CASE STUDY FOR CREATIVE RESEARCH PRACTICE:

BRITTA RILEYWRITTEN BY SOPHIE BAINMARCH 2013

KEY CONCEPTS, PRACTICES & METHODS:

After beginning her career in Journalism for a variety of Texan publications, Britta Riley became intrigued by the influence the world wide web was having on society and decided to help direct that influence. This lead Riley to social media and community advertising for Swatch and MIT and eventually into co-founding four socially conscious businesses over 10 years. While working with the web for several museums and educational institutions, Riley fought to transition what she describes as “hands-on participatory learning about health and the environment” from the museums into the homes of those they were designed to empower, resulting in the founding of Windowfarms.com, which revolutionizes the way humans experience fresh food farming in the dwellings of the 21st century. Windowfarms educates and inspires billions of fresh food lovers who lack the space to grow their own produce, through considered, simple social design. Termed ‘social infrastructure’ this project is kept as open source collaboration because of its use of hydroponics, which is one of the fastest growing areas of patent control in the US, and before long there will be no room for independent control. One of the driving realisations Riley determined was that in order to truly change societies lifestyle choices, everyone must independently take responsibility, and not sit on their hands discussing the decisions of experts. The research and development of Windowfarms has been compared to NASA’s R&D for the crops in space project, in that it explores similar techniques with a scientific basis,

although the R&D for Windowfarms is an ongoing and organically growing process that Riley has termed R&DIY ‘Research & Develop It Yourself’. Using her experience from working with social media as a research tool, Riley created an online community that now has over 44,000 followers all over the world. The online platform encourages members of the community to post their experiments, failures and successes and for others to take those and add or improve upon them from their own experience. This allows Riley and her team to monitor these developments and single out those that are most effective at helping everyone in growing their Windowfarms. The open-source instructions are then provided free to anyone willing to give it a shot. Such a broad community with influences from across the globe provides a true interdisciplinary approach. Riley explains that the biggest opportunity for urban agriculture is to re-conceive what a window can be, and to open our minds to a change in relationships with the environment to be more productive on an individual level. As often as Riley discusses this individual or independent drive for change, a network or community that functions in an interdisciplinary manor, always supports this development and implementation on an individual level. While Riley’s website and social networking sites allow discussion and review of experimentation, her business partners are exercising their expertise in hydroponics to provide the missing link for the public, while also providing the plants themselves that have had a healthy start life in their own, larger, hydroponic farm.

This strong ethical sense of community was nurtured during her time living on a farm in Texas, in a small area that valued highly the skills and friendships of neighbours. This kind of passionate resolve can sometimes land an entrepreneur in a ‘flop’ such as Riley experienced with her ‘urine to fertilizer kit’. The project gained a lot of press exposure and public interest during its time as an interactive exhibition, but once it was re-appropriated into a saleable kit, the charm and intrigue was lost on a critical consumer market. For someone so young and lacking in formal design or engineering education, a product that is high risk for even the most established, well known and trusted firms is not an ideal introduction to the world stage. However, in true entrepreneurial fashion, Britta took what she learnt from the difference in public interaction and consumer market, and embarked on an open source R&D.I.Y community that mirrored much of what she had seen in the reactions of participants of her drink.pee.drink.pee.drink.pee installation project, regained the trust of the consumer market through transparency of her products and involvement of the community in the end design.

The success of Riley’s business comes from the trust grown in the community of her R&DIY’ers. A transparent ‘manufacture’ process and clear expectations of what a ‘consumer’ can get out of the product, provide loyal members of the Window farm community that not only buy her product, but also support her experimentation and help to develop it into a global market product. The nature of the online community also allows for suggestions of improvements for its members and the ability to ask Britta and her team any questions they may have on the nature of open-source design before participating.

FIELD OF INFLUENCE Brita Riley’s aim in many of her ventures has been to educate, or empower others to become educated. This began with her work as journalist, continuing into PDA development of Eco-score, an app that educates shoppers on the true eco efficiency of their groceries as they shop. In many ways her field of influence is her passion and the driving force behind her twisting and turning career path is the desire to make everyone around her just as passionate about their own lives and the way they live them.

