Wikitecture - Radical Collaboration in Architecture

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 6

Many of the precepts that began with Open Source (collaboration, shared IP, crowdsourcing etc.) are migrating from software development into a series of ever more surprising disciplines. Today old-school institutions like Proctor and Gamble go outside of their own R&D teams to innovate new products while Best Buy opens APIs to allow outside developers to build on their catalog data.

Now here comes “Wikitecture” applying these precepts to the very complex process of designing buildings. I want to dig into some of the details of Wikitecture and summarize what I think it has to teach us about collaboration.

My friend Jon Brouchoud is the co-founder of Studio Wikitecture, a group dedicated to bringing collaboration into the architectural process. He and Ryan Schultz have been pioneering "Wikitecture" for the past two years using Second Life as a proving ground.

Recently Studio Wikitecture won Architecture for Humanity’s Founders Award for their submission; a health facility in Nepal. There were over 500 entrants to the contest. Many of Studio Wikitecture’s contributors (roughly 40) were not architects but each brought specific, local knowledge that benefitted the project. A few examples:

• Adobe and gabion wall construction was suggested as among the most viable design material given the exact (and remote) location and the ability to utilize local labor. Other materials would not only cost more but could even be prohibitive in terms of shipping into the area.
• In Nepal an odd number of steps is considered inauspicious so all stair plans were designed for even numbers.

Jon told me that Wikitecture achieved a level of depth and detail in research that would be extraordinarily difficult and time consuming for one firm to manage alone. This gets to the first benefit of Wikitecture; it brings local knowledge into the design process. This video shows the building process:

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Virtual Worlds & the Cognitive Surplus

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 8

How much work went into producing all the (language) versions of Wikipedia? The answer: much less than the total number of hours Americans spent watching TV over the last year. Listening to Clay Shirky estimate the amount of untapped cognitive cycles in his Web 2.0 keynote, reminded me of a similar calculation we did early last year. Amidst the flurry of media stories about Second Life, my immediate reaction to the hype surrounding Second Life was to compare it to the benchmark that Clay cited in his talk: hours of TV viewing per capita.

Nevertheless, the media stories combined with signals from a few of our technical indicators (online job postings, book sales, message lists, ...) encouraged us to dig deeper into Virtual Worlds. We spent time in the latter part of 2007 understanding Virtual Worlds and earlier this year we released a Business Guide. This Sunday (10 a.m. PDT), I will be speaking in Second Life as part of the Virtual Business Expo and I plan to briefly discuss some of our most recent findings. The organizers are encouraging people to register in advance and you can do so here. Hope to see you in-world this Sunday.