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Community-driven design: Collaborative objects, community-generated content, and the expanded role of architects
Abstract
This article explores the intersection of digital architecture, collaborative creativity, and community engagement through our conceptual framework of Collaborative Objects. By enabling a shift from user-generated content to community-generated content in architecture, this new approach promotes democratic design processes. Practical illustrations are provided through a series of public case studies—H = N Co-Doodle, H = N BLOCK, and Meta Block Linz—highlighting the versatility of the Collaborative Objects framework embedded within expanded software applications. These studies address the formal and informal consequences, opportunities, and challenges of transforming static design elements into dynamic, community driven narratives. While recognizing the challenges inherent in this paradigm shift, the article concludes by emphasizing the compelling potential for more shared, inclusive, and community-oriented design processes in the architectural field.
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This paper explores the potential of blockchain technology and the Web3 for a decentralized participatory architecture. In this context, the polyvalent capacity of a block in a blockchain is at the center of this investigation. Blockchain innovations in cryptography and efficient block validation and creation systems have led to autonomous blocks that act as decentralized, transparent, and secure Web3 assets. Following our previous research on collaborative objects that enable real-time participatory design activities, a case study project H=N BLOCK+A is developed that implements blockchain principles at both the conceptual and infrastructural levels. At the conceptual level, architectural blocks are speculated and applied as autonomous and decentralized Web3 assets, i.e., a decentralized kit of parts/blocks/NFTs/applications that can form a crazy patchwork of heterogeneous compatible blocks. At the infrastructural level, an existing sustainable blockchain is facilitated to embed a decentralized design methodology that enables real-time participatory co-creation of a collective architectural form.
Digital networks are transforming the way in which our built environment is planned, designed, and developed. Whilst many have heralded this technology as a solution to the problems of citizen engagement and participation in planning and design processes, the state of public participation in this field still arguably leaves much to be desired. In the last decade, academics and practitioners have explored the possibilities of 3D, multi-user, digital environments in planning and urban design contexts. These “inhabited virtual spaces,” where stakeholders are represented through digital avatars, hold the possibility of engaging a much wider audience in participatory processes, creating a more democratic and bottom-up process, and improving the outcome of community consultations. These multi-user environments can take many forms—and among the most promising are game environments. The benefits of using play and games in creative tasks and decision-making have been widely recorded, leading to the developing field of “serious games,” games which have been designed to accomplish a serious task. Despite this, there has been a reluctance to entertain the idea of appropriating more commercial and widely played games for serious tasks, rather than designing ones from scratch. One game in particular, Minecraft, has shown promising results as part of a participatory design methodology pioneered by UN-Habitat and the Block by Block Foundation. Through an analysis of this program, I will explore how the videogame Minecraft might be used as an innovative tool to improve public participation in urban design, whilst offering a virtual alternative to traditional models of consultation.
This year's conference theme`Towards a new configurable architecture`, provides a good starting point for reappraising and reapplying previous concepts of Configuration' in architectural design. The concept reappears often, but was particularly powerful whenever new computational tools and architectural concepts emerged and revealed strong synergies. In the 1960ties there was such a moment when configuration's pluralistic properties embraced architectural concepts of structuralism and early computing. Therefore this paper looks back at previous concepts of configuration to identify capacities that could inform current synergies of computational tools, such as open platforms, and architectural concepts of the second digital turn in architecture. The way we communicate, access, and exchange information recently accelerated towards realtime sharing of data, bits & pieces, and experiences. Open platforms that enable user-generated content and collective production of value are becoming more common in design. This paper discusses ways in which this collective content production can enable a computational and human-centric architecture, by reappraising previous concepts of configuration such as: open configurations, latent structures and variable infills.
This paper reports on an ongoing experiment in design collaboration: an open collaborative realtime environment that enables participatory design activities in spatially distributed teams. The project builds on online platforms and open source ways of sharing design ideas, but also on recent advances in shared augmented reality enabled by game engine technology. Furthermore it focuses on combinatorial design of collaborative objects: the models shared in this way are not just geometric forms, but informed systems of parts with a procedural or combinatorial logic, an assembly strategy. By pooling and aggregating such intelligent assembly systems in a shared online realtime design space we are trying to move towards pervasive collaboration in architecture. Authors taking part in the project are united in a shared persistent design space and can design collectively. They experience what we refer to as tangible complexity: a playful mode of aggregating and combining design ideas of different authors. We argue that this pervasive collaboration can lead to novel types of complexity: an architecture of socially augmented formations.
The article discusses design communication and participation of laypeople in a virtual participatory urban design process. We speculate that an immersive virtual environment facilitated instrument can allow laypeople to take part actively as designers in the early stage of urban design ideation and generation. We have developed a design communication framework where laypeople can participate in design discourse on a neighborhood's future urban form. The strategy describes an urban design intent, which is informed by the development procedure of an instrument and workflow to engage participants. The integration of the instrument and the engagement procedure enable continuous designing of urban form by laypeople. A protocol analysis has been undertaken to investigate design communication. A coding scheme is applied to investigate, analyse, and understand how laypeople communicate with the design instrument and control design in the virtual environment. Through engaging non-experts, the research impacts on the perceptual affordance created by immersive 3D buildings artifacts and verbal conversation. The protocol analysis validated the setup so that subsequent studies can address the meaningfulness of such design conversations.
Various computer-aided sketch tools can be used to support architectural designing (Tang, Lee, Gero, 2010) either individually in early stage of the process or in communication. We focus on the second mentioned. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of possible applications and mention the platforms which are supported. We explore the advantages or disadvantages of the tools and compare it with our newly developed application called ColLab sketch. With this application we hope in increasing speed and ease of graphic communication on one hand and testing architects demands on the other hand. We develop multiple criteria for evaluating the tools, while believing this paper could be of use to give a hint how to improve remote as well as co-located collaborative designing by sketch. Architectural designing is a very sensitive topic when it comes to sketching. Finally, we would like to compare the newly developed tool to this list and suggest improvements or experiments that help its finalizing.
