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Wikitecture: From clicks to bricks, avatars to architects |
It takes a village to conceive architecture. Just consider Studio Wikitecture, which won Architecture for Humanity’s Founders Award in the 2007 AMD Open Architecture Challenge. For its design of a health-care and telemedicine facility in the western Nepal settlement of Sanfe Bagar, Studio Wikitecture assembled the insights of more than 40 people into a cohesive scheme. Not only were approximately half of these contributors not architects, but also the group never collaborated in the same room.
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As the prefix “Wiki” suggests, this Open Architecture Challenge entry was designed by a community of Internet surfers who had sketched, commented on, and redrawn the medical building. It is a visual analog to how people might write and edit an entry on the popular reference Web site Wikipedia. But in this case, they used a proprietary interface plugged into the online world Second Life, developed by Studio Wikitecture’s Jon Brouchoud and Ryan Schultz.
Previously classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture, Brouchoud and Schultz celebrated a virtual reunion — their avatars bumped into one another on Second Life.
They learned that both had been inspired by their domain: In 2002, Brouchoud tried garnering public participation in a design-competition entry, although Internet technology at the time thwarted the process; Schultz had been researching architectural applications for open-source software.
Together they pooled their knowledge to improve the making of Wikitecture, using Second Life as their venue. Whereas Brouchoud and Schultz’s first attempts were crude — relying on instant messages or a public Flickr group to allow participants to comment on work, for example — for the Open Architecture Challenge the duo created a dashboard where users could build forms, vote and comment on others’ contributions, share screen shots, and modify their colleagues’ designs, all in Second Life. This interface, called the Wiki-Tree, looks something like a Doric column clad entirely in buttons. The tree also tracks the design’s progress. Above it hovers a so-called Ocanopy in which each leaf represents a design iteration, with the branches between them highlighting the evolution of those three-dimensional models. Leaves are color-coded according to their popularity among contributors.
You can say that the Sanfe Bagar conceptual project doesn’t belong to Brouchoud and Schultz, per se. They were simply the tech-savvy conduits for making it possible. Indeed, Studio Wikitecture’s Open Architecture Challenge design is the result of more than 50 iterations and 200 votes. Moreover, if the project were constructed, Brouchoud and Schultz would welcome the residents of Sanfe Bagar to log on and make tweaks. And yet the designers clearly are the shepherds of the work, and currently they are simplifying the interface and pursuing other ways to allow as many people as possible to dance around the Wiki-Tree.
Visit the following links for in-depth sources of information about the Wikitecture process and technology:
• Click here for a conference paper the founders of Wikitecture, Jon Brouchoud and Ryan Schultz, wrote with Scott Chase, senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, for the eCAADe Education and research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe Conference. It covers the 3rd Wikitecture experiment in greater detail.
www.crescendodesign.com/103_chase.pdf
• Click here for a presentation Brouchoud and Schultz did for the American Institute of Architecture Students Forum convention that touched on how virtual worlds could eventually evolve into a platform that facilitates a more decentralized approach to architecture.
www.slideshare.net/theoryshaw/test-238891/
• Click here to read a rough draft Pam Broviak wrote for an article in Slengineer magazine.
studiowikitecture.wikidot.com/local--files/start/200805wikitecture%20_2_.pdf
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