Delineating Crowd Sourced Ownership in the Digital Age for the Built Environment

Abstract

Time Magazine, had named the “Person of the Year” to “YOU” (the crowd) in 20061, due to the infinite potentials of the thou- sands and millions of ‘yous’ who control the media and financing within the new digital democracy. These same citizens of digital inno- vation create the new platforms—seen in the early beta developments of Kickstarter, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook—and contribute to the manipulation of international exchange of information and power, creating value propositions beyond the traditional product complexity of the market. Peer exchange and crowd organizational strategy will be used to innovate the built environment, and it is pertinent for “digi- tal” property and “real” property to recognize and benefit from this emergence. Professional codes of conduct, economic values, and legal regulations have become a means to an end of the designing of digital and physical property, as digital barriers lift much of the necessary pre-cautions that is required to govern collaboration. This body of re- search explores the qualifying factors of open innovation identity be- tween the creators and the consumers, the state of design ethics and ownership uncertainties pertaining to the combinatory methods and mechanisms that employ these technologies.