Digital Design Commons
- Paper: Digital Design Commons. Dimitris Papalexopoulos. International Symposium “Computational Politics and Architecture: From the Digital Philosophy to the End of Work”, November 30, 2011, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais)
Abstract
"Can digital design commons, based on distributed intelligence, help us structure a response to the actual crisis through a low tech - knowledge intensive collaborative perspective? The presentation proposes to reconsider notions related to distributed partial design through a digital commons point of view.
Digital design overflows the limits of isolated works and, through the implementation of open source algorithms, declares its continuous deterritorializations and reterritorializations in a series of projects.
It tends to be ubiquitous and forms a code flow circulating among all possible situated architectural proposals.
Design acquires thus a common character.
Digital Design Commons are pools of a multitude of micro- architecture problem solutions, a multitude of micro - syntaxes covering partial aspects of design, waiting to be actualized in larger design schemes.
They also deny the unique and ultimate “form” in favor of a network’s syntax. They tend to substitute the object’s design with the design of networked multiplicities. Finally, they question the ubiquity of design as an end of work process, linking it to the (local) use value production." (http://atru.arch.ntua.gr/sites/atru/files/posts/50digital-design-commons/papalexopoulosensapm2011.pdf)
Excerpts
"(Digital) Commons
We have noted that, if digital design components are developed in open source – free software, then design could acquire a common character. But how do we recognize what is common and what is not?
Following Jose Perez de Lama ... Α definition of the community operating, in our examples the academic
community, the commons are special formations that need to have several characteristics:
• the resources shared and produced, that is the digital design components,
• the constituent process and management, in the form of an open course process and a common platform of code exchange,
• the conflicts and politics around the enclosure, capture or exploitation of knowledge produced.
Commons produce and are produced. They are produced through singularities. They are
composed of interactions among singularities constituted as collectivity. Commons
produce common wealth but, also, produce themselves, their transformation and the
transformation of the singularities they are composed of. In other words being in
common is a process of making the common. It is a narration and, at the same time, a
machine of becoming.
Digital Commons, notes Felix Stalder, “comprise informational resources created and shared within voluntary communities of varying size and interests. These resources are typically held de facto as communal, rather than private or public (i.e. state) property.
Management of the resource is characteristically oriented towards use within the community, rather than exchange in the market».
Digital Design Commons must have the above characteristics and also be pools of a multitude of micro- architecture problem solutions, a multitude of micro - syntaxes covering partial aspects of design, waiting to be actualized in larger design schemes. For this to happen, they embrace the free – open source software movement, but in fact they are positioned as free knowledge – intensive goods.
Nevertheless, for the digital design commons to be operational, they have to invent and establish the ontology of the digital design components they include. “The role of an ontology is to support knowledge sharing and reuse within and among groups of agents (people, software programs, or both). Ideally, an ontology should capture a shared understanding of a domain of interest and provide a formal and machine-manipulable model of the domain”.
A reference to the domain and task of digital design components’ applications would certainly need to rewrite several key issues of design, construction and manufacturing.
Innovation economy
Digital Design Components, the constituent material of Digital Design Commons, are produced as objectified cognitive labor in a context of what we define as innovation economy, that is an economy promoting the production of the always new. Innovation economy is not interested in the capture of the value of the product per se, but in the capture of the rent on its continuous transformations to new products.
In this economic context of design of the continuously new, what is of importance is the algorithm permitting the continuous changes of the product. Developing algorithms, writing codes with no reference to a use value acquires thus an hegemonic position. Proof of this can be found in the frenetic code learning that took place in the architectural schools during the recent years.
Innovation economy calls, not for stable content and form but for the unfolding of populations of variations of the same. We could add that innovation economy calls, also, for endless combinations of architectural syntax components that constitute Digital Design Commons, objectified and liberated from their initial design schemes. Their writing in free – open source software will surely facilitate their integration to innovation economy, since what matters is changes through time as opposed to the stability in time of intellectual property.
It is necessary not to be trapped in the “digitalism” of an “all free” culture creating digital pools of the continuously new. We must always bear in mind that code creation is about cognitive labor detached from the initial situation that hosted it, waiting to be actualized through communities’ perspectives, goals, intentions, and not to live a life of his own.
Matteo Pasquinelli has argued that “the commons should be acknowledged as a dynamic and hybrid space that is constantly configured along the friction between material and immaterial”
If architecture, through code creation, is a knowledge producing activity, we may have the possibility to structure, through Digital Design Commons, a collaborative, ubiquitous design practice and a flow of interconnected fragments of design, that are, in essence, a form of commonwealth."