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The digital revolution has spawned a new generation of small, agile and hyperactive publishers who, over the last decade, have profoundly transformed how architecture and design are broadcast, both in print and online.AnarchitecturereportbyShumi Bose
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This article was originally published in Domus 961 / September 2012
In Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a printed book to the cathedral building and utters his famous phrase, "Ceci tuera cela" ("This will kill that"). Where once predictions ranged from the utopian to the apocalyptic, we now see an online world that sits alongside the physical world, and similarly fateful proclamations concerning the effect of online architectural publishing on print media have long since passed. In lieu of predictions of one supplanting the other, we see a reality in which distinctions between the two are increasingly blurred. The cacophony of viewpoints, ideas and juxtapositions may still exist, but from this are emerging increasingly hybrid voices and groups, and new forms of publishing conceived as media for conveying architectural and political ideas, rather than as endpoints in themselves.
Driving this new, complex definition of publishing is the widespread access to new technologies— something that has opened the door to a new understanding of what the word "readership" actually means. Contemporary audiences are well versed in receiving information via a variety of media, but reading is not enough: as well as navigating and selecting content, they expect to be able to contribute their own thoughts, ideas, variations and objections. But the impact of new technologies goes well beyond the ubiquitous reach and accessibility of blogs: it extends to short print- run books, global distribution networks, e-publishing, and so on. The thrill of the new isn't enough to hold our interest; increasingly we expect online platforms to be just one of the many tentacled operations of creative practitioners, with overspills between the physical and virtual worlds. Even Dezeen, once considered the epitome of rapid response online design publishing, has evolved into something much more complex, developing into a lifestyle brand that extends into the physical world with pop-up stores and exhibitions.
Top: Having worked for a long time as designers and product managers for companies and architectural practices, Birgit Lohmann and Massimo Mini moved to Bali, Indonesia. In 1999 they created Designboom with its head office in Milan, while during the summer months they relocate Designboom to a temporary office in an undisclosed seaside location in Sardinia. Designboom has a permanent work team, made up of architects and designers from around the world who select and publish (exclusively in English) information and articles on art, architecture and design. Above: Designboom publishes the latest press releases and topical readers’ proposals, as well as journalistic reports conducted by its own staff. Every year Designboom co-organises four to six design competitions with large international corporations. Alongside the Italian edition, over the years four Asian versions of Designboom have also been established in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese
The ease of exchanging information on the Internet allows individuals to engage in collective intellectual works of unprecedented scale. At the same time, seemingly collaborative modes of publishing are also a means for individual, previously hidden voices to gain voice and exposure, as in the case of Ethel Baraona Pohl and her partner César Reyes Nájera, who describe their endeavours at dpr-barcelona as the happy by-product of frustration. Perennially interested in the layers that technology adds to discursive and physical space, their occasional contributions to journals were the only outlet for critical thinking outside the studio; larger bodies of research encountered rejection and huge delays within slow-moving institutionalised channels.
Future Plural is an independent curatorial unit, research lab and umbrella for creative collaboration founded in 2009 by husband-and-wife team Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, together with Alexander Trevi. Its activities include the production of seminars, studios, events, publications, installations and exhibitions that investigate spatial questions
Their experimental (and at the time innovative) digital publications pioneered new models of self- and collaborative publishing, experimenting with platforms that allow texts to be collectively manipulated by an online community. But the most rapidly-expanding branch of their company, dpr-barcelona, is short-print-run architecture books: no mean feat if one considers the crisis in book publishing (just five months ago, the famed Swiss design publisher Birkhäuser was placed in administration).
"Many small-scale emerging ventures deal with the communal, hyperlocal or niche terrains, and are often run by couples"
Geoff Manaugh is the sole author of the widely-read blog BLDGBLOG, a platform that gives voice to his reflections, interviews and essays on architecture, landscape and all things concerning the built environment: from airports and shopping centres to action movies, videogames like Bioshock, prison camps and shelters for giant sequoias. Edible Geography, authored by Nicola Twilley, adopts a geographer’s approach to the science of food. Venue, a travelling project launched by Future Plural in early June, will explore remote locations and visit people of interest scattered across North America, and report on them on and offline
Such a free exchange of ideas is not without its problems, however. At present, the virtual environment is a Wild West of sorts, in which the value of labour and production remains an arbitrarily defined quantity , and universal paradigms regulating attribution, control and agency are as yet absent. Many of the most successful emerging ventures in architectural discourse borrow on traditional modes of production: they are often concerned with hyper-specific or niche terrains. They are small, agile and, in keeping with the cottage-industry low-overhead model, a disproportionate number are run by couples.
