reciprocity. And reciprocity is also very much connected to fairness. So in a way, all the projects we do has this fairness component in it. And also one of the things we think is that with close systems, you cannot create this reciprocity. And I really like this quote from Makeson. I think a lot of people, or some people here might know the manifesto Makeson made. And one of the quotes in there was, if you can't open it, you don't own it. And I think ownership is very important. Because when you feel ownership, you can actually create relations with the stuff you use. So at Vax Society, we have several labs. You can see the labs as research programs we do. We have a creative care lab. We have a future internet lab that focuses on the future of the internet. Urban Reality Lab is focused on how you deal with urban development and location-based applications and virtual layers. And one of the labs I coordinate is the Open Design Lab. And of course, the Open Design Lab has a mission as well. And the mission comes down to that we try to bridge the gap between the virtual world and the old industrial models. Because in the virtual world, we have this network culture. And in the old industrial models I just showed you, they work on a totally different basis, totally different principles. So this is what happened with the industrial stuff in our cities. Division of Labor actually took care of that. And what you see in the back of these industrial buildings is what came out of that. It's the knowledge economy. And the knowledge economy is mainly about information. And information moved away from controlled consumption. What happened is that we had a digital revolution. And we had this digital revolution. This took place. Information and industry got separated. Well, what do I mean by that? When you look at this, people reading books, information was part of the industrial system. You needed books to put this knowledge on. You needed film to put films on. So you had all these artifacts and you had machines to be able to create these artifacts to distribute knowledge. That's where copyright also came in. So copyright is very much related to all these industrial processes. So with the digital revolution, that totally changed. So information is produced in a very distributed way. And people are both the sender and the receiver of information. And this is, by the way, a snapshot of the Internet, I think, two years ago or something. So that digital revolution made this possible as well. This is Napster, one of the first versions, I think. And this was a pain in the ass for the industry because it totally bypassed the system they created. And what they did was, of course, their first reaction was create this control system. But we went on and we did this. And now we have open data. You see all this creation of openness within this network culture is getting more and more. Many people here talk about it already, so I won't go into that too much. But this is when it gets really interesting because Pirate Bay, I think, two or three months ago opened on the side something like what's it called, Fisibles. So on Pirate Bay, you can actually search for physical objects, you can download the files, and you can create them with machines. These are blueprints of products. So at Pirate Bay, you can actually download products now. And then this happens because products now are partly moving away from this controlled consumption as well because it's becoming part of this digital system. We can spread around all this information about products. You can spread around the files to actually create products. And now this shit really hits the fan for the old industrial copyright system because it becomes integrated into this whole network culture and the physical world. So what is that that makes it possible to download products and then make them? Well, digital fabrication is a big part of that. Most of you might know 3D printing. This is a laser cutter. So somebody downloaded the file and with that file, you send it to the machine and the machine can create, in this case, a chair out of that. So there's the chair. So the big thing about this digital fabrication, of course, is the way you can distribute it. These machines are capable of reading digital code and controlling the machine to make the object. And of course, these machines and making chairs is not what it is about. It's about creating access to this means of production because you can actually download yourself silly from Pirate Bay or Thingiverse or whatever and have all these files on your computer but you can still not make a product because you need machines for that. So one of the developments in that is, for example, FabLab. I think FabLab Fabrication Laboratory is one of the biggest distributed maker systems and infrastructure which gives open access and which is growing really fast at the moment. And I'll show you a movie where Neil Goschenfeld, the founder of the whole FabLab idea, will explain the idea of FabLab himself. We've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it. We can declare success we want. What's coming now is the digital revolution in fabrication. My colleagues and I started teaching a class called How to Make Almost Anything and the idea was just that. It's a program looking at how the digital world relates to the physical world. And one of the core things coming out of the research is the idea of digital fabrication, making the Star Trek replicator and assembler that makes anything you want by building the atoms on up. This is designed where you put in the millions of dollars of equipment at MIT or like the mainframes of digital fabrication. We can make anything we want using those tools. In 20 years we'll make it so you can have it in the home. The FabLabs are in between. They spread all around the world letting ordinary people create technology from South Africa to the north of Norway and from rural India to inner city Boston. Instead of spending vast amounts of money to send computers and energy and communication around the world, you can spend much less to send the means to create it. Energy, communication, computation, just to say the words they sound big, they're being tackled as billion dollar mega projects top down. FabLabs is tackling them from the bottom up. We're just finding so many people with such interesting inventions and such great ideas. Sharing that is where I see this go. Okay, so that explains the whole idea of the FabLabs. This is a map of FabLabs around the world which is pretty old actually because also here in Berlin with Open Design City of course you have a FabLabs as well. Even in Holland they, I think around 10, 12 FabLabs already popping up. The great thing about looking at fabrication this way is that you share knowledge on this global level and you have the production on a very local level. So you can actually create products on this local level and local needs and share, but share the information about making it because you have similar machines on the other side of the world. Share that information and other people can use that as well. So one of the examples is Afghanistan, in Afghanistan they make Wi-Fi antennas together with also Kenya and MIT in the States to be able to send Wi-Fi signals from one village to the other village so you can connect all the villages and all the nodes. And they create these antennas for around 200 euros so you can make them yourself instead of the 20,000, 30,000 Cisco system Wi-Fi transmitters. But another project they're doing is in the States it's on modular housing with digital fabrication so how to be able to create your own house. You can actually build a FabLabs with a FabLabs this way so if you have a machine and you have the wooden stuff you can create your house. One of the projects we're working on at Wax Society because at Wax we also have a FabLabs is this prosthetics project we do together with Indonesia and what we're trying to do is to create a prosthetics for under $50. A normal prosthetics, lower leg prosthetics is around the 5,000 euros. When you look at Indonesia for example where you have bamboo and local materials which are pretty strong you can use bamboo instead of titanium. Of course it's not as sustainable as titanium but it's a lot cheaper. The real challenge with this kind of product is that we try to design in such way that people can create them themselves either in workshops or in sessions where you get guidance in it or alone but the real challenge is that. So think about how do I create products that other people can create so you're kind of making blueprints for other people to be able to create their own products. But not only prosthetics, housing, these big things are happening in FabLabs. A lot of designers come there and make their stuff, dresses, we have in Amsterdam a lot of textile students and fashion designers are coming to the FabLabs to work with textiles and to see what happens if you put specific stuff under the laser cutter for example because they're not allowed to do that when you go to a prototyping place and give them a job on cutting something. They can cut anything as long as it's not on the blacklist we know. For example PVC which has chemicals and stuff like that. And this is an example of a little boy I think 9, 10 years old came in and he had something on his, he had something wrong with his food so he needed special things for in his shoe to make them a bit higher inside. And he had to wait for a few months when he was going to the shoe repairman or to the shoe, I call that, the specialist. So he decided to do it himself and he succeeded so he made this stuff all by itself in the FabLabs, learned a lot and I think it's a brilliant example of somebody who puts a lot of time into making this because it's not pushing a button and it's ready. But he succeeded in doing it. So what we do also is look at how can we combine crafts and old crafts and 21st century crafts. This is a project where we use mud building and CNC routing together to create all these ecological, to combine ecological building with this 21st century blob building if you want to call that. And so this is, you might notice project, this has been shown at DMY I think last year and a project by Dirk van de Kooij. So you see that also designers are experimenting with these new technologies as well. So if you open up these technologies people find new things to do with it. So hi, I'm Dirk van de Kooij. I'm graduated on the design academy with the project called Endless. It's actually a big robot that is making furniture out of recycled fridges. Recycled fridges goes inside of the machine on the top of the robot arm and it's getting melted and it's so hot actually that it will melt to the former layer that it's been putting down. So it's riding in one endless line or in one endless string, a chair or a table or another piece of furniture. We can pigment it of course like any other plastic you can. But with this layering structure you can do funny stuff like gradients and you can emphasize the way it's been built up. The idea is like retrieved from rapid prototyping when I saw the model that was made with a really old machine and then you can see the