About Bryan
Bryan Maleszyk is a digital strategist and experience designer based in Boston, MA. He currently plies his craft at isobar North America, where he advises clients on all matters of digital experience.
This site is his outlet for thoughts on business, design, society, pop culture, and anything else that he's thinking about.
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2 Comments
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I think that Kelley’s remarks are understandable and predictable. The idea that somebody’s massive investment in their own specalized education and professional training (totalling at least a decade and tens of thousands of dollars) might be usurped by a hive mind-like construct that operates within their field *should* inspire at the very least trepidation and defensiveness, if not dread.
Of course “understandable and predictable” does not mean that she is necessarily wrong, either. Her comparison to a lawyer’s closing arguements or a doctor’s research are valid. Perhaps the best way to deal with the enchroachment of crowdsourcing in a particular field is to re-focus the goals of the professional. In the case of an architect, while they would give up most creative and artistic control on an open-sourced project, their role becomes even more important when they act as the “fact-checker” or “reality-imposer.”
The implications for urban design are truly astounding. Think of the time and money that could be saved if massive developments like the Columbus Avenue project over the Mass Turnpike could have been collaboratively designed. Instead of an advisarial back-and-forth between developer and residents, the project could have been born out of both parties’ best ideas and might have addressed everybody’s concerns. Construction might have started years ago and be close to completion by now. Instead, all that we have to show for 10 years of wrangling and millions of dollars spent is a hole in the ground.
Even if this kind of approach to building design became widespread, its not like the architect will become an endangered species. There are only so many projects that the average person can hope to participate in.
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Georg
I was just thinking about architectural competitions which are the exact opposite of crowdsourcing. In a prototypical competition you have probably 50 teams of lets say 4 people spending each maybe 200h on one project. That totals to 40,000menhs or 20 menyears(!) of work for one awarded project.
There just has to be an alternative, collaborative approach to produce same or better results with those resources.
Resistance from architects is probably not rational but originates in the starchitect idea – the architect as sole genius and inventor idea that the majority of architects have been educated for and are practicing.
Crowdsourcing Architecture
A few weeks ago I shared the story of Studio Wikitecture with a number of architect friends of mine. Studio Wikitecture is a group of professionals from diverse backgrounds dedicated to bringing the core concepts of the open source movement (crowd sourcing, shared IP, decentralized intelligence) to the architecture of physical spaces. The group recently won the Architecture for Humanity‘s Founder’s Award for their design for a health facility in Nepal, submitted through a challenge issued by the Open Architecture Network. The kicker is that the majority of folks involved in the Studio Wikitecture project aren’t architects at all:
What did my architect friends think about this?
There was significant unease — accompanied by some outright skepticism — with the concept that good design can be had by committee. Kelley says:
In my response to Kelley I noted that no one was arguing that “just anyone” can produce good design on their own — Studio Wikitecture is a classice example of Jame Surowiecki’s thesis on The Wisdom of Crowds
, specifically his definition of a “wise crowd,” which requires
In the case of Studio Wikitecture, each participant contributes his own independent design ideas based on their own background and capabilities. The key to the system is the “wiki tree,” a doric-column like structure within their collaborative environment (Second Life) which allows all participants to view all contributions and vote on them.
The wiki tree in Second Life
Of course, any crowdsourced building design would likely fail — structurally and aesthetically — if educated planners and designers aren’t part of the crowd. Kevin Kelly But it’s nice to see that socially-enabled technology allows design massively collaborative design efforts in almost anything. Earlier this year, Kevin Kelly states in “The Bottom is not Enough” that “the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.” Obviously SW has mastered this approach. The result: a design that incorporated innovative design elements, examples of which are provided by the O’Reilly Radar:
Designers in all fields should take several things away from Studio Wikitecture’s success. First, the emergence of technologies that enable social interaction permit egalitarian participation in the design process, allowing stakeholders or other interested parties — like consumers — to contribute. Second, the environments, platforms, and frameworks that are necessary for these types of projects to be successful will need to be designed as well — in short, it’s a good day to be a designer.
Studio Wikitecture’s submission panels for the Nepalese Health Facility can be found below.