Specialising in architecture and design, dprbarcelona was set up in Barcelona by architects Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera. Under the motto “Beyond books. Between art, science and architecture”, their catalogue includes monographs, documentation of buildings, historical studies, collections of essays and degree theses. All dprbarcelona’s books spring from a creative exchange between publisher, author or architect, and feature contributions by academic experts who complete the overview of each project
Writing in a recent issue of MAS Context—a scholarly Chicago-based journal produced by "the [invited] crowd", available both in print and for free low-resolution download — Javier Arbona aims to conceptualise knowledge-sharing and the rebroadcasting of content. He does this not in the context of privacy, authority and intellectual rights, but rather more interestingly in post-Fordist notions of labour. "Through a series of virtual devices common to most blogs (like 'apps' for quick reposting, emailing, retweeting, bookmarking on other sites, or, say, 'sharing' on Facebook, etc.), the work chores of circulating content are hidden by what seem like benign, abstract socio-communal acts."
Dpr-barcelona’s wide-ranging activity covers a multitude of formats and platforms, convinced of print media’s great value but aware of their readers’ new necessities and uses. They therefore accommodate e-books, tablet apps and hybridisations of various media with interactions through Augmented Reality. Reyes Nájera deals mainly with publications related to bioclimatic architectural projects, while Baraona Pohl collaborates with architectural magazines and sites as well as curating exhibitions and events (she is associate curator of the Istanbul Design Biennial due to open in October)
Arguably, the simultaneous growth of DIY publishing and ground-up activism have resulted in the conflation of civic and political rights with the spatial, civic and architectural locale. In the online output of architects and architectural writers, such as This Is Not A Gateway, or in new event formats such as Venue (the "live" and peripatetic collaboration between Geoff Manaugh and his partner Nicola Twilley, from BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography respectively), one can see a direct opposition to existing capitalised forms of production, and a more grass-roots activist stance in terms of engaging with urban and landscape problems through publications, events, artistic platforms and more. Perhaps in this light, some argue that even the most prolific "news" sites have critical, even political impact by virtue of their mere existence and reach.
Based in Berlin, Ruby Press is a small independent publisher specialised in architecture and urban planning. It was founded in 2008 by Ilka and Andreas Ruby (an architect and an art and architecture historian, respectively) with the aim of pursuing their own editorial line after eight years working as authors and publishers with their company textbild (www.textbild. com)
By disseminating architectural news to a wider audience than ever before, they shift access to knowledge from the hands of geographically marginal elites into the realm of the "real world". David Basulto — a qualified architect, teacher and co-founder of ArchDaily (the self-proclaimed "most popular architecture website today") based in Santiago, Chile — maintains, for example, that reaching a "housewife" demographic is intrinsic to his cause.
The book that marked the start of their business, and which exemplifies their editorial approach, is Urban Transformation, a kaleidoscopic study of emerging urban conditions worldwide. It counts over 50 international contributors including architects, urban planners, politicians and artists. Aiming to relaunch the architectural monograph, the Rubys concentrate on quality books with critical explorations and technical apparatus. The graphic design of all their publications is done in close collaboration with Leonard Streich (a graphic designer and architect), Elena Schütz and Julian Schubert (both architects)
As every forward-looking action has its retrograde reaction, the rapid growth and proliferation of blogs, networks and websites has been paralleled by a more intense fascination with the physicality of print media. While much design discussion has moved online, the recent, globally roving Archizines exhibition, curated by Elias Redstone, showcased contemporary architectural fanzines and journals.
Marcus Fairs has been the soul of Dezeen since 2006, when he created what was then only a design blog. Previously he had worked as a journalist for Blueprint, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and Condé Nast Traveller, and had also been editor of Icon since 2003. In 2007 Rupinder Bhogal joined him as co-editor
This followed Beatriz Colomina's archival Clip Stamp Fold, and preceded an installation dedicated to the 20th century's great magazines at this year's Venice Biennale of Architecture. The volumes on display in all three exhibitions are vibrant matter; they have the capacity to give rise to public spheres and imagined communities. Through the act of being printed, made permanent, books and journals provide punctuation points in the apparently endless production, discussion and evolution of ideas, thus reinforcing the truism that "printed matter matters".
