OSArch Community

OSArch Mission Statement

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    I would argue that there are ethical stances baked into the BIM industry about what buildings are, how they are built, and who builds them. There is no 'neutral' position that can be taken on these things, because they are quite an extreme political vision already.

    The concept that buildings are collections of pre-defined products, installed by site operatives taking instructions; this is an entire political programme for structuring society and its relationship with the environment, what James C. Scott calls 'authoritarian high modernism'.

    Also, having spent many years in this industry, the idea that designers design, and builders carry out their instructions is frankly delusional. BIM starts from the presumption that what is wrong with the building industry is that people don't do as they are told.

    I'm not asking anyone to join a crusade since none of us have that luxury, and I don't have any text that can be pasted into a mission statement, but we need to be constantly aware that reimplementing the conventional BIM wisdom as open source software carries the risk of entrenching industry practices that in software terms we would call 'dark patterns'. We should be aware that this is happening, and be careful not to preclude other ways of doing things.

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    @brunopostle Could you please elaborate on some of the dark patterns? This would be very interesting.

    For the mission statement, may I suggest removing the 'built' environment assertion, so it's just environment and thereby encompasses garden design (planting) as well as associated landscaping as well. I think there is a HUGE amount of awesome work going on in citizen science / open source biology (eg. iNaturalist), all available as open source data (taxons, ML models, etc.), which could easily be combined with, eg. drones, for automated landscape documentation and forward-looking natural landscape projection, which itself also informs traditional built environment architecture. Besides, with the 25 year building lifetime assertion Bruno quipped, planting a tree can be a lot more permanent architecture than a lot of constructed outcomes, and nature is - after all - the very definition of open source!

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    @globalcitizen I'm coming from a place where I see our current way of building as not just profoundly ugly, but environmentally catastrophic - but that is the end result, so it is worth looking at the reasons why this has happened, obviously there are many reasons, but some of them are interlocking with 'BIM'.

    We can look at chains of consequences: the building industry, certainly in the English-speaking world, is deeply adversarial, so there is a legal pressure to make the BIM information unambiguous, layering this semantic database stuff on all parts of the building (though interestingly, it is still the PDF documents and correspondence around them that form the actual contractual information, nobody presents a BIM model in a court or arbitration). So we have these building design-as-database models that require Byzantine software like Revit, and requiring nerds to operate this software the immediate result is that the people actually modelling the building have very little experience of construction - you wouldn't believe how much money is lost in claims and delays simply because nobody at the design stage has the faintest idea what they are doing - the solution is to modularise everything and make buildings assemblies of certified 'products'. Leaving aside the likelihood that none of our greatest architectural heritage could have been built under such a system, no manufacturer is going to certify a 'product' for longer than a twenty to thirty year lifespan, which the financing is fine-with because the discounted value after twenty-five years is near enough to zero to make no difference. But the products are always supplied by the lowest bidder, who shaves their costs by actually designing the product to only last twenty-five years. By design we create a world that consumes the maximum possible amount of resources. The BIM solution is to run with this idea of built-in obsolescence and add a whole layer of decommissioning/recycling information to the IFC database, this is instead of designing long-lived adaptable architecture in the first place.

    'Dark patterns' are the things we make easy, the workflows that are optimised to feel like the natural way to do a thing when, looked-at objectively, we really ought to be doing something else. The problem with proprietary closed-source software is not just that it restricts our freedom to do what we want with our own data, but that it directs our range of actions to that envisaged by the designer of the software. If we can identify a flaw with free software, it is often that it reproduces the functionality of the previous generation of proprietary software, this is usually fine as it builds a free ecosystem, but in the building industry we have multiple ways of doing things that need urgent root and branch change.

    I actually think we are in a good place with the existing free tools, IFC is a good enough base, and where the work is funded by the industry it is ok to expect the result to reflect the industry's priorities, but where we are working on our own time there are whole aspects of the BIM industry that maybe we don't need or want.

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    OSArch: developing the space between open source AEC tools.

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    @globalcitizen said:

    may I suggest removing the 'built' environment assertion,

    As a landscape designer I think what I do is encompassed in the term the Built Environment. In fact I think that it encompasses most human generated spaces. See the Wikipedia definition:

    "In the engineering and social sciences, the term built environment, or built world, refers to the human-made environment that provides the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings to cities and beyond. It has been defined as "the human-made space in which people live, work and recreate on a day-to-day basis."".

    I think that it is a useful distinction from environment which in many cases is read as the natural environment.

    The line that is exclusionary of the landscape imho is this line:

    @duncan said:

    We're creating a place where everyone involved in a buildings conception and life can meet, inspire and collaborate to develop empowering digital tools.

    Here is an attempt at an edit:

    We're creating a place where everyone involved in the built environment's conception and life can meet, inspire and collaborate to develop empowering digital tools.

  6. K

    Hey all,

    Had a few thoughts to share on the question of ethics and how we discuss it in the mission statement or elsewhere after digesting the posts here and the conversation at yesterdays meeting.

    I think that the mission statement draft that @duncan and others have put together seems like a fantastic landing point for people just getting involved in this community, It's clear and concise which is great and I totally agree that including too much of a discussion on the subjects of participatory design, the ethical implications of BIM, etc. could muddy the waters a bit and make it a less effective introduction to the community.

    That said, like @Moult and @brunopostle and others have expressed I also find it hard to separate the ethical implications of OSArch from the discussion of Open Source Software, but since the ethics side is such a large and varied subject area, condensing it all into a few digestible paragraphs seems like a massive task .

    What I'd like to propose then is a community curated reading list, with resources that discuss the ethical implications and the wider impact of OSArch that we could include as a resource page on the wiki? This could help give people a way to engage with these ethical questions, without us having to spend a lot of time and effort summarizing them.

    A collection like this could also be a huge help to Architecture students who are looking for resources to discuss OSArch related issues in their projects and writings.

    If folks think this sounds like a good idea I'd be happy to start up a thread for it and start collecting / organizing suggestions. Here's a few documents that jump to mind as a start:

    Open Source Architecture - Carlo Ratti (both the book and the article in domus)

    Open Source Architecture: An Exploration of Source Code and Access in Architectural Design - Theodora Vardouli & Leah Buechley

    Dilemmas in a general theory of planning - Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber

    Architectures Public - Giancarlo De Carlo

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    @baswein said:

    As a landscape designer I think what I do is encompassed in the term the Built Environment.

    That's great. However, the reality is that most people coming from outside the industry would definitely not associate foliage with 'Built Environment'.

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    great comments. anyone is welcome to make a new draft (just let me know so we don't both start). I'm a bit tied down with some personal issues at the moment so I don't know when I'll have a chance to get back to this.

    @baswein "built environment" - good discussion. I almost started using that term, it's a term i like since it elegantly avoids the discipline silos.

    @kcress FOSS ethic resource list sounds like a good idea. Then we can write somewhere something like "read more about the ethical implications of software choices ..." But do we need to make our own list? Surely there are good lists out there.

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    I’m interested to see an open source program that can do:

    1- architectural models

    2- algorithmic designer

    3- structural models

    4- structural analysis

    5- structural designer

    6- MEP

    7- soil and civil works

    8- rendering and compiling

    I know I’m asking too much but (do it all application) could be a wonderful idea specially if it’s open source, it could replicate the success of blender and change the industry to the best

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  11. D

    I finally copied the text over to the wiki. If anyone wants to make some moves on incorporating some of our discussion here into that text then let's do it!

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