Crowdsourcing: The Future in Design Research?

This past week, internationally renowned French architect Jean Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the profession's highest honor. Nouvel's practice, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, has completed and engaged in various projects worldwide. The studio is perhaps most known for designing the Arab World Institute in Paris, and has recently unveiled its design for a new 75-story tower next to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Unlike other famous architects, including several previous winners of the Pritzker Prize such as Frank Gehry (1989), Zaha Hadid (2004) , and Thom Mayne of Morphosis (2005), who have very particular, unchanging, individual styles despite the various contexts of each of their projects, Nouvel's architecture is articulated in numerous ways and addresses a range of issues. He explains that this is a result of his belief that it is critical for analysis to influence and drive design, "I research every project. I talk to a lot of people. Every building has a relation to the climate, to the wind, to the colors of the buildings around it. I arrive at a concept with all the parameters in place. When I have all these constraints, I begin. "Nouvel continues that when architects do not research and respect surroundings, "You go around the world, you see all the same buildings, and you feel like you're in the same place."

Another previous Pritzker Prize Laureate, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands (2000), takes a similar approach to architecture with his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which is arguably the leading international architectural practice. Like Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Koolhaas' practice also engages in rigorous contextual analysis, but in addition, OMA presents and publishes its graphs, charts, diagrams, and compositions (example pictured above) in books. Recent and current publications include Al-Manakh (September 2007) and Lagos: How it Works (November 2008), studies on the history and architecture of the Gulf region and on West African urbanism, respectively. But while Nouvel and Koolhaas are current examples of leading architects that fight the global homogenization of architecture through in-depth analysis, their careers began around 40 years ago and were rooted in the concepts, cultures, and technology of that time. What then, will research minded architects and designers whose careers are based in our contemporary information society grow to become? Compared to traditional strategies that have been used for research such as simple computation, observation, and surveying, emerging technologies can record, organize, and visualize data at exponential rates, scopes, and amounts. These technologies, which use crowdsourcing, or the outsourcing of a task (such as research) traditionally performed by one person or a small group to a much larger body of people in an open source method. For example, while encyclopedias were traditionally developed by singular companies such as Merriam-Webster and Brittanica, Wikipedia, today's version of the encyclopedia, is written and constantly updated by anyone who can access the internet.

Among the many methods of research that are currently developing, Evernote, Here are our Journeys, and Dash Express are three projects that incorporate new technologies and crowdsourcing with methods of data collection and analysis. Evernote (pictured below), a mobile technology based software application, pitches that although people are battered with information on a daily basis, its program makes it possible for users to remember everything. Those that integrate Evernote into their lives can capture information, either by copying and pasting on a computer or by photographing with a camera phone, which is then organized into a personal database for later search and use. Evernote has not yet been fully released and is currently in beta testing, but Scott Gilbertson, author of Wired.com's blog Compiler, has confirmed in a recent review that with Evernote "there are a nearly limitless number of ways you can get information," which once collected becomes "fully searchable and accessible". Another application in the works is Here are our Journeys, a final year project of Matt Collins, a Multimedia Technology and Design student at Brunel University in London. Collins has developed a program that connects the music people listen to with the routes they travel. The project innovatively amalgamates various different types of data into one place. As Collins explains, data from GPS units and music players is logged and is then represented "online bringing together content from Yahoo Maps, Flickr, and YouTube." Dash Express uses GPS technology as well, but it is a fully developed product. Networked through the internet, Dash Express is not the typical in-car device; it collects live information, including car speed and traffic density, and calculates what is truly the shortest route to take. While it is particularly aimed at facilitating driver navigation, the design serves as a prototype for tremendous possibilities. Because it accumulates information on a network, explains Engadget's Nilay Patel in a product review, "the more users there are, the better it's going to get." For example, if units like this were widely used in a society, researchers could analyze countless urban patterns, such as where people are at what times of the day, what routes people take, how much time people spend at specific places, and so forth.

Each of these three projects integrates current technologies with research to allow for unprecedented data sourcing. If architects and designers could use data logged from these innovations in contextual studies of communities, and then organize the findings, which is perhaps the most difficult task, they could begin to understand the real-time and current existence of cities and societies at much more personal levels. Perhaps practices could collect, develop, and broadcast information all in one place. Instead of publishing findings in a one-way medium, such as the books of OMA and AMO, architects and designers could present their research, in addition to collecting data, through mobile technology interfaces and the internet programs. This way research and design would be reciprocal. What I find most intriguing, is that by using crowdsourcing, these developing practices of research not only can affect the design of a product, building, or environment, but entire cultures at large. These methods depend on public participation and input, and thus work better if more people use them and if quality information is provided. This encourages societies that are more open as well as more willing to engage and share.