Fairs and Bhogal created Dezeen Limited and expanded the site in terms of numbers and contributions, while gradually adding initiatives like the Dezeenjobs search site in 2008, and a site in 2012 specialised in design watches: Dezeenwatchstore. Their latest enterprise is Dezeenscreen, a site devoted to videos of architecture, design and art, launched at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair. Dezeen aims at the quick-fire select publication of the best architecture, design and interior design projects worldwide, thanks to a dense network of international collaborators and voluntary contributions received from professional and other sources
But the nature of architectural books is also changing. Organisational structures and layouts have become more flexible, more determined by the visual, more accommodating of non-architectural content, and increasingly employing some of the tools of online paradigms. Julien De Smedt's 2010 monograph Agenda features images of Kanye West's blog, facsimile emails and diagrams tracking office workflow, echoing the tools of Web analytics familiar to any online publisher. The publication of books from blogs — such as The BLDGBLOG Book — has also reflected the growing recognition of online discourse within traditional print media.
In 2007, Trenton Oldfield teamed up with Deepa Naik to establish this non-profit organisation in London with the aim of providing a link between the street and academic circles. Together they seek to create platforms for critical research on the urban fabric. This Is Not A Gateway brings to bear the experiences and interests of its two founders: Oldfield worked for more than ten years in NGOs specialising in urban planning and cultural and environmental programmes; Naik collaborated with museum organisations in the field of art while concerning herself with social, educational and structural themes
Andreas Ruby, co-founder of Berlin-based offices textbild and Ruby Press, is cynical about the simple transposition between screen and page, confessing, "It's like with early cars: they all looked like horse carriages, until they found their own way." Instead, he speaks with passion and conviction about books as an enduring art form, with their own intrinsic possibilities, physically encoded in subtly corporeal nuances. Ruby Press books could be described as a reaction to the logic of the large-printrun media machine that has in recent years grown dramatically in influence within the realms of design and architecture publishing. They are characterised by attention to detail, carefully considering page size, paper weight and porosity, and exquisite graphic design—but also short print runs. Low overheads allow for agility and small scale, and small-scale publishing, in turn, legitimates not only a more finely tuned specificity and quicker production, but also a more artisanal approach and the ability to operate on lower margins.
In 2009 Oldfield and Naik set up Myrdle Court Press as a means to support and give visibility to their work with the realisation of graphically advanced books designed for maximum legibility, utilising high-quality materials entrusted to local printers and an independent distributor. Oldfield and Naik’s main ambition is to provide a remedy for the chronic lack of critical discussion, and compensate for the reduced credibility in the democratic system of today’s rapidly and chaotically expanding urban fabrics
What one finds today, therefore, is not that online formats seek to replace or supersede printed formats. Instead, the poly-vocal, movable and interactive capacity that is most amplified in online production is actually part of a wider change affecting both print publishing and architectural production itself. Pop-cultural, even ahistorical post-modern juxtapositions, achieved in print by Banham, the Venturis, Archigram and many others before and after, have not only continued online, but also extrapolated into an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of perspectives and media. Rather than being drowned in sound, as readers we are increasingly savvy in terms of what to see and how, at what speed, in what context and on which device.
Shumi Bose (@tontita00), curator and writer of architectural history and theory.
A proposition for a different approach to designing space to succeed the single-author model includes tools from disparate sources to create new paradigms for thinking and building
The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling*
Open Source Architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm describing new procedures for the design, construction and operation of buildings, infrastructure and spaces. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and others, it describes an inclusive approach to spatial design, a collaborative use of design software and the transparent operation throughout the course of a building and city's life cycle.
Cooking is often hailed as an early form of open source; vernacular architecture—producing recipes for everyday buildings—is another form of early lo-fi open-source culture, openly sharing and optimising technologies for building. A contemporary form of open-source vernacular is the Open Architecture Network launched by Architecture for Humanity, which replaces traditional copyright restrictions with Creative Commons licensing and allows open access to blueprints. Wider OSArc relies on a digital commons and the shared spaces of the World Wide Web to enable instantaneous collaboration beyond more established models of competition and profit. Traditional architectural tools like drawings and plans are supplemented and increasingly replaced by interactive software applications using relational data and parametric connectivity.