ornament or the lines and you can see how it's been built up and I said okay wow this is cool. I want to blow it up to a bigger scale and then make it an ornament and tell the people in the chair really how it's been made. It was much faster like a prototype machine does it in five days in a chair and this does it in three hours and you can use recycled plastic instead of really expensive materials. There's maybe a future ahead for me also with this project. So enjoy. Okay so those are examples of people using these technologies to create solutions for specific problems or to create designs or to create objects. But it's not only about that. I think a big part of the labs and the importance of places like the FabLab or Hacker Spaces or whatever you want to call it is that the making process itself. It brings crafts and making into the environment again. It creates this relation with the objects you use again which is necessary also to create this ownership and this ownership is necessary to take responsibility also for the stuff you do. And also to be able to understand the systems around you. Because making and this is I've read this story about Arkea people creating billies. I think you know billies. You know these really easy cupboards people make and they made a comparison about people who made billies and they put them together and they asked which one do you like most and everyone liked their own billy. They thought their own billy was the most beautiful and they're exactly the same. So anyway if you make something yourself even though it's an Ikea billy you get an attachment to it in a way. So talking about Ikea I think let people give their own meaning to stuff. Own products as well. Hack products. Because if you look at objects and if you get this ownership over objects it's about these experiences as well. And again also the stories behind all these objects. So it's important to look at technology and to hack into it. Because if technology becomes very complicated and I was showing the car in the beginning and the car is you know it's an easy thing and I don't think there are that many people that can fix their own cars nowadays. So that's also the reason why we need these places. We need places where people hack into this technology because otherwise it will be the big companies and the big institutions that will make this technology and you'll be the one that consumes it and have to deal with that. So that's also one of the I think maybe the most important function of these labs and it's also in a city because that's what's happening. You get production much more closer to the urban environment. Some people call it post industrial production. I think post industrial production might actually create these new relations. So what does that mean for a business? Because I think a lot of people and that's one of the questions I get a lot is okay you know find nice story, a bit idealistic and I believe people are altruist but the bottom line is still how do you make money with all this stuff? Well the bad news is I don't know. I don't know, I cannot tell you how to make money with all this stuff with everything that's happening but what we did is we did experiment with it and we're still doing some experiments but just have a look at this model. So I was talking about crafts before the industrial revolution people made products in workshops. The mass production model you get standardized products. What we have now is that people can actually be part of that interactive digital design process. We can create interfaces where people can be part of creating their own products. So if you look, this is simplified but it's a way of looking at what's happening. And we did a project with Drogh Design. Drogh Design is a design brand in Holland which is pretty famous for its high quality design and we were creating this platform. It's not online yet but we're creating this platform called Make Me where we look at how we can create business models around all these new things that are happening. And the main, the basics of the platform is that it's a platform for products which are not made yet. That means that if somebody is going to buy something on that platform, he can still choose who's going to make it, maybe he's going to make it themselves. That's a business model as well. And also, you know, what the product is going to look like because if it still has to be made, you can still have influence on the product. So these are some of the products which came out of the first pilot. You see the cupboard in the left corner? That is, there's an interface created for that where you can actually push at specific places and the cupboard will make holes at the places where you've pushed. And in the back, it generates, so in the system, it generates all these outlines for machines to read the code to actually make this cupboard as well. So you can, after you've made your product, you can choose which FabLab is going to produce it and then it sends it right away to the FabLab. So it's about optimization of the system. It's about having consumers make them part of this design process. And also, it's about how is the designer going to make money on these blueprints which are downloadable and freely distributable. This is another product, I'll go through that. It's a bikini line which you can cut with the laser cutter. And the nice thing about this, and of course the sizes, you can change everything in the colors, but it melts together while it's cutting. So you can put two materials on top of each other and it cuts with the laser cutter and it melts together so you have really high quality bikinis. So how does that relate to openness? For the FabLabs, I think it speaks for itself. But with the stuff I showed you with the business models, I think what's happening is that it's also creating new relations with the people who make stuff. Because it gives the craftsman, either it's 21st century craftsmanship, it's digital fabrication or it's people that make stuff by hand, it gives them a face again. And you can also, you can relay it more to them and it becomes much more transparent. So to me, that's openness as well. But if you look at where I think the really, the main things are happening is when you put something, when you put products online, you create communities around it and you create a context where everyone can collaborate and participate. And then you're talking about open source design hardware products. This is a car which has been developed open source. This is a house which has been developed open source. And these products mainly exist online. This is where the real stuff is going on. And once in a while, there is a momentum of a house that's popping up, which is a version of the whole community working on that house. That's also something we want to do with Fairphone. And we're starting this year to create this open design community where people can actually combine and think and create stuff together with us to be able to produce this product. And I think one of the important factors in that is that we can make this invisible hand I was talking about in the beginning, we can make this invisible hand visible again and create shared value throughout this whole production chain. So when we go back to where I started, I think we still have a long way to go. But I truly believe we have the perfect situation now to create this relational industry based on values. And I also believe that we can all benefit from that. So I'd like to leave it with this. And thank you for your attention. I don't know if we have time for questions. No, it's 11 already. Okay, so one or two questions. No one? Not too early? Okay. First of all, thank you very much. A fantastic keynote. What about the phone? Can you tell us a bit more of when will it be ready to ship or be able to ship the boat? The problem with the phone, it's a very complicated thing to do. But what we did, we simplified it by saying we get one mineral, which is cobalt, and cobalt is used for making batteries. And we focus on cobalt now, so we're in Congo trying to set up collaborations with mining companies or with mining corporations there to actually create this battery. And we have on the other side of the market a KPN Vodafone T-Mobile. We're already willing to sign contracts to take these batteries and put them into the market. So that's where we start. And then, you know, a smartphone has more than 30 minerals, which also, you know, dubious in terms of fairness. So it's a long way to go. We do it step by step. Go on. Thanks. Bas, thank you very much. Due to our schedule, we have to close another session. Thank you. Welcome.
 Okay, so good morning everyone. Welcome as well. I'm sorry because of the delay of the  laptop. We thought it died but what actually happened is we stacked two laptops on top of  each other and there's this little magnet inside that makes it turn off. So my laptop  screen was turning off and on and off and on because it was sitting on top of the other  one. But anyway, it works now. It didn't die so I'm happy. It's a good start of the day  because my computer is still alive. So I'd like to start with what a quote from actually  Oscar Wilde, the picture of Dorian Gray, 1890. People know the price of everything but the  value of nothing. I think a lot of people can relate to that. But what is value? How  does value relate to prices and our economy? Why is it, for example, that water which is  more useful than diamonds is a lot cheaper than diamonds? They call this the value paradox.  So our empathic values, sustainable values, social values, shared values integrated in  our economic systems. I think there are no easy concluding answers to these questions  but I think we are at a point in time where we can really shape the economy right now  and we can create a more relational economy, a relational system where our values are more  based on relations with products, people and the systems we work in. So to achieve these  relations we need openness and transparency. So in this presentation I'll show you some  context and projects which I'm working on which relate to all these questions but also  why it's important that this is something we have to ask now and that we have to deal  with now. So is there anyone here who knows what this is? Yeah? Shot really loud? No idea?  Now? Toaster, yeah. So I think looking at this product and this toaster has been made  by this guy over here, this Thomas Twates and Thomas Twates went into a shop and knew  the price of a toaster because he was going to buy one and he was going to buy one for  I think three or four pounds and he asked himself how is it possible to make something  like this for three or four pounds and what's behind it? What's the story behind this toaster  and how do you make it and who's making it and what do you need for it? I think it's  a really good question because it's also a question which we don't ask that much ourselves  anymore. And what came out of that is this beautiful toaster which looks kind of alienating  because we are used to have all these and you see it there in the shop together with  all the other toasters. We are used to see these masperduce toasters as objects we use  every day and we don't ask about how is it made and what's around it. But with the toaster  Thomas Twates made, you can actually see how it's made because he took it very seriously.  