Riversimple has just announced they will be releasing the plans for their new fuel-cell car under a creative-commons license.  They’ve also set up a collaborative wiki so people who are interested in participating in the design process can download the CAD files, make improvements and submit them to the community for review.

The opensource design approach has had great success in the domain of software design, due mostly to the low cost of implementing software designs and transferring the code base.  There’s been discussion about applying the basic system of production to other fields, but this seems to be the first viable example.  The most interesting aspect of Riversimple’s announcement is that the design was released in a fully-formed state; the collaborative process is starting after a commercial company spent the time engineering the design and making the difficult decisions about what the goals and tactics of the project (this is most often where ‘open-source’ projects break down when the cost of implementing a design is substantial).

This speaks to an argument I’ve made a couple times; designers are paid for their ability to solve problems, not for the end-result of the design process.  Aside from legal issues, there doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against releasing designs after they’ve been completed.  This also ties into my argument earlier that building a system for exchanging architectural details could vastly accelerate the evolutionary process of architectural details.