OSArc is not only involved with production; reception to a given project—critical, public, client, peer-related—can often form part of the project itself, creating a feedback loop that can ground—or unmoor—a project's intention and ultimately becomes part of it, with both positive and negative consequences. OSArc supersedes architectures of static geometrical form with the introduction of dynamic and participatory processes, networks, and systems. Its proponents see it as distinguished by code over mass, relationships over compositions, networks over structures, adaptation over stasis. Its purpose is to transform architecture from a top-down immutable delivery mechanism into a transparent, inclusive and bottom-up ecological system— even if it still includes top-down mechanisms.
OSArc relies upon amateurs as much as experienced professionals—the genius of the mass as much as that of the individual—eroding the binary distinction between author and audience. Like social software, it recognises the core role of multiple users at every stage of the process—whether as clients or communities, designers or occupants; at its best, it harnesses powerful network effects to scale systems effectively. It is typically democratic, enshrining principles of open access and participation, though political variations may range from stealth authoritarianism to communitarian consensualism.
Open Source Architecture revolutionises every step of the traditional building process, from brief-building to demolition, programming to adaptive reuse, including the following:
Funding
New economic models, exemplified by incremental microdonations and crowd-funding strategies like Sponsume and Kickstarter, offer new modes of project initiation and development, destabilising the traditionally feudal hierarchy of client/architect/occupant. Financing of private projects increasingly moves to the public domain, offering mass rather than singular ownership, whereas funding of public projects can be derived from more flexible, responsive frameworks than simple levies or taxation. OSArc has particular appeal for builders outside the mainstream economy, such as squatters, refugees and the military.
Engagement
Traditional developments deploy engagement programmes in which the community is consulted on incoming developments, with blunt tools such as focus groups, which often result in lack of representation and input, or at worst can result in NIMBYism. With crowd-funded models, forms of engagement are built into the process, enabling a kind of emergent urbanism in which use of space is optimised on terms set by its users. This reclamation of people's power can be seen as a soft, spatial version of Hacktivism. OSArc can suffer some of the organisational drawbacks of open-source software, such as project bifurcation or abandonment, clique behaviour and incompatibility with existing buildings.
Standards
Standards of collaboration are vital to OSArc's smooth operation and the facilitation of collaboration. The establishment of common, open, modular standards (such as the grid proposed by the OpenStructures project) addresses the problem of hardware compatibility and the interface between components, allowing collaborative efforts across networks in which everyone designs for everyone. Universal standards also encourage the growth of networks of non-monetary exchange (knowledge, parts, components, ideas) and remote collaboration.
Design
Mass customisation replaces standardisation as algorithms enable the generation of related but differentiated species of design objects. Parametric design tools like Grasshopper, Generative Components, Revit and Digital Project enable new user groups to interact with, navigate and modify the virtual designs, and to test and experience arrays of options at unprecedented low cost—recognising laypeople as design decision-making agents rather than just consumers. Opensource codes and scripts enable design communities to share and compare information and collectively optimise production through modular components, accelerating the historical accumulation of shared knowledge. BIM (Building Information Modelling) and related collaboration tools and practices enable cross-disciplinary co-location of design information and integration of a range of platforms and timescales. Rapid prototyping and other 3D printing technologies enable instant production of physical artefacts, both representational and functional, even on an architectural scale, to an ever-wider audience.
Construction
The burgeoning Open Source Hardware movement enables sharing of and collaboration on the hardware involved in designing kinetic or smart environments that tightly integrate software, hardware and mechanisms. Sensor data brings live inputs to inert material and enables spaces to become protoorganic in operation; design becomes an ongoing, evolutionary process, as opposed to the one-off, disjointed fire-and-forget methodology of traditional architecture. Operating systems emerge to manage the design, construction and occupancy phases, created as open platforms that foster and nourish a rich ecosystem of "apps". Various practices jostle to become the Linux, Facebook or iTunes of architectural software, engaging in "platform plays" on different scales rather than delivery of plans and sections. Embedded sensing and computing increasingly mesh all materials within the larger "Internet of things", evolving ever closer towards Bruce Sterling's vision of a world of spimes. Materials communicate their position and state during fabrication and construction, aiding positioning, fixing and verification, and continue to communicate with distributed databases for the extent of their lifetime.
