Cooperative Design

Responding to msg by gvelez@xxxxxxxxxx ("Gonzalo Velez J. UCV")
on


Professor Gonzalo Velez,

Would you care to expand what you mean by the term, Cooperative
Design?

For me, it may mean, variously, cooperation of the
unsatisfactory following sorts:

1  Among design professionals within a single firm or
corporation-- architects, engineers, specialty consultants, say
like SOM or HOK.

2  Among professionals in design but in separate firms --
architects, plannners, urban designers, interior designers, and
so on.

3  Between design professionals and other persons involved in
construction and development -- architects, developers,
contractors, lawyers, finance experts, surveyors, and so on,
say like Design-Build or Joint Venture.

4  Between design professionals and community members --
architects, planners, citizens, community organizations,
politicians and so on.

5  Design by members of cooperatives or community organization
who do not hire design professionals, or use designers only as
non-privileged members of the group.

However, cooperation is also possible by any number of joint
approaches to design different from that of the single
designer, say by horizontal, vertical, serial, field,
heirarchical, heteroarchical or heterodoxical arrangements for
sharing and distributing design definition and responsibility.

This last catch-all category is most interesting to me because
it covers a wide variety of unfolding experiments in design now
underway to expand on and improve, maybe supplant, the first
five -- which as you probably know, have each in their own way
a substantial momentum, entrenched agenda and institutional
inertia.  I dream of Design-L being one of these experiments,
among its other noble purposes.

Supplementing these, however, is the solitary designer working
completely alone, who is worthy of compelling equal attention
as any "cooperative" venture, for me at least, and neither can
be very well understood without the other.

And, I assume that design for you is not limited to a
conventional definition of architecture so that the great
variety of design fields and methodologies are included, again
like my dream Design-L.

I hope you will share your report here.