Link to gdoc publisher: https://gdoc.pub/doc/18YTQQ52r9mcs1LAEgP8yb3Kk6HOHGa5q9QCM81NCLx8#?usp=sharing
Text translated from Swedish with google translate, take care.
Summary
Skiljelinjer is an architectural research project exploring disagreement as a decision-making principle in collaborative design. The exploration is based on a digital collaborative design tool that actualizes only controversial proposals. A final design is realized as an architectural project.
Project description
We want to start a discussion about disagreement as a potential decision-making principle in design and architecture - in short, collective disagreement as a precondition for the common.
The project will result in a fully usable digital tool to create designs based on collective disagreement. We have chosen to focus on architecture as a design area, as it requires instrumental thinking that is both practical and aesthetic. Both of these types of thinking are necessary for our research to show interesting disagreements - dividing lines, within the test group in terms of priorities and policies.
We use a digital tool as the basis for the project for four reasons:
1. The participants do not need to be in the same place, hence we can reach out and use a much larger and diverse group of people for the different iterations.
2. We can calibrate at a high level of detailed the degree of disagreement that underlies the design decisions, to find what level gives the most interesting results.
3. All iterations are standardized and measurable so that they can form the basis for future projects with similar investigations.
4. The tool can thus be used by other groups in other forms, for widely different ideas and explorations.
We will perform a large number of different tests to calibrate the tool and the process, to hopefully find various interesting directions and uses. Among other things, we plan to do iterations with architecture and design students, active architects, groups on the political right and left, as well as low and high-income earners. These different iterations are intended to explore how disagreements occur in different social groups, which in turn allows us to make the tool wider and more useful.
The tests can also help each group to reach a deeper understanding of their own dynamics. For example, it could be used by teams trying to find new forms of collaboration, or who want to understand their internal dynamics before a large project.
The project will be exhibited at ArkDes with results from the various iterations presented as architectural projects.
We are also planning to realize one of the proposals as a built project in Höör. We have access to land and are in dialogue with the municipality about building an artist's residence there.
The project will also result in a number of seminars and a research report or handbook based on the results of the study, with a focus on creating inspiration for future investigations with a similar interest.
Themes
Skiljelinjer explores disagreement as a guiding design principle. “Disagreement” is a normal part of business management culture, where many large companies have a policy against making decisions if there is consensus within the board. This is to counteract a consensus trap where the team members do not take individual responsibility for the decision or do not get involved in the issue.
In collaborative art in general and participatory design processes in particular, the culture of consensus is often strong. The basic idea is that only ideas that the whole group agrees on can form the basis for the actual actions within the project. The project want to reverse this consensus culture and instead use only those decisions where no common agreement can be reached as the basis for the design.
Value words like "collaboration" and "consensus" are often misused as goals in themselves. The project wants to question whether agreement and consesnsus is really always the best basis for collaboration. Instead, the project asks the question if disagreement, division, and dispute can be an equally strong basis to create from.
It is often said that "democracy is a tool, not a goal." The project raises the question of whether even democracy in disagreement can be a tool to achieve results. In an increasingly polarized political reality, it becomes crucial to investigate whether or not this polarization itself can be a basis for building a more inclusive society.
In this way, the project becomes an exploration of anti-utopian creation. Instead of trying to bridge our differences in the name of democracy, the project begs the question whether or not these differences are in themselves the prerequisite for society.
The project contains several different iterations with different groups to investigate how disagreements occur within different social classes and different cultural segments. In this way, a deeper understanding is created of what disagreement means at both the group and individual levels, and at the same time which cultural or socio-economic markers precede specific types of disagreement.
The project also addresses double criticism of contemporary urban planning, where large construction companies draw, plan and build, in many cases without the participation of both politicians, architects, and citizens. The usual criticism of this is to allow citizens to participate in the process, which often leads to unsatisfactory results as the processes are poorly designed and the form of participation not thought through. By taking this legitimate criticism of urban planning but turning it upside down, we want to influence architecture in a more experimental and investigative direction.
Method and process
The project is based on 10 or more iterations with different groups that create collaborative architecture through our tool. The project requires this number of iterations to be calibrated and to find interesting results. We will carry out iterations with very different conditions, more on that further down.
The design tool is a simple 3D drawing program that users can use in their smartphone or browser. The resolution is low and the functions simple in order to lower the technical threshold for participating. The tool should be accessible to people who have no experience from 3D software.
The group of users is given the task of collaboratively designing a specific place in the city, given various conditions eg. budget or scope. Via open street maps, the place is shown in its context with surrounding buildings.
We have chosen not to lock ourselves at a specific location for the research, and will instead adapt the site to each specific group. This is because the results are so unpredictable that we do not know what changes are required between each iteration in order for us to further develop the project. The choice of location also obviously affects the process that arises.
All users start designing at the same time, they can draw in real-time in 3D and suggest additions and changes. All users can also view, comment and vote on each other's extensions and changes. Everyone's voices weigh just as heavily. Users can also change, "fork", each other's extensions in the design, to create new extensions, which are voted on and changed by others, and so on.
Only the most controversial additions and changes go on to the final design. We measure controversiality partly by counting votes for and votes against, and partly by the amount of comments.
An example:
We use existing participatory design tools as a basis for building a standalone platform. We use the gaming engine Unity and its ecosystem to simplify the programming process and keep the platform modular and open source. Thus, after the end of the project period, the platform can be used by other groups for similar projects.
We will experiment with many different conditions for the different iterations. Among other things, we investigate how it affects the process of; the group of participants knows that only the controversial decisions will be used for the design, if the group is accustomed to collaborative design work (eg architecture students), if the group has the same or different political beliefs, etc. Since the tool is digital the participants in a group can be scattered across the country and thus randomly selected.
Transdisciplinary collaboration
The project involves collaborations with both architecture students and teachers in Stockholm. The ambition of the project is to explore disagreement as a prerequisite for the common in general and its potential in urban planning and architecture in particular, through these collaborations with active and prospective architects.
In architecture and urban planning, various tools are often used to stage co-creation, influence and situations of relative consensus. These tools are called “citizen monologue”, “participatory urban planning” and the like. The disagreement that often arises in these processes is noted, but is quickly sorted out as negative for the continued cooperation. The project similarly relates to ideas and conceptions of participant culture and collaborative design, but at the same time orchestrates the processes completely differently by emphasizing conflicts rather than consensus.
The project is inspired by large online experiments in participant culture and collaborative processes. For example, Reddit Place, where reddit's users were given access to a 1000 x 1000 pixel canvas, where anyone could change color by one pixel, but only one pixel and only once every five minutes. In this way, users had to collaborate to write or paint something, but could also easily sabotage each other's ideas. Another example is Twitch Plays Pokémon, where over a million users on the streaming platform twitch together tried to play Pokémon by simultaneously submitting whatever commands they wanted. Due to the number of users, it was impossible for the program to register all commands, instead, it became a random selection which led to irrational and confusing gameplay.
We are
Jakob Sköte, artist and architect with an interest in how tools influence creativity.
Sebastian Dahlqvist, artist and curator with an interest in “failure” as an artistic concept.
Max Čelar, artist and programmer with an interest in explorative decision-making processes.