Occupancy
OSArc enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment—"to Inhabit is to Design", as John Habraken put it. Fully sentient networked spaces constantly communicate their various properties, states and attributes—often through decentralised and devolved systems. System feedback is supplied by a wide range of users and occupants, often either by miniature electronic devices or mobile phones— crowd-sourcing (like crowd-funding) large volumes of small data feeds to provide accurate and expansive real-time information. Personalisation replaces standardisation as spaces "intelligently" recognise and respond to individual occupants. Representations of spaces become as vital after construction as they were before; real-time monitoring, feedback and ambient display become integral elements to the ongoing life of spaces and objects. Maintenance and operations become extended inseparable phases of the construction process; a building is never "complete" in OSArc's world of growth and change. If tomorrow's buildings and cities will now be more like computers—than machines—to live in, OSArc provides an open, collaborative framework for writing their operating software.
References
— R. Botson, R. Rogers, What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, HarperCollins, New York City 2010
— M. Fuller, U. Haque, "Urban Versioning System 1.0", in Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series, Architectural League of New York, New York City 2008
— J. Habraken, Supports—An Alternative to Mass Housing, The Architectural Press, London 1972
— U. Haque, Open Source Architecture Experiment, 2003-05
— D. Kaspori, "A Communism of Ideas: towards an architectural open source practice", in Archis, 2003
— K. Kelly, Out of Control: the rise of neo-biological civilization, Perseus Books, New York City 1994
—C. Leadbeater, We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity, Profile Books, London 2008
—Nettime mailing lists: mailing lists for networked cultures, politics, and tactics
—Open Building Network / Working Commission W104, "Open Building Implementation" of the CIB, The International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (meets in a different country every year since its first meeting in Tokyo in 1994)
—C. Price, R. Banham, P. Barker, P. Hall, "Non Plan: an experiment in freedom", in New Society, no. 338, 1969
—M. Shepard (editor), Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, MIT Press, Boston 2011
—B. Sterling, "Beyond the Beyond", blog on Wired Magazine
*As part of the special report on open-source design published in issue 948, Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of open-source architecture. He responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented below. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas—a 21st-century manifesto of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.
Friends' opinions will affect search results, thanks to a feature inspired by Facebook.
Tom Simonite 03/30/2011
Google has launched a close copy of Facebook's Like button that will crowdsource people's opinions to help the search engine know what's valuable online. Called +1, the button will appear on Web pages and alongside search results, enabling users to signal that they appreciated a piece of content. Google will track clicks of the button to hone search results, using clicks from your friends as a signal of what is most relevant to you.
The search company announced the new feature today, saying:
It's called +1—the digital shorthand for "this is pretty cool."
A YouTube video introduces the feature, which will be "slowly rolling out" on Google.com, at first for users of the English version. Google's new feature is very similar to one built by both rival Bing and search startup Blekko. Both use data from Facebook Like buttons to have your friends' opinions tune your search results.
However, your social network is something of a blind spot to Google, which doesn't have the same understanding of your social connections that Facebook does. Initially the +1s of your Google chat buddies and contacts will be used to "enhance" your results, the company says, while eventually +1s from your Twitter contacts might also be taken into account. At launch, though, +1 seems likely to be somewhat hamstrung by Google's lack of a detailed social "graph" for its users.
When Google previously tried to remedy that, it enraged people by guessing at whom its users were friends with from their e-mail activity, and pitching them into a copy of Twitter called Buzz. Coincidentally, the FTC today delivered its verdict on the debacle, labeling Google's behavior an example of "deceptive privacy practices."
Yet Google's hunger for a better understanding of your social network, and hence whose opinions it should use to tune your search results, is only going to be heightened by the launch of +1. Expect to see Google make renewed efforts to launch features and tools that capture social connections in coming months.
Personal comment:
With the actual hype word "crowdsourced", we can see a bigger trend coming on: the collaboration between a digital network of "universal computer machines" and a physical network of human brains to achieve tasks that humans can't do (as quickly) or that computers are not able to achieve (recaptcha paradigm). We see more and more network applications where computers either allow to organize a network of brains or literally rely on "organic brains" (a big and first exemple to my knowledge being the Mechanical Turk service by Amazon).
It is therefore a double augmentation: the human brain augmented by the networked computer(s) augmented by the brains. We can possibly see the same effects on contemporary space: the physical space augmented by the digital networked/mediated space augmented by the physical space...
