The Opendesk Foosball table has been attracting a lot of attention since its design and manufacture in January. Many of our followers asked if we were going to make the design public. Our response - lets do it!

Opendesk represents values of openness, accessibility and inclusivity (to name a few). Transparency is an operating principle we strongly believe in and wish to echo in everything we do. Across the multiple levels of work we do, be it design or marketing, production or development, we want to communicate it all, in a manner that is truthful and insightful, focusing on the ‘why’ and not the ‘what’.

For the past 14 months, Opendesk has been focusing on the workspace furniture market, delivering great projects to fantastic organisations like Google, Nike, HereEast and Kano - and all built through local makers. Many of these projects have resulted in the design and making of awesome new products. What has happened to these products? We shout about them through our social media channels and website with glossy photos and luring stories. Values such as openness, accessibility and inclusivity should influence the way we shout about these projects and their resulting products.

So how should we shout about these projects and associated products in a way that is true to our values. Lets open up the source material! Not only will we share the glossy photos and luring stories that celebrate the success of each project, we will also share production files, design assets, 3D models and other content. We will publish them through our blog, as “make it yourself” content for the creative hobbyists and design gurus out there!

You may be thinking right about now - “yeah that’s what you guys do right - publish designs under open source licenses”. You would be right, but to tell you the truth, many designs we produce internally, never reach the public domain. The main reason for this sounds a little fluffy, but it is essentially due to the small size of our team and the need to build tools that enable us to be truly open! There is still plenty to do, but we are well on our way!

So over the next 3 months, we plan to look back through our most successful projects, delivered by great independent makers, and find the “easter egg” products from each and release the assets to you, our community. We’ll start by looking back through our archives but the plan is that this will now become the norm and for all new projects and products we will do the same and open them up to you guys.