WorldChanging's Alex Steffen sez, "Our colleague Cameron Sinclair at Architecture for Humanity is about to launch the beta of the Open Architecture Network, which will let users upload, share and modify designs for humanitarian/ sustainable innovations, under a Creative Commons license. It's essentially a way to rip, mix and burn blueprints for solutions to the problems posed by poverty, urbanization and environmental decline."
With a coalition of sponsors and partners, including Sun, Architecture for Humanity built and is starting to test a system designed to be not just a repository of good ideas, but a tool for collaboration and research. Users will be able, Cameron says, to search existing ideas based on a number of criteria (such as, say, "housing, affordable, tropical, community-designed, passive solar, bamboo materials) and the ratings of other users.
This is no elitist playground, either. "We're not defining an architect as someone who's been through 7 years of education," Cameron says. "If this thing isn't useful to informal community designers living in favelas, it'll fail. We aim to prove that you don't need $15,000 worth of CAD programs to come up with design solutions. You can participate with a napkin sketch, a borrowed scanner and a public Internet connection." (However, it should be noted that the site will be available initially only in English, which will further limit its utility to barefoot architects.)
The Network will also provide insight not only into what people have built elsewhere, but how they built it: "It's not just designs, it goes all the way through to implementation — it will have not just innovative abstract solutions, but actual projects and built buildings."
(Thanks, Alex!)