The rise of lending libraries, swapping sites, and product as a service systems over the last 5 years or so has been impressive. We've seen an upswing in everything from clothing swap parties to local rental communities, to big services like Zipcar for getting around without having to own a car and even AirBnB for renting spare bedrooms from locals rather than hotel rooms. Rachel Botsman is the co-author of the book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. She studies how we're switching to a culture of sharing, and how that will transform business, consumerism, and the meaning and impact of social networking in our lives. She took the time to answer a few questions from us about what's behind collaborative consumerism, and what we can expect over the next few years.
Lending libraries, rental sites for stuff, and even car sharing is getting more popular these days. But what area of consumables have you seen the most growth in for sharing or swapping among community members? Swapping sites for goods with limited value or that fulfill a temporary need such a baby goods, books and DVDs are growing at a staggering rate; Peer-to-peer space rental sites (homes, gardens, parking spaces, storage etc.) such as AirBnb, Landshare and Parkatmyhouse are exploding in mainstream popularity; Bike sharing is the fastest growing form of transportation in the world; Co-working spaces are popping up in the world's major cities; I think 2011 is the year that we start to see skill or 'favor' share communities such as TaskRabbit, Skillshare and Hey Neighbor start to take off.
As collaborative consumerism becomes more practical and popular, how do you think it will shift our economy as a whole?
Big picture (and I am talking in 10-20 years time), I think we will see the way we measure 'wealth', 'growth' and 'happiness' being completely redefined. We are already seeing countries such as the UK, Canada and France looking at reinventing measures beyond GDP that give a picture of the holistic well-being of a nation. As Sarkozy commented, "So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP."
The way assets and income are taxed is going to be an interesting area as more people become "micro-entrepreneurs" earning money renting out their assets or bartering their skills. Peer-to-peer marketplaces essentially cut out a lot of middlemen but in the process create a whole array of cottage industries. Just think of Etsy. It's going to be interesting to see whether big brands and global businesses retain their appeal or whether small really is the next big thing.
Some of the big environmental benefits we can see with a culture of sharing goods is reduced production of stuff, and definitely less waste. What are some of the lesser seen eco-benefits we might see?
In short, a) better utilization of assets b) products designed for longevity not obsolescence and c) mindset and behavior change.
All around us, we are surrounded by stuff that has what I call 'idling capacity', the untapped value of unused or underused assets. There are different kinds of idling capacity. Products that are underutilized (e.g. the average car that sits parked for 23 hours a day); products that fulfill a temporary need (e.g. baby goods and clothes): or those that diminish in appeal and value after usage (e.g. a movie or a book). At the heart of Collaborative Consumption is how we can use the latest technologies to redistribute 'idling capacity' and maximize usage.
I could not think of a more exciting time to be a designer. Longevity does not just mean designing with durable materials but making goods with modularity that can be seamlessly updated, as well as easily broken down for future reuse, resale or repair. It will mean designing products that can be easily shared, customized and personalized by different users. If a designer had a blank sheet of paper and was designing a car for shared usage versus individual ownership how would it differ? How can we use RFID tags to embed stories, images, and videos into shared goods so they become smarter and more interesting than individually owned products? There are endless sustainable design opportunities...
When people start using different examples of Collaborative Consumption they frequently describe a 'mindset change.' There are examples like car sharing where users think twice about whether they need to drive and thereby reduce their miles travelled by an approximated 45%. And there are examples like peer-to-peer rental, where people are using platforms such as Neighborgoods or Snapgoods. 'Owners' are realizing they can make money from renting out their assets peer-to-peer and 'renters' are experiencing the benefits of not needing to own. Finally, you have examples like 'swap trading' where people suddenly realize they are surrounded by assets they can swap to get what they want versus buying new stuff. The behaviour becomes addictive.
How far do you think we are from having collaborative consumerism be a mainstream way of using goods, and what are some of the steps we still need to take to get there?
We are just in the nascent stages of Collaborative Consumption. We have already seen examples like Netflix, eBay and Zipcar become household names but that has taken a decade - technology and consumer values were playing catch-up. But I think the current massive cultural and technological shift is accelerating the next wave of Collaborative Consumption at an astonishing rate.
I think it's critical for more big brands to enter the space. BMW, Daimler and Peugeot have all recently launched car sharing models. Amazon just announced its 'Buy Back' scheme of second-hand unwanted books. I would love to see a big bank enter the social lending space; for a retail giant like Target to launch an innovative rental model; for a brand like Zappos to create a shoe swapping and repair platform....
Big brands can reach scale faster, they prove there are real business models behind Collaborative Consumption (and there are), but they also create the social proof, the cultural cache for this new cultural and economy to become mainstream.
