Searching around in Second Life to find great examples of learning and collaboration, I stumbled today on a convincing illustration of what is possible in this world: wikitecture, the application of a 3-D wiki-tool for architecture.
I was aware of the existence of the Studio Wikitecture, but I must admit I forgot about their projects, feeling intimidated by those smart builders being such a terrible builder myself. Studio Wikitecture
is an open group, composed of a diverse range of individuals from varying disciplines, interested in exploring the application of a open-source paradigm to the design and production of both real and virtual architecture and urban planning.
I was reminded of their projects when I received a press release, announcing that out of 566 registered entries from 57 countries, Studio Wikitecture won the overall ‘Founder’s Award’ (third place finalist) for their open-source entry to a competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity on the Open Architecture Network. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the Open Architecture Network, their entry for a tele-medicine facility in Western Nepal was chosen “for embracing a truly collaborative way of working using online crowdsourcing and Second Life as a way to create a highly participatory design approach.”
The group developed a 3D-Wiki plug-in for Second Life. The project is an extremely interesting example of the application of various social media techniques, so I cannot resist the temptation to quote the press release extensively:
The ‘Wiki-Tree’ as it was called, acted as a version tracking system that worked very much like a conventional Wiki, but instead of tracking text documents in a linear history as you see in Wikipedia, the ‘Wiki-Tree’ tracked versions of 3-dimensional models and saved them within a continually evolving 3-dimensional digital tree ‘canopy’.
Similar to Wikipedia, this 3D-Wiki allowed this loose, self-organized group of contributors to share ideas, edit the contributions of others, and vote on which design iterations should be considered for further refinement.
Over and above the actual building design, Studio Wikitecture’s entry proposed that the wiki-tree and virtual model live on pass the competition and be used to help incorporate feedback from the Nepalese community and end-users into evolving design.
In addition, they proposed that the virtual platform would allow individuals from around the world to experience the local site and conditions as the project evolves over time, further expanding the outreach, awareness and support for this project to a global audience.
The winning entry was the result of Studio Wikitecture’s 3rd Wikitecture experiment to explore the procedures and protocols necessary to practice a more open and distributed approach to architectural design. Of those, the group explored prediction market voting procedures to assure consensus or ‘Crowd Wisdom’, as well as developed a contribution assessment system to divvy up fair ownership among all the contributors.
Here you see a demo of the Wikitecture Tree:
This video shows the progress of the project:
The experiments have been described in detail (pdf).
Roland Legrand