So what he did, he went into the mines and got the iron ore and he actually found a patent  online of someone who found out how to get iron out of iron ore. There was actually someone  who was playing around with microwaves to try to get iron out of iron ore. So he used that  and from all these steps and getting further into this process, the technical process,  he actually learned a lot about the stories behind all these, you know, the people working  in the mines. So it became more like this project about the stories around stuff. So  the toaster tells a story and it's the beauty of the product I think is that it's transparent,  that you can see what's behind it. So it's an industrial product and it's, you know,  we kind of got alienated from all these products. And looking at industry when it started, this  is around, I don't know, there are probably a lot of people here who know the wealth of  nations, Adam Smith, 1767. And Adam Smith is the one, this is the first book that actually  describes the economic systems. And Adam Smith was describing the self-regulating market.  He was describing the vision of labor and the vision of labor is exactly what happened  with the toaster as well. You know, everything became processes. And you have some people  working on that aspect, some people working in the mines, some people working somewhere  else on having the fuels to make the machines work. So there's another man called Milton  Friedman. He's a true capitalist who has a really, I think a brilliant story about a  pencil where he explains the division of labor. And I'd like to show you the movie of Milton  Friedman explaining this. Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the  world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which  it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington.  To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel,  it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed  graphite. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South  America. This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya,  where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen  with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea  where it came from, or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the  glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.  People who don't speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might  hate one another if they ever met. When you go down the store and buy this pencil, you  are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all  those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to  make this pencil? There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was  a magic of the price system, the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together  and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum.  That is why the operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive  efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.  Well, a true capitalist, I would say. Also, he brings this really romantic story about  the free market and people not knowing that they are working together on this pencil,  but are connected in a way that creates this social bonding, blah, blah, blah. What he  is talking about is the invisible hand, the self-regulating market. The invisible hand  is the hand, and Adam Smith was already talking about it. There are some critics about the  interpretation of that, but the invisible hand of the self-regulated market became this  thing everyone was holding on to, because isn't it beautiful that everything works by itself?  The problem with that is that you also, that is an untransparent way of working. If you  don't know if somebody is working, you know, the vision of life, somebody is working on  a piece there and somebody else is working on a piece there, they don't know. They have  no shared value in the whole thing. The invisible hand takes care of that. So what if this untransparent  situation creates unfair situations? And I think invisible hands can be really unfair,  and I think some British people here might agree with that, because if you look at production  and products, they become so complicated and it becomes so impossible to trace all these  parts, because look at this car. It's a beautiful car, but it's an old car, and it's actually  a very simple car. The cars right now are much more complicated. Can you even imagine  that all these pieces have suppliers, and all these suppliers of these pieces have suppliers,  and those have suppliers again? So it's exponential, it becomes exponentially complicated to trace  where stuff is coming from. So the cars right now have electronics as well, and when you  put electronics into the equation, it becomes even more complicated. And there's also a  lot of stuff going, you know, being unfair about these electronics we use. I can show  you that in the next short movie.  I'm on my way to the eastern Congo, one of the most dangerous places in the world. Congo  has been a major source of natural resources for the mobile industry the last 15 years.  I've heard that in mind, Steven the Jungle, children are working under horrible conditions.  I want to see where these minerals are coming from, and to see with my own eyes if they are  financing war. This is chance. He's 16. He says that for the last three years he's been  working in Besie, the biggest illegal mine in Congo. He wants to take me there. You see,  this is horrible, what they are living is really horrible. Four years ago this place  was nothing but jungle. Today 15 to 25,000 people are working here. Different armed  groups are fighting to gain control over the mine. These teenage boys stay down here for  several days, digging out minerals essential for the mobile industry. Mines like these  are few years away. In the last 15 years more than 4 million people have died. These minerals  end up in mobile phones, like my Nokia. Does that make me responsible? We are all responsible,  and you know that all this is going into you. We must be revolted by this situation. We are  a human being. Get out of the mine, Nokia.  Okay so, of course this is through the eyes of a documentary maker. There's a lot of  drama in it, but there's definitely a point here I think. Looking at the situations we  create around these products, making these products, it's so complicated to even know  where stuff is coming from. Nokia for example in this movie is one of the targets of the  documentary maker. Nokia cannot say they have conflict minerals, conflict free phones. There's  not one phone provider, phone developer in the world that can actually say that they  have conflict free phones. Because it's impossible to trace. You see here the difficulty of the  tracing in the Congo itself. It's not only, you know, this is about the mobile industry,  but it's not the mobile industry itself. It's the whole electronics industry. You know,  tantalum, one of the minerals they showed here in the movie as well, is used for capacitors.  And capacitors are in all electronics. So, also cars. So I went to this website called  slavery footprint.org. And I don't even have a mobile phone actually, but I do have a computer.  I do have a lot of electronics in my house. So what you do, you fill in all these electronics  devices you have. And the website then calculates how many slaves are working for you. So I got  60 slaves working for me. Well, obviously most of them are working in China. But some of them  are also working in the States, South America, Africa. It's all around the world slaves are  working for me. But the problem with, you know, slaves and the whole term slaves is that, you  know, what makes a slave a slave? And what is slavery? And what is the opposite of slavery?  Because when you look at the opposite of slavery, I think we're talking about liberty. And what,  you know, if you look at one of the brightest people ever lived tells us about liberty. He  actually says, it's a term whose meaning is so porous that there is little interpretation  that it seems able to resist. So what does that say about fairness? What does that say about  openness? If even liberty is so porous that you cannot, you know, you can make anything out of  that. But there's one thing I do know. And I'm a designer and designers like to think in solutions.  And not so much in question, because we have had, you know, I've been putting out all these  questions and all these abstract terms which are really hard to answer. But if you look at  unfairness, so you take the opposite of what is fair, I think everybody believes that you have to  have action when you have unfair situations. So one of the projects we did is creating a fair  phone. And we're still working on it because that's not something you do within one year. But  fair phone is a project we started two or three years ago. And what we thought is okay, so if the  mobile industry cannot say that there is conflict free, that there are conflict free phones and  they cannot, you know, vouch for fair phones, then we're going to make one ourselves. Because how  hard is it to make a phone? Phones are being made already. The hardest thing is to make them fair.  So we started doing that. And of course you cannot do that yourself. Because I'm not a phone  developer. I don't know electronics and I don't know mines. I don't know minerals. I don't know  where you can go on and on. But together, if you put it up as a platform, I think we can come  quite far. So that's what we did. We started step by step. And one of the things we did was also go  to Congo and find out if it's possible to work with mines and corporations where you can actually  contribute. Africa.  Fairphone is the world's first collective non-profit technology company developing a phone using  minerals mined and sold under equity conditions. Recently, Fairphone undertook effect-finding  mission to Katanga, the most southern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Katanga's soil  is full of copper and cobalt, the letter being used in batteries for mobile phones. The Fairphone  crew visited various parties in the mining industry, from high-ranking officials to artisanal  miners. This short film shows you some highlights of a very successful bill, Bumpy Expedition,  towards the heartland of Congo's copper belt.  We are in the Camillombé quarry where artisanal miners produce cobalt.  So there, we have a very deep pit that can be 60 meters high, and there are ramifications  that people can go through. And to protect themselves against rain, artisans put their cows. So when it  rains, the rain can't attack them from inside. And there, they are working. And generally,  in such cases, they don't come out immediately. They make reserves there, and the days of  their work, they come out with the same day.  One has to work to change  phone a party on Kongo.  Yes, I was wondering if you would take my phone to Kongo.  It's not a product.  It's a gift from me.  It's a gift from me.  