Here follows a repost of an article I posted recently on Linkedin. It explains what I’m trying to achieve and why :
“After several years of experience in the field, I found myself thinking over the way in which our job was aging, suffering from immobility while changes in our society went on at full speed.
Emboldened by professor Carlo Ratti’s essay: “Open Source Architecture”, I started working on an idea which could have helped me into shaping a different way we could work, by rejuvenating our aging business model and at the same time opening our work to both the general public and fellow designers.
What I’m trying to do is to apply the Open source idea to any design process, handling projects the way you would do in software development. Treating design as if it was software, with briefs, goals, intermediate releases and fixes, will help fellow designers who are facing the same problems all around the world to join in on the process, or even just take the data you’ve built and start their own design from whichever point in the job, saving time and resources.
How many people in the world are trying to solve the same problem at the same time? This way, they’d be free to employ their creative energies toward new tasks, adding to the general progress and convergence of the field.
There are multiple implications to an Open Source Architectural model: you lose the unique property off your designs and decide to share all your hard earned trade secrets “en plain air”, handing out both the complete design and the process for everyone to see and use (costs, design decisions, meeting outcomes, fails and setbacks, etc..).
The goal is to offer free, transparent knowledge in order to gain public support in the form of networks and new ideas. Hence, I’d like to take advantage of today’s ease of sharing and communication (from discord channels to instagram or twitch), in order to gather a network and form a community. Moreover, online mecenatism would enable us to self-start our designs/problems, make our own briefs and develop them as if was an independent research lab, through the help of online communities rallying behind one’s flag.
I’m testing these ideas through a series of self-started projects. Our first concept, a cnc milled table is about to enter the test phase soon while the second ( an off-grid shelter ) is just about to start. Feel free to join us on discord or download the projects on Github, we are always happy to discuss our work together.”