Being a long time writing the "Virtual Architecture Society (VAS)" in SL, I am following with great interest the development of IT tools to support an architect, developed within metaverses and especially in Secondlife.
About six months ago a very interesting news has been disseminated in the "SEA". The architects avatars Keystone Bouchard and Theory Shaw, an interest in participatory methods stemming from Wikis, had recently developed a very special project: the "Wikitecture Tree." This project moved the concepts underlying the collaborative wiki, within the territories of the large extended Secondlife City Online.
Wikitecture Tree is the starting point for the experience that I will now tell.
This experience covers a real architectural competition, a competition such as the hundreds of architectural competitions in the world every day bandits.
To achieve this we set up a contest architecture firm, association between "Real Life Architects in Second Life" (real architects in SL), under the name Studio Wikitecture and based Second Life .
It was decided to participate in a competition organized by 'Open Architecture Network , which was required to design environmentally sustainable buildings actually disadvantaged compared to three: one in Africa, one in Asia and South America. The competition in question is the Open Architecture Challenge 2008, which this year has collected records of 566 architecture firms from around the world.
view of the professional experiences in Asia by some of the participants, we chose our location on the Nepalese Sanfo Bagar (Achham region). In this small mountain village on the slopes of the Himalayan you must make a medical clinic that will operate in 10 doctors, allowing the treatment of 7,700 patients.
wikitecture The tree has been the key instrument that made possible the collaboration between the architects involved. The potential of the Wiki-Tree is found precisely in the design phase of the clinic. Each designer, offering their ideas, gave shape to new digital branches of the tree generated by the Wiki-Tree. For every idea proposed participants could comment on, and approved or rejected, by a simple voting system. Therefore, the most popular ideas were those that generated the most important branches and green, while the ideas that have not found the collective feedback has been transformed into so-called "deadwood." In support of the Wiki-Tree was also made available a forum and a wiki 2D, which allowed a greater integration of ideas and comments.
The Wiki-Tree consists of a series of buttons that allow the recording of the various states of progress of the project. These progress are connected interactively to a "branch digital" degraded from green to red, based collective appreciation. Clicking on any of the leaves is materialized during the project agreement, allowing ex-post evaluations and allowing for subsequent proposals.
Through the project we have promoted the closest approach to the principles of ecology (from the balance of man and nature), anthropology (with respect to other cultures) and sustainable energy (compliance with local energy resources).
The project was completed and sent in late February 2008, through a series of drawings made by mounting the images taken from Second Life, integrated with functional and spatial information.
The final tables are very similar to the tables of the competition they usually are sent by the architectural "normal."
That's what we were surprised, amazed at how the work done during the 3 months of design in Second Life has given the final results very high.
To underline the effectiveness of these collaborative tools is the only prestigious prize awarded by the Open Architecture Challenge, the Founder's Award, in addition to the third category prize.
With this pioneering project was colonized a new territory that can open up future collaborative desirable streets.
