Digital Property: Open-source Architecture

Even more than authorship, ownership is challenged by the rise of digitaland computational methods of design and production. These challengesare simultaneously legal, ethical and economic. How are new methods offabrication and manufacture going to irreversibly change not only ways ofworking, but also designers’ ethics and their stance on ownership? In his2013 second-term State of the Union address, President Obama statedthat 3D printing ‘has the potential to revolutionize the way we makealmost everything’. Nowhere will the impact of 3D printing be felt greaterthan in the architectural and design communities. When anyone can printout an object or structure from a digital file, will designers still exert thesame creative rights or will they need to develop new practice andpayment models? As architecture becomes more collaborative withopen-source processes, will the emphasis on signature as the basis ofownership remain relevant? How will wider teams working globally beaccredited and compensated? This issue of AD explores this subject; itfeatures the work of designers who are developing wholly newapproaches to practice by exploring means of commercialising process-based products rather than objects.

Contributors: Phil Bernstein, Mark Garcia, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti and David Ruy

Featured architects: Francis Bitonti, Marjan Colletti, Wendy W Fok, Panagiotis Michalatos, Jose Sanchez, Thibault Schwartz, Aaron Sprecher, Feng Xu and Philip Yuan

Nyckelord: authorship; rise; methods; computational; design; ownership; production; simultaneously legal; manufacture; new; ways; fabrication; designers; stance; state; address; union; secondterm; everything; way; potential; president obama, Design, Drawing & Presentation, Design, Drawing & Presentation