Week 18 - Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income
Assignment
Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
Prepare drafts of your summary slide and video clip and put them in your root directory
Presentation slide and clip
Dissemination plan
My final project aims to educate children in school regarding waste production and collection in a toyish, edutainment-al way. It’s an interactive game, framed within the medium of a workshop onto which kids play and discover how as consumers every action - and inaction too - brings a consequence.
All my reasoning regarding a distribution for this kind of product might be more political than economical, since it reflects how I view concepts like education, ecology and consumerism, and the ground of this view is set on topics such as being open-source, adopting the culture of making and promoting accessibility (both in economical and cognitive sense).
Licence and availability
I realized that the best licence I can adopt for the product of my final project is the CC BY-SA-40 by Creative Commons.
This kind of licence implies that:
Anyone is free to copy, redistribute, remix, transfomr and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially
The attribution of the product must always be declared in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests that the licensor is endorsing the new use
The remixes, transformations and build-upons of the product must distributed under the same licence of the original
The reason I want to adopt this relatively free licence is because I designed the whole thing thinking about children at school, and rarely schools have a dime to spare for any project that is a bit too much out-of-the-box like my final project. For this reason, and also for promoting a culture of sharing, I think that everyone with the resources to build one for herself - and possibly giving it to a school - should do so.
Furthermore, I’m humble enough to know that this is my very first significant project as a maker (with all the flaws that this implies), hence I figured out that if I ever want to get some reckoning in this world, I should adhere to its philosophies whenever it’s apt (also, I previously reported I got heavily inspired by other existing products - really heavily - plagiarism-borderline heavily - so I don’t think aiming for a gain could be an intellectualy honest and correct move).
To fully promote this concept, I’m making every single component of the project freely available on a github repository which I’ll keep open to fork and improvements, if anyone will ever be interested to give its own contribution.
Gift, distribution, profit
Since my Fab Academy participation was partially founded by a very generous local businness called Euroinformatica, it’s pretty obvious for me that the result of the final project will be a gift to them, which I already know they will use in their mission to promote education in sustainability and recycling. In fact, I’ve already been asked to forsee some communication material to present the game in front of school class and explain them how to play with it in a sort of recycle-themed workshop. This is already an important step which will give me a great and valuable feedback on my work and I feel really lucky and priviliged for that.
If time and resources allow me to do so, I’m really willing to prepare one or two more prototypes to keep both as a record and as a product to be tested. Furthermore, beyond the documentation material, I think I’ll prepare a presentation that will summarize all the key features of the product, the reasons why it is born and how it can be obtained and used by anyone.
I can use this presentation to present myself to institutions, businesses and prominent people, and keep promoting the ideals onto which the whole project is based. For this reason, I think I should prepare myself to the opportunity of making and distributing new prototypes in case anyone else becomes interested in them, even for a purchase.
For the reasons explained above, I find myself quite reluctant to see an high-margin profit from this work and perhaps will avoid to promote it simply like an item to buy. Beyond work-hours and materials, if I’ll ever have to consider a form of payment it might be for added values like the experience of building and programming the product along with an audience and moderating the whole session as a workshop for both the themes of sustainability and ecology, and digital fabrication and making.
I can easily see how a whole new generation of products and services (especially games) can be promoted, distributed and made profitable in a such way, and I would surely appreciate being part of a similar movement.