The beneficiaries of Riley’s projects are not only those that buy the end product, but can include educators such as school teachers assigned the task of cultivating healthy consumption practices among the next generation. Government bodies, which will look to people like Britta for solutions to the rapidly urbanizing population and how their lives can be maintained. Other members of the design community who may see Riley’s products and recognize her passion, but feel they can assist her in the deliverance through a partnership. Other businesses outside of Riley’s peer circle can see the R&D.I.Y model being utilized and study it’s benefits before adapting it for their own businesses, an action Riley openly encourages. And of course there are the crowd source communities of people that form from all over the globe around Riley’s design systems or products. These people gain the most immediate benefit through use of the product, but also gain a support network for the lifestyle that accompanies these products. In providing that support,

Riley ensures the enduring success of each product or system. Often in responses to suggestions from members on her Windowfarms community website, Britta will need to remind people that while there may be a quick fix to something they are struggling with, the project is intended to be long term, along with the online community itself. In the past this has meant turning down offers of assistance with programming on a volunteer basis, as Riley believes it is unsustainable, and a constantly changing IT team will only end up harming the community. Riley learnt of crowd sourcing during college but at the time this meant simply handing out medial tasks to the public that required no set skills level. Mass collaboration however, is where the minds and imaginations of the community are ignited and anyone can look at any or all parts of a project and add their thoughts, experiment with their ideas, and continue to engage. The benefit is that a natural and honest form of advertising occurs that can be spread across the globe and then discussed by smaller groups or instant feedback can be provided on the same platform. The risk of mass collaboration is that by handing over an entire project to the public, the owner of the idea looses a lot of the power to make money from their design. Riley has managed to still sell her product by gaining the interest of consumers that are not directly involved with the mass collaboration effort, or do not share an interest in the development side of such projects. In an interview with Molly Petrilla on smartplanet.com, Riley is asked how she manages the ownership of the ideas within the crowd source community. In her response she explains that the

better ideas in the forum gain more traffic, which often results in credit from other members of the community. However, Windowfarms has had to apply for patents due to some members of the community using other designs as suggestions for improvement on Windowfarms. Riley’s response doesn’t explain how she prevents members of the crowd sourced community from adapting existing designs in breach of existing patents, the occurrence merely forced her to seek legal advice on patenting and to apply for patents based on the direction Windowfarms was heading. It seems that in an online community, patent breaches can only be avoided by not being used in the end design, but will always be a part of the discussion. The result of the legal advice was the creation of a social enterprise. This allows there to be a for-profit and not-for-profit branch. The profits from the designs created by the crowd-sourced experiments go back into the community and educational sides of the business, while profits go towards the manufacture of the Windowfarms kit. A partnership set up between Windowfarms and Garden State Urban Farms, who provide the young plants that are sold as part of the kit & assist with the testing of new species in the Windowfarms set-up, has kept the cost of her product low and the manufacture of parts minimal and local. These factors result in a low cost product that provides the customer with instant return in the form of food. This has meant Windowfarms can easily market the kit for a profit without seeming too expensive for the outcome.

CAREER PATH While Britta Riley may not be traditionally qualified as a designer, her work experience and passions have led her to introduce solutions to the problems of large communities through many forms of design. These are often kits that are a result of a system design study such as ‘The Urine-Fertilizer DIY Kit’, a system then turned into product for market. Originally, Riley and business partner Rebecca Bray discovered the harmful effects for urine on US waterways in its current system, un-treated urine flushed directly into open waterways and the ocean. They began to research this further and found that scientists in Germany were testing filtration systems for urine to remove the harmful elements before the waste process begins. These elements are extracted from the urine leaving a benign liquid and formed into a plant fertilizer. Riley and Bray did not change the scientific process but decided instead to exhibit it as installation art at a gallery in the US. Attendants peed into a cup and followed their urine through the process. They documented their PH levels and urine smells before being given a packet of their very own fertilizer to take home. The exhibition allowed the public to understand what the process really involved and become more open minded to a truly effective solution, rather than reading about it in the press, which would undoubtedly tap into anyone’s initial reaction of ‘gross’, harming the message of the project. Riley is not only a young entrepreneur who tackles start up companies with a ‘high-risk’ (challenging current practice or being one of the first to operate in new/emerging fields), she is also an established artist and sculptor who has exhibited in MoMA NY

as well as internationally in Japan, Venice and Helsinki to name a few. On one of her websites <http://brittariley.carbonmade.com/about> she confesses to starting up a couple of ‘flop’ ideas that regardless, won awards for their innovation. The first of her projects was with her mother, founding a medical practice for women in Texas that ignored insurance boundaries and focused on affordable and accessible care. Several Eco focused apps, websites and businesses followed, also gaining recognition for their entrepreneurial nature. Riley provides three terms to describe herself in her working life, ‘Innovation Culture Hacker’, ‘Social Entrepreneur’ and ‘Artist’. By studying her resume and context of her explorations, it is clear the Riley’s driving force is her social conscious. Some skills she has listed herself as having include “ethics, engineering without a degree in engineering, doing whatever it takes, asking questions, asking forgiveness, saying no & motivating other people to get important $#!+ done.” It is clear that Riley believes everyone has the power to improve their environment and that of those around them, whether that have the skills as a professional or otherwise. This type of approach to design is incredibly supportive of open source and DIY and encouraging to a community that is otherwise only fed mass produced consumer product.