I'm not going to take it from you.  I'm going to take it from you.  Okay.  The answer is that our objective is to be honest.  We have a channel.  We have a phone call.  We have a phone scandal.  We have a phone call.  We have a phone call.  I'm not going to lie.  I'm not going to lie.  I'm going to lie.  No kidding.  I'll leave you because if you leave, I Constitutional  Jeent빈 men can hear something chocolate  So, I work for a media lab in Amsterdam.  It's a non-profit organization called Vax Society.  And Fairphone is one of the projects we do.  If you want to know more about the project and look at what we're at at this point, you  can go to the website and look it up.  At Vax Society, we have a mission.  And our mission is to give social cultural meaning and value to technological developments.  In a way, it's looking at social innovation.  And when you look at the projects we do, one of the principles we work on a lot is reciprocity.  And reciprocity is also very much connected to fairness.  So in a way, all the projects we do has this fairness component in it.  And also one of the things we think is that with close systems, you cannot create this  reciprocity.  And I really like this quote from Makeson.  I think a lot of people, or some people here might know the manifesto Makeson made.  And one of the quotes in there was, if you can't open it, you don't own it.  And I think ownership is very important.  Because when you feel ownership, you can actually create relations with the stuff you use.  So at Vax Society, we have several labs.  You can see the labs as research programs we do.  We have a creative care lab.  We have a future internet lab that focuses on the future of the internet.  Urban Reality Lab is focused on how you deal with urban development and location-based  applications and virtual layers.  And one of the labs I coordinate is the Open Design Lab.  And of course, the Open Design Lab has a mission as well.  And the mission comes down to that we try to bridge the gap between the virtual world  and the old industrial models.  Because in the virtual world, we have this network culture.  And in the old industrial models I just showed you, they work on a totally different basis,  totally different principles.  So this is what happened with the industrial stuff in our cities.  Division of Labor actually took care of that.  And what you see in the back of these industrial buildings is what came out of that.  It's the knowledge economy.  And the knowledge economy is mainly about information.  And information moved away from controlled consumption.  What happened is that we had a digital revolution.  And we had this digital revolution.  This took place.  Information and industry got separated.  Well, what do I mean by that?  When you look at this, people reading books, information was part of the industrial system.  You needed books to put this knowledge on.  You needed film to put films on.  So you had all these artifacts and you had machines to be able to create these artifacts  to distribute knowledge.  That's where copyright also came in.  So copyright is very much related to all these industrial processes.  So with the digital revolution, that totally changed.  So information is produced in a very distributed way.  And people are both the sender and the receiver of information.  And this is, by the way, a snapshot of the Internet, I think, two years ago or something.  So that digital revolution made this possible as well.  This is Napster, one of the first versions, I think.  And this was a pain in the ass for the industry because it totally bypassed the system they  created.  And what they did was, of course, their first reaction was create this control system.  But we went on and we did this.  And now we have open data.  You see all this creation of openness within this network culture is getting more and more.  Many people here talk about it already, so I won't go into that too much.  But this is when it gets really interesting because Pirate Bay, I think, two or three  months ago opened on the side something like what's it called, Fisibles.  So on Pirate Bay, you can actually search for physical objects, you can download the  files, and you can create them with machines.  These are blueprints of products.  So at Pirate Bay, you can actually download products now.  And then this happens because products now are partly moving away from this controlled  consumption as well because it's becoming part of this digital system.  We can spread around all this information about products.  You can spread around the files to actually create products.  And now this shit really hits the fan for the old industrial copyright system because  it becomes integrated into this whole network culture and the physical world.  So what is that that makes it possible to download products and then make them?  Well, digital fabrication is a big part of that.  Most of you might know 3D printing.  This is a laser cutter.  So somebody downloaded the file and with that file, you send it to the machine and the machine  can create, in this case, a chair out of that.  So there's the chair.  So the big thing about this digital fabrication, of course, is the way you can distribute it.  These machines are capable of reading digital code and controlling the machine to make the  object.  And of course, these machines and making chairs is not what it is about.  It's about creating access to this means of production because you can actually download  yourself silly from Pirate Bay or Thingiverse or whatever and have all these files on your  computer but you can still not make a product because you need machines for that.  So one of the developments in that is, for example, FabLab.  I think FabLab Fabrication Laboratory is one of the biggest distributed maker systems and  infrastructure which gives open access and which is growing really fast at the moment.  And I'll show you a movie where Neil Goschenfeld, the founder of the whole FabLab idea, will  explain the idea of FabLab himself.  We've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it.  We can declare success we want.  What's coming now is the digital revolution in fabrication.  My colleagues and I started teaching a class called How to Make Almost Anything and the  idea was just that.  It's a program looking at how the digital world relates to the physical world.  And one of the core things coming out of the research is the idea of digital fabrication,  making the Star Trek replicator and assembler that makes anything you want by building the  atoms on up.  This is designed where you put in the millions of dollars of equipment at MIT or like the  mainframes of digital fabrication.  We can make anything we want using those tools.  In 20 years we'll make it so you can have it in the home.  The FabLabs are in between.  They spread all around the world letting ordinary people create technology from South Africa  to the north of Norway and from rural India to inner city Boston.  Instead of spending vast amounts of money to send computers and energy and communication  around the world, you can spend much less to send the means to create it.  Energy, communication, computation, just to say the words they sound big, they're being  tackled as billion dollar mega projects top down.  FabLabs is tackling them from the bottom up.  We're just finding so many people with such interesting inventions and such great ideas.  Sharing that is where I see this go.  Okay, so that explains the whole idea of the FabLabs.  This is a map of FabLabs around the world which is pretty old actually because also  here in Berlin with Open Design City of course you have a FabLabs as well.  Even in Holland they, I think around 10, 12 FabLabs already popping up.  The great thing about looking at fabrication this way is that you share knowledge on this  global level and you have the production on a very local level.  So you can actually create products on this local level and local needs and share, but  share the information about making it because you have similar machines on the other side  of the world.  Share that information and other people can use that as well.  So one of the examples is Afghanistan, in Afghanistan they make Wi-Fi antennas together  with also Kenya and MIT in the States to be able to send Wi-Fi signals from one village  to the other village so you can connect all the villages and all the nodes.  And they create these antennas for around 200 euros so you can make them yourself instead  of the 20,000, 30,000 Cisco system Wi-Fi transmitters.  But another project they're doing is in the States it's on modular housing with digital  fabrication so how to be able to create your own house.  You can actually build a FabLabs with a FabLabs this way so if you have a machine and you  have the wooden stuff you can create your house.  One of the projects we're working on at Wax Society because at Wax we also have a FabLabs  is this prosthetics project we do together with Indonesia and what we're trying to do  is to create a prosthetics for under $50.  A normal prosthetics, lower leg prosthetics is around the 5,000 euros.  When you look at Indonesia for example where you have bamboo and local materials which are  pretty strong you can use bamboo instead of titanium.  Of course it's not as sustainable as titanium but it's a lot cheaper.  The real challenge with this kind of product is that we try to design in such way that  people can create them themselves either in workshops or in sessions where you get guidance  in it or alone but the real challenge is that.  So think about how do I create products that other people can create so you're kind of  making blueprints for other people to be able to create their own products.  But not only prosthetics, housing, these big things are happening in FabLabs.  A lot of designers come there and make their stuff, dresses, we have in Amsterdam a lot  of textile students and fashion designers are coming to the FabLabs to work with textiles  and to see what happens if you put specific stuff under the laser cutter for example because  they're not allowed to do that when you go to a prototyping place and give them a job  on cutting something.  They can cut anything as long as it's not on the blacklist we know.  For example PVC which has chemicals and stuff like that.  And this is an example of a little boy I think 9, 10 years old came in and he had something  on his, he had something wrong with his food so he needed special things for in his shoe  to make them a bit higher inside.  And he had to wait for a few months when he was going to the shoe repairman or to the  shoe, I call that, the specialist.  So he decided to do it himself and he succeeded so he made this stuff all by itself in the  FabLabs, learned a lot and I think it's a brilliant example of somebody who puts a lot  of time into making this because it's not pushing a button and it's ready.  But he succeeded in doing it.  So what we do also is look at how can we combine crafts and old crafts and 21st century crafts.  This is a project where we use mud building and CNC routing together to create all these  ecological, to combine ecological building with this 21st century blob building if you  want to call that.  