Peter Troxler

Peter Troxler is research director of the digital research institute at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. His field of research is the impact of readily available direct digital manufacturing technologies and the design and manufacturing practice of “fabbers” and “makers” on the creative and manufacturing industries, and the emergence of networked co-operation paradigms and business models based open source principles – such as Open Design and Open Source Hardware. Moreover, Peter studies the emergence of third spaces and new manufacturing initiatives in Urban Open Innovation Environments, how they relocate production and research functions to the centres of neighbourhoods in the form of new spaces of production, and how the relationships between people and tools, people and capital, and people and authorities need to be remodeled to provide the conditions for radical innovations for the development novel socio-technical configurations. Peter is an industrial engineer by training (PhD 1999 from ETH Zurich). He worked in factory automation, attaching robots and automatic tool-changers to CNC milling machines before pursuing his career as a design consultant in Switzerland and later as a research manager in knowledge technologies and knowledge management at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. At new media think tank Waag in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he worked on Fab Labs and the development and promotion of Creative Commons licences and the development of Open Design.

Publications

Building Open Source Hardware Business Models
Building Open Source Hardware Business Models
Laetitia Marie Thomas, Karine Evrard-Samuel, Peter Troxler. © 2023. 30 pages.
Open source hardware (OSH) initiatives are collectively managed projects enabled by the internet and digital fabrication tools. They allow people to create products in a cheaper...