This paper makes three contributions: first, we suggest a clear, concise definition of Web 2.0, something that has eluded other authors, including the Tim O'Reilly the originator of the concept. Second, prior work has focused largely on the implications of Web 2.0 for producers of content, usually corporations or government agencies. This paper is one of the few analyses of Web 2.0 from the point of view of users. Third, we characterize the creative activity of Web 2.0 users. In addition to their active content production, they are unusually active users of the Internet for entertainment. In multivariate models predicting Web 2.0, the most consistently important variables are technical ability, comfort revealing personal data and, particularly, Web 2.0 confidence. These variables suggest that despite the apparent simplicity of FaceBook or of typing a book review on Amazon, ability remains very important in the eyes of users. For many, there appears to be something daunting about contributing to Web 2.0 activity and many potential users remain, rightly or wrongly, uncertain of their ability to make a contribution. We conclude that the study of Web 2.0 can tell us much about how the Internet is unique, and that it warrants a significant scholarly attention.
ActiveCube is a bi-directional user interface that supports a
person's creative work through constructing and interacting with 3D
virtual objects by using actual physical cubes. With this flexible
interface, the user can easily construct various 3D structures in a
virtual environment by simply combining the cubes. All of the faces of
the cubes are the same and can be connected to any face of any other
cube. A computer recognizes the constructed 3D structure in real time,
so consistency is always maintained between the real environment and its
corresponding representation in a virtual environment. Each cube is
equipped with a processor for autonomous simulation and communication
functions between cubes. A cube also utilizes a sensor for detecting the
operational intention of the user and/or a display/actuator used as an
output channel. Users can interact with ActiveCube in various ways by
using the sensors, and the response to the interaction is also shown by
displays/actuators installed on the cube. Each ActiveCube is equipped
with both input and output devices, which makes the interface intuitive
and helps to clarify the causal relationship between the input of the
user's operational intention and the output of simulation results
A so-called Spatial Technology Stack (STS), that unifies Architectural Geometry and game-tech can robustly support the
(i)
synthesis of high-performance shapes including structurally optimised geometry and its processing for robotic and digital fabrication (RDF), and
(ii)
creation of environments that deliver novel, engaging and productive spatial user experiences both in the physical and virtual instantiations of architecture.
A technological thesis associated with these observations is that STS can provide, in comparison to the ubiquitous but misaligned Building information Modelling technologies, an alternative high-performance technological basis for engaging and responsible design, both online and on-land. We will argue that STS is better aligned with the cultural production view of architecture, spatial user-experience (UX) design and end-user ergonomics, integrated design and construction and the ecological benefits thereof, and the game-tech powering the metaverse.KeywordsArchitectural geometryTectonismMetaverseGame-techParticipatory designRobotic and digital fabricationSpatial technology stack
Real-time simultaneous multi-user (RSM) computer-aided design (CAD) is currently a major area of research and industry interest due to its potential to reduce design lead times and improve design quality through enhanced collaboration. Minecraft, a popular multi-player online game in which players use blocks to design structures, is of academic interest as a natural experiment in collaborative 3D design of very complex structures. Virtual teams of up to forty simultaneous designers have created city-scale models with total design times in the thousands of hours. Using observation and a survey of Minecraft users, we offer insights into how virtual design teams might effectively build, communicate, and manage projects in an RSM CAD design environment. The results suggest that RSM CAD will be useful and practical in an engineering setting with several simultaneous contributors. We also discuss the potential effects of RSM CAD on team organization, planning, design concurrency, communication, and mentoring.
3D modelling in the inception phase of architectural design is typically not supported in CAD. Moreover 3D modelling is still far from intuitive with the common interface techniques. This paper introduces a 3D modelling tool for architects, named DDDoolz, which is limited in its purposes but yet very powerful in its use. A cube is the basic drawing element to construct arrays representing building masses. Modification of the design is achieved by dragging sets of cubes, resulting in the creation or deletion of new cubes. Building upon the grid structure of DDDoolz, a design methodology has been developed. To analyse its strengths and weaknesses, DDDoolz is compared with traditional scale modelling.
This paper introduces a novel shared drawing medium called ClearBoard. It realizes (1) a seamless shared drawing space and (2) eye contact to support realtime and remote collaboration by two users. We devised the key metaphor: “talking through and drawing on a transparent glass window” to design ClearBoard. A prototype of ClearBoard is implemented based on the “Drafter-Mirror” architecture. This paper first reviews previous work on shared drawing support to clarify the design goals. We then examine three methaphors that fulfill these goals. The design requirements and the two possible system architectures of ClearBoard are described. Finally, some findings gained through the experimental use of the prototype, including the feature of “gaze awareness”, are discussed.
This paper is about networked collaboration in architectural education and about information architecture for networked collaborations. It presents results of a quantitative process analysis of two types of courses in Computer Aided Architectural Design that were taught using database-driven online environments. The main focus of the quantitative analysis is the performance of these online environments as information structures, designed to accommodate the presentation and the peer-to-peer exchange of design information for relatively large groups of between 60 and 150 participants. Using the database records to reconstruct the processes, three different quantitative analyses are described.Their results indicate that for these projects the web-environments were successful in enhancing peer-to-peer learning and that they promoted a more objective assessment of the submitted works. The study also looks at the effect that the environments themselves had on the process. Finally it draws some conclusions about these environments' information architecture: it presents tentative guidelines about how such environments must be designed to handle the dynamic display of design data, from many different authors, in a way that is transparent to the users.
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