Nowadays science has gone very far, there is an overload of information, for sure enough for new breakthroughs, but probably too much for one head. This information is kept in the heads of different people, scientists and professionals, and what you need to do is just add one to another, and probably a new outbreak will occur.
But of course the communication technologies also advance. Twenty years ago people, working on the same project, were tied to each other; they had to work in the same place at the same time, to be able to share their knowledge, ideas and to produce something. Then in 1991 WWW came and changed it all.
“The World-Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project”.
(Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al. 1994)
It gave people the chance to work together, being in the different parts of the globe, sometimes never even seeing each other in the real life.
Then, in 1998 an era of Open source software began. Open source concept gave birth to plenty prosperous software and web projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Linux OS) and at this stage proved itself to be very efficient.
Let’s take a look at the way people collaborate in architecture. They use internet to connect each other and share information, but do they reach the full capacity of the knowledge they can get? The state of the art of collaboration in architecture can be compared to the level of development of the collaboration used in web and software design somewhere between 1991 and 1998. But what if we made a step further? If the “hive mind”1 was used in architecture practice, it could become incredibly efficient, and lots of breakthroughs could happen.
Shouldn’t we try to catch up?
Bibliographic references:
- Kelly, Kevin 1994. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World. Addison Wesley, MA.
- Kelly, Kevin 2008. Bottom is not Enough
- Leach, Neil 2011. Swarm Intelligence.