Pervasive Collaboration and Tangible Complexity in Realtime Architecture

Abstract

This paper reports on an ongoing experiment in design collaboration: An open collaborative realtime environment that enables participatory design activities in spatially distributed teams. The project builds on online platforms and open ource ways of sharing design ideas, but also on recent advances in shared augmented reality enabled by game engine technology. Furthermore it focuses on combinatorial design of collaborative objects: The models shared in this way are not just geometric forms, but informed systems of parts with a procedural or combinatorial logic, an assembly strategy. By pooling and aggregating such intelligent assembly systems in a shared online realtime design space we are trying to move towards pervasive collaboration in architecture. Authors taking part in the project are united in a shared persistent design space and can design collectively. They experience what we refer to as tangible complexity: A playful mode of aggregating and combining design ideas of different authors. We argue that this pervasive collaboration can lead to novel types of complexity: An architecture of socially augmented formations.