And so this is, you might notice project, this has been shown at DMY I think last year  and a project by Dirk van de Kooij.  So you see that also designers are experimenting with these new technologies as well.  So if you open up these technologies people find new things to do with it.  So hi, I'm Dirk van de Kooij.  I'm graduated on the design academy with the project called Endless.  It's actually a big robot that is making furniture out of recycled fridges.  Recycled fridges goes inside of the machine on the top of the robot arm and it's getting  melted and it's so hot actually that it will melt to the former layer that it's been putting  down.  So it's riding in one endless line or in one endless string, a chair or a table or another  piece of furniture.  We can pigment it of course like any other plastic you can.  But with this layering structure you can do funny stuff like gradients and you can emphasize  the way it's been built up.  The idea is like retrieved from rapid prototyping when I saw the model that was made with a  really old machine and then you can see the ornament or the lines and you can see how  it's been built up and I said okay wow this is cool.  I want to blow it up to a bigger scale and then make it an ornament and tell the people  in the chair really how it's been made.  It was much faster like a prototype machine does it in five days in a chair and this does  it in three hours and you can use recycled plastic instead of really expensive materials.  There's maybe a future ahead for me also with this project.  So enjoy.  Okay so those are examples of people using these technologies to create solutions for  specific problems or to create designs or to create objects.  But it's not only about that.  I think a big part of the labs and the importance of places like the FabLab or Hacker Spaces  or whatever you want to call it is that the making process itself.  It brings crafts and making into the environment again.  It creates this relation with the objects you use again which is necessary also to create  this ownership and this ownership is necessary to take responsibility also for the stuff  you do.  And also to be able to understand the systems around you.  Because making and this is I've read this story about Arkea people creating billies.  I think you know billies.  You know these really easy cupboards people make and they made a comparison about people  who made billies and they put them together and they asked which one do you like most  and everyone liked their own billy.  They thought their own billy was the most beautiful and they're exactly the same.  So anyway if you make something yourself even though it's an Ikea billy you get an attachment  to it in a way.  So talking about Ikea I think let people give their own meaning to stuff.  Own products as well.  Hack products.  Because if you look at objects and if you get this ownership over objects it's about  these experiences as well.  And again also the stories behind all these objects.  So it's important to look at technology and to hack into it.  Because if technology becomes very complicated and I was showing the car in the beginning  and the car is you know it's an easy thing and I don't think there are that many people  that can fix their own cars nowadays.  So that's also the reason why we need these places.  We need places where people hack into this technology because otherwise it will be the  big companies and the big institutions that will make this technology and you'll be the  one that consumes it and have to deal with that.  So that's also one of the I think maybe the most important function of these labs and it's  also in a city because that's what's happening.  You get production much more closer to the urban environment.  Some people call it post industrial production.  I think post industrial production might actually create these new relations.  So what does that mean for a business?  Because I think a lot of people and that's one of the questions I get a lot is okay you  know find nice story, a bit idealistic and I believe people are altruist but the bottom  line is still how do you make money with all this stuff?  Well the bad news is I don't know.  I don't know, I cannot tell you how to make money with all this stuff with everything  that's happening but what we did is we did experiment with it and we're still doing some  experiments but just have a look at this model.  So I was talking about crafts before the industrial revolution people made products in workshops.  The mass production model you get standardized products.  What we have now is that people can actually be part of that interactive digital design  process.  We can create interfaces where people can be part of creating their own products.  So if you look, this is simplified but it's a way of looking at what's happening.  And we did a project with Drogh Design.  Drogh Design is a design brand in Holland which is pretty famous for its high quality  design and we were creating this platform.  It's not online yet but we're creating this platform called Make Me where we look at how  we can create business models around all these new things that are happening.  And the main, the basics of the platform is that it's a platform for products which are  not made yet.  That means that if somebody is going to buy something on that platform, he can still choose  who's going to make it, maybe he's going to make it themselves.  That's a business model as well.  And also, you know, what the product is going to look like because if it still has to be  made, you can still have influence on the product.  So these are some of the products which came out of the first pilot.  You see the cupboard in the left corner?  That is, there's an interface created for that where you can actually push at specific  places and the cupboard will make holes at the places where you've pushed.  And in the back, it generates, so in the system, it generates all these outlines for machines  to read the code to actually make this cupboard as well.  So you can, after you've made your product, you can choose which FabLab is going to produce  it and then it sends it right away to the FabLab.  So it's about optimization of the system.  It's about having consumers make them part of this design process.  And also, it's about how is the designer going to make money on these blueprints which are  downloadable and freely distributable.  This is another product, I'll go through that.  It's a bikini line which you can cut with the laser cutter.  And the nice thing about this, and of course the sizes, you can change everything in the  colors, but it melts together while it's cutting.  So you can put two materials on top of each other and it cuts with the laser cutter and  it melts together so you have really high quality bikinis.  So how does that relate to openness?  For the FabLabs, I think it speaks for itself.  But with the stuff I showed you with the business models, I think what's happening is that it's  also creating new relations with the people who make stuff.  Because it gives the craftsman, either it's 21st century craftsmanship, it's digital  fabrication or it's people that make stuff by hand, it gives them a face again.  And you can also, you can relay it more to them and it becomes much more transparent.  So to me, that's openness as well.  But if you look at where I think the really, the main things are happening is when you  put something, when you put products online, you create communities around it and you create  a context where everyone can collaborate and participate.  And then you're talking about open source design hardware products.  This is a car which has been developed open source.  This is a house which has been developed open source.  And these products mainly exist online.  This is where the real stuff is going on.  And once in a while, there is a momentum of a house that's popping up, which is a version  of the whole community working on that house.  That's also something we want to do with Fairphone.  And we're starting this year to create this open design community where people can actually  combine and think and create stuff together with us to be able to produce this product.  And I think one of the important factors in that is that we can make this invisible hand  I was talking about in the beginning, we can make this invisible hand visible again and  create shared value throughout this whole production chain.  So when we go back to where I started, I think we still have a long way to go.  But I truly believe we have the perfect situation now to create this relational industry based  on values.  And I also believe that we can all benefit from that.  So I'd like to leave it with this.  And thank you for your attention.  I don't know if we have time for questions.  No, it's 11 already.  Okay, so one or two questions.  No one?  Not too early?  Okay.  First of all, thank you very much.  A fantastic keynote.  What about the phone?  Can you tell us a bit more of when will it be ready to ship or be able to ship the boat?  The problem with the phone, it's a very complicated thing to do.  But what we did, we simplified it by saying we get one mineral, which is cobalt, and cobalt  is used for making batteries.  And we focus on cobalt now, so we're in Congo trying to set up collaborations with mining  companies or with mining corporations there to actually create this battery.  And we have on the other side of the market a KPN Vodafone T-Mobile.  We're already willing to sign contracts to take these batteries and put them into the  market.  So that's where we start.  And then, you know, a smartphone has more than 30 minerals, which also, you know, dubious  in terms of fairness.  So it's a long way to go.  We do it step by step.  Go on.  Thanks.  Bas, thank you very much.  Due to our schedule, we have to close another session.  Thank you.  Welcome.