BUSINESS DOCUMENTS So far in this study of Britta Riley’s creative practice, it has been interesting to try and understand how she is making money from her R&D.I.Y modeled Windowfarms project. While she has never spoken about her own financial profits from any of her enterprises, she does discuss the difference in profit and not-for-profit branches of Windowfarms and how they can be managed as co-existing strategies. However, during interviews and write-ups by Riley her explanations don’t seem to describe traditional definitions of these models. For example, directly under the log in for the Windowfarms community website, there are two links to provide further information of the terms and conditions. One directs you to the ‘Terms of Service’, the other to the website for Open Source Hardware <www.openhardwaresummit.org>. A statement on the landing page for OSHW reads “Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.” Yet under the heading ‘Commercial Licenses Require A Different Process’ of the Terms of Service, members are told they are unable to use their designs or designs generated from the open-source site to profit from in any way, unless detailed plans are provided to Windowfarms admin and then approved: “If you are planning on using your Windowfarms in a commercial setting, using it as a marketing/advertising prop, or in any way profiting from it, those uses are currently outside of the scope of our intended creative commons license use. We request that you contact us at info@windowfarms.org with an explanation of your proposed use.”

It seems that this is at odds with the very definition of open-source design as described by OSHW and that the creative commons license, which is out of date, also conflicts with the set-up of the R&D.I.Y model. By continuing to study the business model of R&D.I.Y and Windowfarms, we can learn a lot about the legalities of open-source design. The ‘Terms of Service’ published on the open-source community website for Windowfarms <http://our.windowfarms.org/tos/> try to explain how open-sourced designing can work for both the community and the business within the social enterprise sphere. One member of the community posted an interesting response to these Terms of Service in the questions and comments section of the Windowfarms community blog. The main concern addressed by the member is the definition of open-source and the need to be completely transparent. The member explains that if Windowfarms intends for the instructions for farming with the technology resulting from the open-source community, to be free and openly available, then why are these instructions not something that can also be directly writable by members of the community. If it were truly open-source, then there would be no need for a ‘core team’ to hand pick the best parts of a forum to them create downloadable instructions. The instructions would be part of a wiki, similar to Wikipedia that are directly editable and therefore constantly changing and improving as a direct result of the open-source communities efforts. This member also lists a number of other confusions they found when trying to be part of the community < http://our.windowfarms.org/tag/non-profit/>.

Riley has attempted to responded to the concerns of this member in a reply comment <http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/12/11/something-is-not-quite-right/#comments>. While she does explain that this entire process is a learning curve, not only for herself, but for the entire business world, on how to operate via open-sourced communities, she doesn’t directly explain why there must be a registration with terms and conditions or why there is a need for a ‘core team’.

CONCLUSION To contextualize this case study towards that of a creative research practitioner, I believe Britta Riley has given us enough material to ascertain there are people operating outside of the skilled and qualified design industry operators, providing valuable input to creative research practice. As previously mentioned, Riley has influenced many fields including and outside of design and I find her approach to problem solving without a degree inspiring. It is this true belief that anyone can accomplish a successful contribution in the field of their passion that encourages me to move forward, gives me support when I will likely have ‘flops’ the way Riley did, and hope that I will also be able to work in an interdisciplinary environment and influence a broad scope of people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• www.linkedin.com/pub/britta-riley/2/1/277• http://brittariley.carbonmade.com/• http://www.ted.com/speakers/britta_riley.html• http://www.windowfarms.com/• http://www.rndiy.org/• http://our.windowfarms.org/ • http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/11/next-generation-

windowfarms-looking-funding-kickstarter/• http://under30ceo.com/interview-britta-riley-and-window-

farms-its-all-about-resilience/• http://our.windowfarms.org/tag/non-profit/• http://www.windowfarms.com/business-insider-20120205-

windowfarms-changing-urban-farming/• http://our.windowfarms.org/2011/12/11/something-is-not-

quite-right/#comments

Written for Simone Le Amon - Creative Research Practice. Semester 1, 2013. RMIT Industrial Design.

By Sophie Bain. Student number s3195033.