Even more than authorship, ownership is challenged by the rise of digital and computational methods of design and production. These challenges are simultaneously legal, ethical and economic. How are new methods of fabrication and manufacture going to irreversibly change not only ways of working, but also designers’ ethics and their stance on ownership? In his 2013 second-term State of the Union address, President Obama stated that 3D printing ‘has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything’. Nowhere will the impact of 3D printing be felt greater than in the architectural and design communities. When anyone can print out an object or structure from a digital file, will designers still exert the same creative rights or will they need to develop new practice and payment models? As architecture becomes more collaborative with open-source processes, will the emphasis on signature as the basis of ownership remain relevant? How will wider teams working globally be accredited and compensated? This issue of AD explores this subject; it features the work of designers who are developing wholly new approaches to practice by exploring means of commercialising process-based products rather than objects.
Contributors: Phil Bernstein, Mark Garcia, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti and David Ruy
Featured architects: Francis Bitonti, Marjan Colletti, Wendy W Fok, Panagiotis Michalatos, Jose Sanchez, Thibault Schwartz, Aaron Sprecher, Feng Xu and Philip Yuan
Antoine Picon is the G Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard GSD. He works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the 18th century to the present. In his book La Ville territoire des cyborgs (Editions de l'lmprimeur, 1998), he began to investigate the changes brought to cities and architecture by the development of digital tools and digital culture. His three most recent books - Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (Birkhauser, 2010); Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (John Wiley & Sons,2013); and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (Wiley, 2015) - deal extensively with this question. He received science and engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, an architecture degree from the Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a PhD in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Wendy W Fok is the creative director/ founder of WE DESIGNS, which provides creative strategies for the built environment, as well as Resilient Modular Systems, a socially missioned venture and public-benefit corporation that focuses on innovative modular components using hybridised composite materials for the building industry. Her awards include the Autodesk(R) Pier 9 AiR (2016), Young CAADRIA Award (2015), Digital Kluge Fellowship awarded by the Library of Congress (2014- 15), the Art Directors Club of New York's ADC Young Guns 11 Award (2013), and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Dallas 'Express Yourself' Women in Architecture Award (2013). She has a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Barnard College, Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons, and completed her Doctor of Design at the Harvard GSD. Her doctoral research investigates computational innovation, the ethical/equitable application of technical methods of digital fabrication, and issues of intellectual property law within ownership and authorship property rights for the built environment.