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Okay, so good morning everyone. Welcome as well. I'm sorry because of the delay of the laptop. We thought it died but what actually happened is we stacked two laptops on top of each other and there's this little magnet inside that makes it turn off. So my laptop screen was turning off and on and off and on because it was sitting on top of the other one. But anyway, it works now. It didn't die so I'm happy. It's a good start of the day because my computer is still alive. So I'd like to start with what a quote from actually Oscar Wilde, the picture of Dorian Gray, 1890. People know the price of everything but the value of nothing. I think a lot of people can relate to that. But what is value? How does value relate to prices and our economy? Why is it, for example, that water which is more useful than diamonds is a lot cheaper than diamonds? They call this the value paradox. So our empathic values, sustainable values, social values, shared values integrated in our economic systems. I think there are no easy concluding answers to these questions but I think we are at a point in time where we can really shape the economy right now and we can create a more relational economy, a relational system where our values are more based on relations with products, people and the systems we work in. So to achieve these relations we need openness and transparency. So in this presentation I'll show you some context and projects which I'm working on which relate to all these questions but also why it's important that this is something we have to ask now and that we have to deal with now. So is there anyone here who knows what this is? Yeah? Shot really loud? No idea? Now? Toaster, yeah. So I think looking at this product and this toaster has been made by this guy over here, this Thomas Twates and Thomas Twates went into a shop and knew the price of a toaster because he was going to buy one and he was going to buy one for I think three or four pounds and he asked himself how is it possible to make something like this for three or four pounds and what's behind it? What's the story behind this toaster and how do you make it and who's making it and what do you need for it? I think it's a really good question because it's also a question which we don't ask that much ourselves anymore. And what came out of that is this beautiful toaster which looks kind of alienating because we are used to have all these and you see it there in the shop together with all the other toasters. We are used to see these masperduce toasters as objects we use every day and we don't ask about how is it made and what's around it. But with the toaster Thomas Twates made, you can actually see how it's made because he took it very seriously. So what he did, he went into the mines and got the iron ore and he actually found a patent online of someone who found out how to get iron out of iron ore. There was actually someone who was playing around with microwaves to try to get iron out of iron ore. So he used that and from all these steps and getting further into this process, the technical process, he actually learned a lot about the stories behind all these, you know, the people working in the mines. So it became more like this project about the stories around stuff. So the toaster tells a story and it's the beauty of the product I think is that it's transparent, that you can see what's behind it. So it's an industrial product and it's, you know, we kind of got alienated from all these products. And looking at industry when it started, this is around, I don't know, there are probably a lot of people here who know the wealth of nations, Adam Smith, 1767. And Adam Smith is the one, this is the first book that actually describes the economic systems. And Adam Smith was describing the self-regulating market. He was describing the vision of labor and the vision of labor is exactly what happened with the toaster as well. You know, everything became processes. And you have some people working on that aspect, some people working in the mines, some people working somewhere else on having the fuels to make the machines work. So there's another man called Milton Friedman. He's a true capitalist who has a really, I think a brilliant story about a pencil where he explains the division of labor. And I'd like to show you the movie of Milton Friedman explaining this. Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from, or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. People who don't speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met. When you go down the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was a magic of the price system, the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum. That is why the operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world. Well, a true capitalist, I would say. Also, he brings this really romantic story about the free market and people not knowing that they are working together on this pencil, but are connected in a way that creates this social bonding, blah, blah, blah. What he is talking about is the invisible hand, the self-regulating market. The invisible hand is the hand, and Adam Smith was already talking about it. There are some critics about the interpretation of that, but the invisible hand of the self-regulated market became this thing everyone was holding on to, because isn't it beautiful that everything works by itself? The problem with that is that you also, that is an untransparent way of working. If you don't know if somebody is working, you know, the vision of life, somebody is working on a piece there and somebody else is working on a piece there, they don't know. They have no shared value in the whole thing. The invisible hand takes care of that. So what if this untransparent situation creates unfair situations? And I think invisible hands can be really unfair, and I think some British people here might agree with that, because if you look at production and products, they become so complicated and it becomes so impossible to trace all these parts, because look at this car. It's a beautiful car, but it's an old car, and it's actually a very simple car. The cars right now are much more complicated. Can you even imagine that all these pieces have suppliers, and all these suppliers of these pieces have suppliers, and those have suppliers again? So it's exponential, it becomes exponentially complicated to trace where stuff is coming from. So the cars right now have electronics as well, and when you put electronics into the equation, it becomes even more complicated. And there's also a lot of stuff going, you know, being unfair about these electronics we use. I can show you that in the next short movie. I'm on my way to the eastern Congo, one of the most dangerous places in the world. Congo has been a major source of natural resources for the mobile industry the last 15 years. I've heard that in mind, Steven the Jungle, children are working under horrible conditions. I want to see where these minerals are coming from, and to see with my own eyes if they are financing war. This is chance. He's 16. He says that for the last three years he's been working in Besie, the biggest illegal mine in Congo. He wants to take me there. You see, this is horrible, what they are living is really horrible. Four years ago this place was nothing but jungle. Today 15 to 25,000 people are working here. Different armed groups are fighting to gain control over the mine. These teenage boys stay down here for several days, digging out minerals essential for the mobile industry. Mines like these are few years away. In the last 15 years more than 4 million people have died. These minerals end up in mobile phones, like my Nokia. Does that make me responsible? We are all responsible, and you know that all this is going into you. We must be revolted by this situation. We are a human being. Get out of the mine, Nokia. Okay so, of course this is through the eyes of a documentary maker. There's a lot of drama in it, but there's definitely a point here I think. Looking at the situations we create around these products, making these products, it's so complicated to even know where stuff is coming from. Nokia for example in this movie is one of the targets of the documentary maker. Nokia cannot say they have conflict minerals, conflict free phones. There's not one phone provider, phone developer in the world that can actually say that they have conflict free phones. Because it's impossible to trace. You see here the difficulty of the tracing in the Congo itself. It's not only, you know, this is about the mobile industry, but it's not the mobile industry itself. It's the whole electronics industry. You know, tantalum, one of the minerals they showed here in the movie as well, is used for capacitors. And capacitors are in all electronics. So, also cars. So I went to this website called slavery footprint.org. And I don't even have a mobile phone actually, but I do have a computer. I do have a lot of electronics in my house. So what you do, you fill in all these electronics devices you have. And the website then calculates how many slaves are working for you. So I got 60 slaves working for me. Well, obviously most of them are working in China. But some of them are also working in the States, South America, Africa. It's all around the world slaves are working for me. But the problem with, you know, slaves and the whole term slaves is that, you know, what makes a slave a slave? And what is slavery? And what is the opposite of slavery? Because when you look at the opposite of slavery, I think we're talking about liberty. And what, you know, if you look at one of the brightest people ever lived tells us about liberty. He actually says, it's a term whose meaning is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist. So what does that say about fairness? What does that say about openness? If even liberty is so porous that you cannot, you know, you can make anything out of that. But there's one thing I do know. And I'm a designer and designers like to think in solutions. And not so much in question, because we have had, you know, I've been putting out all these questions and all these abstract terms which are really hard to answer. But if you look at unfairness, so you take the opposite of what is fair, I think everybody believes that you have to have action when you have unfair situations. So one of the projects we did is creating a fair phone. And we're still working on it because that's not something you do within one year. But fair phone is a project we started two or three years ago. And what we thought is okay, so if the mobile industry cannot say that there is conflict free, that there are conflict free phones and they cannot, you know, vouch for fair phones, then we're going to make one ourselves. Because how hard is it to make a phone? Phones are being made already. The hardest thing is to make them fair. So we started doing that. And of course you cannot do that yourself. Because I'm not a phone developer. I don't know electronics and I don't know mines. I don't know minerals. I don't know where you can go on and on. But together, if you put it up as a platform, I think we can come quite far. So that's what we did. We started step by step. And one of the things we did was also go to Congo and find out if it's possible to work with mines and corporations where you can actually contribute. Africa. Fairphone is the world's first collective non-profit technology company developing a phone using minerals mined and sold under equity conditions. Recently, Fairphone undertook effect-finding mission to Katanga, the most southern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Katanga's soil is full of copper and cobalt, the letter being used in batteries for mobile phones. The Fairphone crew visited various parties in the mining industry, from high-ranking officials to artisanal miners. This short film shows you some highlights of a very successful bill, Bumpy Expedition, towards the heartland of Congo's copper belt. We are in the Camillombé quarry where artisanal miners produce cobalt. So there, we have a very deep pit that can be 60 meters high, and there are ramifications that people can go through. And to protect themselves against rain, artisans put their cows. So when it rains, the rain can't attack them from inside. And there, they are working. And generally, in such cases, they don't come out immediately. They make reserves there, and the days of their work, they come out with the same day. One has to work to change phone a party on Kongo. Yes, I was wondering if you would take my phone to Kongo. It's not a product. It's a gift from me. It's a gift from me. I'm not going to take it from you. I'm going to take it from you. Okay. The answer is that our objective is to be honest. We have a channel. We have a phone call. We have a phone scandal. We have a phone call. We have a phone call. