Decentralized Version Control and Mass Collective Collaboration in Design A Case Study of a Web Application Utilizing the Diff Algorithm and Automated Design Generation

Abstract

Especially in early design phases, there is still potential to achieve collective design in architecture. To investigate the possibilities of mass collaboration, this study is based on a web application (http://lmnarchitecture.com) which implements the same technology that present software development stands on. Within those plans, the system calculates the resemblance between the models utilizing an algorithm that computes the difference between texts. The system requires the users to choose one model that is existent, and calculates the resemblance in real-time. As a result, a tree diagram is collectively achieved each having the link of inheritance. Two types of "Bots" (automated plan generation) was implemented to examine the effect of human-machine collaboration. As a result, there were 1750 models submitted in three months. Throughout the models created by humans, in this system, 49% of the models were inherited by the same user, and 23.04% of the models inherited bots.