Massive collaboration architectures: crowdsourcing applied to the architectural project

Communication tools have always conditioned the way in which human beings organize and collaborate. The arrival of the Internet and the development of digital technologies has led to the emergence of unprecedented forms of collaboration, where large masses of collaborators can work together to achieve outcomes that a single individual, alone, could not. Many of these manifestations of collective intelligence arise in an emergent way, without previous planning. However, through crowdsourcing it is possible to design massive collaboration processes and take advantage of the collective intelligence of the great masses of connected users. Crowdsourcing is a term born from the conjunction of the words “crowd” and “outsourcing”. Broadly speaking, crowdsourcing is the outsourcing of tasks to a large mass of indefinite number of participants connected through the Internet in order to achieve a specific objective. Since the term was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing has been used successfully in multiple fields. Its implementations have had objectives as diverse as the transcription of texts, the training of artificial intelligences, the analysis of blood samples or the discovery of exoplanets. “An architecture of mass collaboration: the application of crowdsourcing in architectural design” is a prospective investigation that studies the designed application of collective intelligence to architecture through crowdsourcing. The aim of this thesis is to determine what kind of applications crowdsourcing have could in architectural design. The research is organized into five blocks. In the INTRODUCTION, the observations that have triggered this research are presented. Then the hypothesis, the objectives and the methodology that will be followed throughout the thesis are introduced. BLOCK o aims to develop a theoretical framework for crowdsourcing. Three tools are developed, which will be used to detect, identify and analyze case studies: the definition, roots and variables of crowdsourcing. In BLOCK 1 the state of the art of the application of crowdsourcing to architecture is presented. A systematic search of cases will be carried out and the results are analyzed in order to determine what type of crowdsourcing applications have already been implemented in architectural design. In BLOCK 2, architectural case studies close to crowdsourcing are identified and analyzed. These could, although not framed within the definition of crowdsourcing, with certain modifications, be the basis for new applications. To identify these cases, architectural case studies related to the roots of crowdsourcing are sought: open source, the democratization of tools, the emergence of Pro-Ams and the inclusion of users in value chains. They are analyzed to determine what kind of applications can derive from them. BLOCK 3 is propositional. On the one hand, some of the existing applications are rethought to propose improvements. On the other hand, new types of crowdsourcing applications are proposed that have not yet been explored within architectural design. The thesis concludes stating that crowdsourcing has multiple types of applications to architectural design. Although the application of crowdsourcing in the field of architecture is incipient (compared to the development it has had in other fields), it allows us, through mass collaboration processes, to record reality and to produce objective knowledge based on subjective perceptions and design solutions.