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to lie. No kidding. I'll leave you because if you leave, I Constitutional Jeent빈 men can hear something chocolate So, I work for a media lab in Amsterdam. It's a non-profit organization called Vax Society. And Fairphone is one of the projects we do. If you want to know more about the project and look at what we're at at this point, you can go to the website and look it up. At Vax Society, we have a mission. And our mission is to give social cultural meaning and value to technological developments. In a way, it's looking at social innovation. And when you look at the projects we do, one of the principles we work on a lot is reciprocity. And reciprocity is also very much connected to fairness. So in a way, all the projects we do has this fairness component in it. And also one of the things we think is that with close systems, you cannot create this reciprocity. And I really like this quote from Makeson. I think a lot of people, or some people here might know the manifesto Makeson made. And one of the quotes in there was, if you can't open it, you don't own it. And I think ownership is very important. Because when you feel ownership, you can actually create relations with the stuff you use. So at Vax Society, we have several labs. You can see the labs as research programs we do. We have a creative care lab. We have a future internet lab that focuses on the future of the internet. Urban Reality Lab is focused on how you deal with urban development and location-based applications and virtual layers. And one of the labs I coordinate is the Open Design Lab. And of course, the Open Design Lab has a mission as well. And the mission comes down to that we try to bridge the gap between the virtual world and the old industrial models. Because in the virtual world, we have this network culture. And in the old industrial models I just showed you, they work on a totally different basis, totally different principles. So this is what happened with the industrial stuff in our cities. Division of Labor actually took care of that. And what you see in the back of these industrial buildings is what came out of that. It's the knowledge economy. And the knowledge economy is mainly about information. And information moved away from controlled consumption. What happened is that we had a digital revolution. And we had this digital revolution. This took place. Information and industry got separated. Well, what do I mean by that? When you look at this, people reading books, information was part of the industrial system. You needed books to put this knowledge on. You needed film to put films on. So you had all these artifacts and you had machines to be able to create these artifacts to distribute knowledge. That's where copyright also came in. So copyright is very much related to all these industrial processes. So with the digital revolution, that totally changed. So information is produced in a very distributed way. And people are both the sender and the receiver of information. And this is, by the way, a snapshot of the Internet, I think, two years ago or something. So that digital revolution made this possible as well. This is Napster, one of the first versions, I think. And this was a pain in the ass for the industry because it totally bypassed the system they created. And what they did was, of course, their first reaction was create this control system. But we went on and we did this. And now we have open data. You see all this creation of openness within this network culture is getting more and more. Many people here talk about it already, so I won't go into that too much. But this is when it gets really interesting because Pirate Bay, I think, two or three months ago opened on the side something like what's it called, Fisibles. So on Pirate Bay, you can actually search for physical objects, you can download the files, and you can create them with machines. These are blueprints of products. So at Pirate Bay, you can actually download products now. And then this happens because products now are partly moving away from this controlled consumption as well because it's becoming part of this digital system. We can spread around all this information about products. You can spread around the files to actually create products. And now this shit really hits the fan for the old industrial copyright system because it becomes integrated into this whole network culture and the physical world. So what is that that makes it possible to download products and then make them? Well, digital fabrication is a big part of that. Most of you might know 3D printing. This is a laser cutter. So somebody downloaded the file and with that file, you send it to the machine and the machine can create, in this case, a chair out of that. So there's the chair. So the big thing about this digital fabrication, of course, is the way you can distribute it. These machines are capable of reading digital code and controlling the machine to make the object. And of course, these machines and making chairs is not what it is about. It's about creating access to this means of production because you can actually download yourself silly from Pirate Bay or Thingiverse or whatever and have all these files on your computer but you can still not make a product because you need machines for that. So one of the developments in that is, for example, FabLab. I think FabLab Fabrication Laboratory is one of the biggest distributed maker systems and infrastructure which gives open access and which is growing really fast at the moment. And I'll show you a movie where Neil Goschenfeld, the founder of the whole FabLab idea, will explain the idea of FabLab himself. We've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it. We can declare success we want. What's coming now is the digital revolution in fabrication. My colleagues and I started teaching a class called How to Make Almost Anything and the idea was just that. It's a program looking at how the digital world relates to the physical world. And one of the core things coming out of the research is the idea of digital fabrication, making the Star Trek replicator and assembler that makes anything you want by building the atoms on up. This is designed where you put in the millions of dollars of equipment at MIT or like the mainframes of digital fabrication. We can make anything we want using those tools. In 20 years we'll make it so you can have it in the home. The FabLabs are in between. They spread all around the world letting ordinary people create technology from South Africa to the north of Norway and from rural India to inner city Boston. Instead of spending vast amounts of money to send computers and energy and communication around the world, you can spend much less to send the means to create it. Energy, communication, computation, just to say the words they sound big, they're being tackled as billion dollar mega projects top down. FabLabs is tackling them from the bottom up. We're just finding so many people with such interesting inventions and such great ideas. Sharing that is where I see this go. Okay, so that explains the whole idea of the FabLabs. This is a map of FabLabs around the world which is pretty old actually because also here in Berlin with Open Design City of course you have a FabLabs as well. Even in Holland they, I think around 10, 12 FabLabs already popping up. The great thing about looking at fabrication this way is that you share knowledge on this global level and you have the production on a very local level. So you can actually create products on this local level and local needs and share, but share the information about making it because you have similar machines on the other side of the world. Share that information and other people can use that as well. So one of the examples is Afghanistan, in Afghanistan they make Wi-Fi antennas together with also Kenya and MIT in the States to be able to send Wi-Fi signals from one village to the other village so you can connect all the villages and all the nodes. And they create these antennas for around 200 euros so you can make them yourself instead of the 20,000, 30,000 Cisco system Wi-Fi transmitters. But another project they're doing is in the States it's on modular housing with digital fabrication so how to be able to create your own house. You can actually build a FabLabs with a FabLabs this way so if you have a machine and you have the wooden stuff you can create your house. One of the projects we're working on at Wax Society because at Wax we also have a FabLabs is this prosthetics project we do together with Indonesia and what we're trying to do is to create a prosthetics for under $50. A normal prosthetics, lower leg prosthetics is around the 5,000 euros. When you look at Indonesia for example where you have bamboo and local materials which are pretty strong you can use bamboo instead of titanium. Of course it's not as sustainable as titanium but it's a lot cheaper. The real challenge with this kind of product is that we try to design in such way that people can create them themselves either in workshops or in sessions where you get guidance in it or alone but the real challenge is that. So think about how do I create products that other people can create so you're kind of making blueprints for other people to be able to create their own products. But not only prosthetics, housing, these big things are happening in FabLabs. A lot of designers come there and make their stuff, dresses, we have in Amsterdam a lot of textile students and fashion designers are coming to the FabLabs to work with textiles and to see what happens if you put specific stuff under the laser cutter for example because they're not allowed to do that when you go to a prototyping place and give them a job on cutting something. They can cut anything as long as it's not on the blacklist we know. For example PVC which has chemicals and stuff like that. And this is an example of a little boy I think 9, 10 years old came in and he had something on his, he had something wrong with his food so he needed special things for in his shoe to make them a bit higher inside. And he had to wait for a few months when he was going to the shoe repairman or to the shoe, I call that, the specialist. So he decided to do it himself and he succeeded so he made this stuff all by itself in the FabLabs, learned a lot and I think it's a brilliant example of somebody who puts a lot of time into making this because it's not pushing a button and it's ready. But he succeeded in doing it. So what we do also is look at how can we combine crafts and old crafts and 21st century crafts. This is a project where we use mud building and CNC routing together to create all these ecological, to combine ecological building with this 21st century blob