We’re going to be blogging over the next few days about why we selected our ideas.

We met up with Denise Stephens last week to talk some more about her Enabled by Design idea. There’s so much potential with this one to go in all sorts of different directions; one of the biggest challenges is going to be focusing on what’s possible in just a weekend!

At its core, Denise has identified a really simple need for better user-centric design solutions, but we discussed a whole range of ways the project could develop, including incorporating aspects of another Social Innovation Camp submission for a user-generated map of disabled access.

But there’s one aspect that the Social Innovation Camp advisory board liked in particular. Its Ebay-like shopping portal is great, but there’s also scope for Enabled by Design to include more user-generated stuff as well.

Open source design

The success of the open source software organisational model has led to it being adapted to build and design other products.

There are quite a few experiments in open source manufacturing and product development, there’s a couple of open source cars and an open architecture community. The collaborative design spirit has also reached prosthetics; Pimp My Arm is all about prosthetics users sharing their needs and adaptive designs.

Enabled by Design could incorporate an open design element, allowing people to share their own adaptations with others. It could work a little like Instructables; say you’ve adapted you kettle to make it easier to pour your tea. You post a photo together with ‘how to’ instructions for making your own and share it with others through the site.

Could you help build a shopping portal for adaptive design or maybe you’ve had experience with open source design? Get in touch and tell us how you can help the Enabled by Design team.