Net terug van Cannes is RedesignMe alweer op weg naar Romania om te presenteren op Vodafone’s Webstock Web 2.0 conferentie.

Deze conferentie zal vol staan van presentatie en workshops over de ontwikkeling van web 2.0 en de kracht er van voor business. http://www.webstock.ro/

While co-creation & crowdsourcing are the new buzz-words, collective design efforts have been studied longer than many of us might know. While visiting the museum of architecture in Barcelona I stumbled upon an exposition of Peter Smithson, an architect who died a few years ago. He wrote many books about architecture and also wrote about collective design. Here’s an excerpt from one of his books:

Collective design:

“The invention and perfection of collective activities, firstly to placate and subdue reality, and then to invest it with deeper and deeper levels of meaning and satisfactions, comes naturally to man.The temple, for example, was designed by one set of men as a long-lasting embodiment of an idea, capable of being given extension of meaning or tokens of renewal by quite other sets of men long after the initiators were dead. These elaborations were sometimes almost as long-lasting as the main structure itself, sometimes they were only for the day or the hour….each was made in the acknowledgement of the others.For some years now, most buildings have seemed to exclude other people’s specializations; and certainly, in the city-center, motor-cars having occupied the whole of the space between buildings. Motor-cars have themselves become almost the only other participation design specialization in the public arena.In this sad circumstance there has arisen a strange interpretation of the general disquiet of the many, and the active wish of a few to get back into that arena. Some have suggested that people should build their own houses from a kit of crude parts and that this is how they can involve themselves into the design process. But to what level has the architect’s specialization fallen if all we can now suggest is orthogonal Lego?”

- Peter Smithson (1973)

Quite daunting, isn’t it?