building if you want to call that. And so this is, you might notice project, this has been shown at DMY I think last year and a project by Dirk van de Kooij. So you see that also designers are experimenting with these new technologies as well. So if you open up these technologies people find new things to do with it. So hi, I'm Dirk van de Kooij. I'm graduated on the design academy with the project called Endless. It's actually a big robot that is making furniture out of recycled fridges. Recycled fridges goes inside of the machine on the top of the robot arm and it's getting melted and it's so hot actually that it will melt to the former layer that it's been putting down. So it's riding in one endless line or in one endless string, a chair or a table or another piece of furniture. We can pigment it of course like any other plastic you can. But with this layering structure you can do funny stuff like gradients and you can emphasize the way it's been built up. The idea is like retrieved from rapid prototyping when I saw the model that was made with a really old machine and then you can see the ornament or the lines and you can see how it's been built up and I said okay wow this is cool. I want to blow it up to a bigger scale and then make it an ornament and tell the people in the chair really how it's been made. It was much faster like a prototype machine does it in five days in a chair and this does it in three hours and you can use recycled plastic instead of really expensive materials. There's maybe a future ahead for me also with this project. So enjoy. Okay so those are examples of people using these technologies to create solutions for specific problems or to create designs or to create objects. But it's not only about that. I think a big part of the labs and the importance of places like the FabLab or Hacker Spaces or whatever you want to call it is that the making process itself. It brings crafts and making into the environment again. It creates this relation with the objects you use again which is necessary also to create this ownership and this ownership is necessary to take responsibility also for the stuff you do. And also to be able to understand the systems around you. Because making and this is I've read this story about Arkea people creating billies. I think you know billies. You know these really easy cupboards people make and they made a comparison about people who made billies and they put them together and they asked which one do you like most and everyone liked their own billy. They thought their own billy was the most beautiful and they're exactly the same. So anyway if you make something yourself even though it's an Ikea billy you get an attachment to it in a way. So talking about Ikea I think let people give their own meaning to stuff. Own products as well. Hack products. Because if you look at objects and if you get this ownership over objects it's about these experiences as well. And again also the stories behind all these objects. So it's important to look at technology and to hack into it. Because if technology becomes very complicated and I was showing the car in the beginning and the car is you know it's an easy thing and I don't think there are that many people that can fix their own cars nowadays. So that's also the reason why we need these places. We need places where people hack into this technology because otherwise it will be the big companies and the big institutions that will make this technology and you'll be the one that consumes it and have to deal with that. So that's also one of the I think maybe the most important function of these labs and it's also in a city because that's what's happening. You get production much more closer to the urban environment. Some people call it post industrial production. I think post industrial production might actually create these new relations. So what does that mean for a business? Because I think a lot of people and that's one of the questions I get a lot is okay you know find nice story, a bit idealistic and I believe people are altruist but the bottom line is still how do you make money with all this stuff? Well the bad news is I don't know. I don't know, I cannot tell you how to make money with all this stuff with everything that's happening but what we did is we did experiment with it and we're still doing some experiments but just have a look at this model. So I was talking about crafts before the industrial revolution people made products in workshops. The mass production model you get standardized products. What we have now is that people can actually be part of that interactive digital design process. We can create interfaces where people can be part of creating their own products. So if you look, this is simplified but it's a way of looking at what's happening. And we did a project with Drogh Design. Drogh Design is a design brand in Holland which is pretty famous for its high quality design and we were creating this platform. It's not online yet but we're creating this platform called Make Me where we look at how we can create business models around all these new things that are happening. And the main, the basics of the platform is that it's a platform for products which are not made yet. That means that if somebody is going to buy something on that platform, he can still choose who's going to make it, maybe he's going to make it themselves. That's a business model as well. And also, you know, what the product is going to look like because if it still has to be made, you can still have influence on the product. So these are some of the products which came out of the first pilot. You see the cupboard in the left corner? That is, there's an interface created for that where you can actually push at specific places and the cupboard will make holes at the places where you've pushed. And in the back, it generates, so in the system, it generates all these outlines for machines to read the code to actually make this cupboard as well. So you can, after you've made your product, you can choose which FabLab is going to produce it and then it sends it right away to the FabLab. So it's about optimization of the system. It's about having consumers make them part of this design process. And also, it's about how is the designer going to make money on these blueprints which are downloadable and freely distributable. This is another product, I'll go through that. It's a bikini line which you can cut with the laser cutter. And the nice thing about this, and of course the sizes, you can change everything in the colors, but it melts together while it's cutting. So you can put two materials on top of each other and it cuts with the laser cutter and it melts together so you have really high quality bikinis. So how does that relate to openness? For the FabLabs, I think it speaks for itself. But with the stuff I showed you with the business models, I think what's happening is that it's also creating new relations with the people who make stuff. Because it gives the craftsman, either it's 21st century craftsmanship, it's digital fabrication or it's people that make stuff by hand, it gives them a face again. And you can also, you can relay it more to them and it becomes much more transparent. So to me, that's openness as well. But if you look at where I think the really, the main things are happening is when you put something, when you put products online, you create communities around it and you create a context where everyone can collaborate and participate. And then you're talking about open source design hardware products. This is a car which has been developed open source. This is a house which has been developed open source. And these products mainly exist online. This is where the real stuff is going on. And once in a while, there is a momentum of a house that's popping up, which is a version of the whole community working on that house. That's also something we want to do with Fairphone. And we're starting this year to create this open design community where people can actually combine and think and create stuff together with us to be able to produce this product. And I think one of the important factors in that is that we can make this invisible hand I was talking about in the beginning, we can make this invisible hand visible again and create shared value throughout this whole production chain. So when we go back to where I started, I think we still have a long way to go. But I truly believe we have the perfect situation now to create this relational industry based on values. And I also believe that we can all benefit from that. So I'd like to leave it with this. And thank you for your attention. I don't know if we have time for questions. No, it's 11 already. Okay, so one or two questions. No one? Not too early? Okay. First of all, thank you very much. A fantastic keynote. What about the phone? Can you tell us a bit more of when will it be ready to ship or be able to ship the boat? The problem with the phone, it's a very complicated thing to do. But what we did, we simplified it by saying we get one mineral, which is cobalt, and cobalt is used for making batteries. And we focus on cobalt now, so we're in Congo trying to set up collaborations with mining companies or with mining corporations there to actually create this battery. And we have on the other side of the market a KPN Vodafone T-Mobile. We're already willing to sign contracts to take these batteries and put them into the market. So that's where we start. And then, you know, a smartphone has more than 30 minerals, which also, you know, dubious in terms of fairness. So it's a long way to go. We do it step by step. Go on. Thanks. Bas, thank you very much. Due to our schedule, we have to close another session. Thank you. Welcome.
like to start with what a quote from actually system where our values are more based on openness and transparency. So in this pounds and he asked himself how is it possible to it. So it's an industrial product and it's, you impossible to trace all these parts, because look even imagine that all these pieces have more than 4 million people have died. These brightest people ever lived tells us about mission is to give social cultural meaning and value to technological developments. In a way, down to that we try to bridge the gap between the Because in the virtual world, we have this that. It's the knowledge economy. And the able to create these artifacts to distribute industrial processes. So with the digital world. So what is that that makes it possible to one of the developments in that is, for example, world relates to the physical world. And one of create their own products. But not only and old crafts and 21st century crafts. This is a people using these technologies to create and making into the environment again. It creates production much more closer to the urban workshops. The mass production model you get digital design process. We can create interfaces all these new things that are happening. And the can still have influence on the product. So these car which has been developed open source. This is to create this open design community where people together with us to be able to produce this have time for questions. No, it's 11 already.