IPO Tables – Connecting The Dots For Circularity

IPO is a very simple software that allows to solve the circular economys most urgent question - how to make outputs inputs again - in the most elegant way imaginable.

Many production or uses processes have outputs that end up as waste because no one knows how to use them. Also the world of materials and objects is so complex that it is hard to map or foresee all the effects of a design decision I make to day for the future. 

IPO is software that enables through open collaboration to find and create reuse opportunities for almost everything - or at least guide design decisions towards solutions where that is the case, because the software enables to see and plan and enable a circular future for creations I make today. 

Designers, producing companies, recycler, but also end users. 

IPO creates a transparency layers for alle objects and enables everyone to see the world like MacGyver - a world that is like Lego - a flexible construction kit for everyone. 

Since we all interact with objects on a daily bases in our private and professional life there are potential uses for everyone. 

The IPO-Software is a simple text editor allowing you and everyone on the net to create documents (pages) about hardware or hardware like things. It has two basic page types:

1. module pages
2. things pages

The user uses the software by creating a “module” page. A module is in its core a simple table with three columns: Input, Process, Output. Here you can describe a production process or a step in a production process. For example how to make a cup of coffee:

Everything in the input & output column gets automatically created their own page – “things“-pages. On that page you can find all other IPO modules that have this thing in their input or output-column. Here the thing page for „Water“.

You can click on the modules to enter them. You can see the next module with all its inputs and outputs and follow them.

… module → thing → module → thing → module → thing …

That’s it.

Why is this interesting? If you think about it for a while you will quickly find a lot of interesting ideas what to do with this data and data structure. Some ideas are posted here. http://ipo.opencircularity.info/ But many many more have been discussed and are thinkable. 

It structures data about objects in a way that it "gamyfies" circularity almost. People want to find (and add) use cases to avoid dead ends. 

With this it could be come a search engine for product designers they use when creating an object. And why they search and test the documentation of their solution is created at the same time. 

Imagine all your Google-Searches you do in a project would automatically generate a good part of your project documentation.

The result will be a responsive Web App. The frontend is implemented with React. The visualization of the cycles is done by JavaScript and the library D3.js. The backend is implemented with Java Spring. Authorization and authentication is done via Spring Security with OAuth. Frontend and backend communicate via rest APIs and SparQL queries with the backend to retrieve paths. The APIs to retrieve the data/paths as RDF are also made available externally so that others can also use the data. The connection to the Wikidata Apis allows the use of the stored items as well as their relationships (taxonomy), meta information and translations. Since it allows to use a lot of existing information, since our Api can also provide the Wikidata IDs other our. Use information as well. The data is stored in the graph database Neo4J. It allows you to search for paths and cycles natively, even taking costs into account. For this Cypher Queries are used, which allow e.g. to find the shortest or all paths between 2 nodes (items). The deployment is done via Docker Container.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

We have a very early prototype and plan and @alpha test with a small group in the coming months. From there the software will be improved. Then we want to run a first test using the tool to connect companies in Berlin. 

Proof of concept. 

A huge data base with products. 

The software is meant to be open source. So other ppl. can build things on top of it or create their own versions of it. So we hope to see a lot of plugins or use cases that we haven't thought of so far. 

The IPO project aims to foster a culture and an ecosystem that utilizes transparent and open documentation of objects and process to create circular processes. 

Open Source Circular Economy. (What is Open Source Circular Economy? Read or Watch Here: http://larszimmermann.de/video-utopia-open-source-circular-economy/ ) 

Time (& Money) 

We are to busy with earning our rent to really put the time into the project it would need to make the next steps. A small amount would already allow us to get to the proof of concept stage. 

Work hard. 

Find partners. 

And motivation when people start using it and find it useful to make impact. 

Use the project as part of other paid projects on open circularity we make. 

Right now we are 3. 

We have two capable coders (Enrico and Michael) and one "Marketing & Community" person with a lot of standing in the field and community. (Founder and former Main-Maintainer of Open Source Circular Economy Days: https://oscedays.org) 

Closly to

Circular Berlin

OSCEdays 

Mifactori 

Science Hack Day Berlin 

+ many on the horizon 

There is none specific right now. 

The software is so universal that we are sure after the proof of concept a lot of interesting ideas and opportunities might pop up. 

There are many ideas flying around. 

see previous question  

We think IPO is a great tool for design & sustainability education. Not just for students but also for established engineers or even consumers. It puts the main question of circularity "what happens next with this" in the core of its interactivity and creates a lot of interesting effects and uses from this.