Two weeks ago in Basel, at the Shift Festival, I saw some material about the Cybersyn project that struck me as fascinating.
“Project Cybersyn was a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973 (during the government of president Salvador Allende). It was essentially a network of telex machines that linked factories with a single computer centre in Santiago, which controlled them using principles of cybernetics.
(…)
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean attempt at real-time computer-controlled planned economy in the years 1970–1973 (during the government of president Salvador Allende). It was essentially a network of telex machines that linked factories with a single computer centre in Santiago, which controlled them using principles of cybernetics. The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer.“
Country computing: a real-time feedback loop
Interestingly, Cybersyn design has been heavily influenced by the architect of this system, Stafford Beer, a cyberneticist specialized in feedback loops of management in corporations. The idea was basically to design a system for capturing, processing and presenting economic information to be managed in real time. A sort of feedback loop with the population, based on various organizations models better described here or in this lecture called “Fanfare for Effective Freedom: Cybernetic Praxis in Government” [PDF]. Some examples below of the underlying model of Cybersyn:
The idea was to have so-called “algedonic meters” in people’s home, i.e. warning public opinion meters that would be able to transmit Chilean citizens’s pleasures/displeasures to the government or television studio in real time. The government would then be able to respond rapidly to public demands based on these information, (”rather than repress opposing views” as proposed by Stafford Beer).
User Interface design
Also, the interface design has been carried out by the Gui Bonsiepe a German designer working in Chile at the time of the project. Eden Medina, a researcher at Indiana University in the US is currently writing a book about this project (see here). Some quotes from here found there that I’ve found intriguing:
“I think the image of the operations room looks like something out of ‘Star Trek’or 2001. Whenever I show that image, people are stunned. Most people wouldn’t associate that futuristic image with the Allende period in Chile.
(…)
the flat panel projection screens used a series of slide projectors located behind the wall that were attached to the armrests of the chairs. When you pushed a button on the armrest, it would change the slide on the screen. Each of these slide images was hand-drawn by some of Chile’s top graphic designers. It looked like something that was real-time and highly automated — but you have to remember, this was the 1970s.“
With BIM, project collaboration was possible. But online collaboration over CAD drawings hasn’t been easy yet, with some applications that work very slow or in a limited way.
But a new project coming out of Autodesk Labs promises to make online CAD collaboration feasible: Autodesk Butterfly.
As you can see on the above video, sharing works on a very simple way over email allowing people to work on a drawing at the same time. I gave Autodesk Butterfly a try at their technology preview website (no need to sign-in, just hit Try Now) and the flash interface loaded fast. It is very intuitive to use if you have used AutoCad, and the version control system allows you to go back to previous states of the drawing.
An iPhone version would be great, as it would allow you to do on-site review and annotations. Anyway, the preview looks very strong, and maybe we will have a full version of this tool available soon.
A whole new era of architecture collaboration and online plan sharing? By extrapolation: community design, architects-social networks and open source plans?
Now social media has the equivalent of the Times Square "deficit clock."
Today the Web is bursting with social media content and a burgeoning supply of (and demand for) "real-time" information. This information is created as people open new Facebook and other social media accounts, churn out Tweets and other microblogs, post photos and videos, and tirelessly text one another. But getting a grip on exactly how much is happening--and what the primary sources are--is a slippery task, especially since web companies often jealously guard their metrics.
The new social media counter. Credit: Gary Hayes.
Now there's a social-media "clock" of sorts, which you can check out here. It charts the second-by-second accumulation of social-media accounts, blogs, Tweets, photo uploadings, status updates, and the like. Consider it the social-media equivalent of that national-deficit "clock" in Times Square.
The effort does require a reality check. It's not actually an accurate rendering of the real-time Web. Rather, it's a counter, created by an Australia-based virtual-world entepreneur named Gary Hayes. Hayes set the various rates of increase according to various estimates culled from disparate sources such as analysts, company blogs, and news media accounts. Some of the estimates are several months old and may not actually be accurate or complete.
But, while it may not provide any new primary information, or be accurate in all categories, Hayes' social-media clock is nevertheless an excellent visualization of where much of the Web's growth is coming from these days.
UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)
A diverse group of artists were asked to conduct a Wikipedia search, and then to continue onto other articles through linked words, creating a “string” of ideas. The final form is a reader containing these articles …
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