DISTRIBUTED ECONOMIES THROUGH OPEN DESIGN AND DIGITAL MANUFACTURING

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is 1) to analyze the potential digital manufacturing technologies and open design have to achieve a distributed economy and 2) to identify the limits and possibilities of digital manufacturing and open design in relation to the principles of Design for Sustainability applied to the clothing sector. The method used was bibliographic review. This paper emphasizes the benefits of distributed economies on attempting design for sustainability principles. Then, it discusses the relation between open design and digital manufacturing with distributed economies. We argue that open design and digital manufacturing have the potential to reduce the impacts caused by the clothing sector, but we emphasize that both strategies per se do not lead to a more sustainable scenario.