Open Communitition

The recent enthusiasm in popular culture for massively multiplayer online environments has proven that eclectic online communities have the potential to develop powerful problem solving capacities through the enactment of a collective intelligence. In collaborative design, this calls for the implementation of a shared environment leveraging the collective intelligence of online communities through open competition. The goal is to spur innovation through a public process where the emerging design ideas are available to all competitors.  Foreseeing a radical change in the identity of the architect, becoming but the designer of these emergent communal design environments, this paper aims at making the case for this alternate CAAD model through the execution of a pilot study. This study, based on the Serpentine Pavilion procedural framework, sends a sample group of designers to a shared videogame environment, where they are asked to create their own pavilion using a kit of parts drawn from the reverse engineering of Frank Gehry’s 2008 pavilion. These iterations are scored in real time against a set of quantitative programmatic requirements, but they are also assessed qualitatively through more subjective criteria by the community of competitors, enriched by the immersive virtual experience of each other’s designs. Observation and analysis of participants has been undertaken through the recording of design sessions and online survey.  This pilot study is currently being undertaken, yet the initial results hint at displaying much potential for a participative, intuitive and instantaneous form of collaborative CAAD based on communal competition.