The Convergence of Web 2.0 and Architecture: How far can we push it?

Websites and web communities such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Ebay (among many others) are currently revolutionizing information networking on the internet by allowing its users to produce, share, and manipulate content. Through this participation, users are essentially building and developing the websites and web communities themselves, rendering the actual websites as a mere framework that is expanded upon. Practices like this are archetypal in the current movement in web design and development and are often referred to as Web 2.0, or an improved, more participatory version of the initial World Wide Web.

Last month, Studio Wikitecture, an architecture and urban planning firm, gave a lecture at the annual forum of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) about the studio's aims to apply the decentralized and open-source concepts behind Web 2.0 to the fields of architecture and urban planning. The studio has been using Second Life as a platform for its projects. Inspired by concepts of alternate, digitally connected worlds, such as the matrix in the popularized Matrix Series and the metaverse in Neal Stephenson's Science Fiction cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Second Life is a public, internet-based software application which is essentially a 3-D, virtual world. For Studio Wikitecture, the use of this program has allowed the studio mass communication and collaboration from audiences worldwide throughout the design process. In their current project, in which they are designing a health clinic in western Nepal, the studio asserts that anyone in the world can help them and participate in the design by means of the internet. By registering and logging in for free on Second Life or by visiting the studio's website, anyone can submit their own design iterations as well as comment and critique on the current status of the project.

Although Studio Wikitecture employs contemporary cutting edge technology that enables for such efficiency, convenience, and outreach, the core manifesto of their studio is very similar to that of preceding, less complex participatory design programs, such as BaSiC Initiative and Rural Studio. Founded in 1995 and 1993 respectively, these programs preceded the likes of Wikipedia and Studio Wikitecture in involving users more in the design and construction of its projects. Both programs stationed themselves in the communities that they were building in, facilitating everyday, hands-on collaboration and dialogue with the actual people that would be using the buildings they designed. Even so, these programs were not even themselves the first to implement the idea. And while a great debate could be sparked arguing over who came up with the idea first, what is more important is the effectiveness of these programs, and which methods of communication are better.

In their lecture, Studio Wikitecture touches on the classic theme of the contrasting pros and cons of big corporations and small businesses. They note that while big corporations can manage at a vast scale with great resources, their services tend to be uniform and detached from the user. Likewise, small businesses often possess the creativity and intimacy that large corporations lack, yet they do not have the resources to reach and administrate a broad audience. Studio Wikitecture claims that through the lowered costs and increased accessibility of communication that information technologies such as the internet provide, it is possible for the first time in human history to have the aforementioned benefits of both large corporations and small businesses, as in their projects and the Wikitecture interface in Second Life (below). However, I would not be so quick to comply. While there is no doubt that the use of Second Life, which has more than 12 million registered accounts, allows for an unprecedented outsourcing of ideas and input because of the sheer quantity of its users, the quality of that input still does not match that which can be gathered from intimate face-to-face meetings. While programs such as Rural Studio physically immerse themselves in the lives of those that will be using their projects, the Wikitecture interface allows only for digital, disengaged immersion. Furthermore, while Second Life is nearly exactly what it's title proclaims (the avatars that users create are truly Second Life users' second lives), those users are human beings first and avatars in Second Life second. As long as we exist as physical human beings, the value of our physical interactions and human senses will always supersede that of their virtual mediations.

While Studio Wikitecture's explorations take great steps in the trying convergence of virtual worlds with the physical world, the internet is simply a tool for creating and designing architecture in the Wikitecture project. It is a super efficient, super accessible, and experiential suggestion box. What if there was a way to further integrate the internet and architecture. How will this be done? In the way that projects such as Wikipedia and Youtube are constantly evolving in real time on the internet, what if the internet was not only a tool, but the essence of a project's existence. Could such a project have a simultaneously evolving real world counterpart? Furthermore, what the internet itself was the entire extents of a project? Could we still call this architecture and moreover, are we still humans at this point of our existence?