Ephraim Joris :

This research has been a progression towards a practice where I operate as a practitioner and an academic exploring possible overlaps between practice and teaching. To develop the notion of the collaborative in teaching relating it with my practice, I started work on InsideOpen, as an online tool for collaboration between designers; students and people from practice. This tool aims to act as a platform between academia and practice and between practices (surely Architecture Project offices in the different countries) to share research/information in design through the concept of a good conversation.

InsideOpen aims to examine how the integration of the principles of online communities (which most of us use as part of our everyday life) can improve a collaborative learning/design experience. The website, designed as an interactive online discussion forum, aims to develop into a user-driven directory for research in spatial design (due to the accumulation and categorization of posts) produced and maintained by its users. This recourse aims to ac­commodate users from different backgrounds, both students and practitioners from dif­ferent universities and professional environments. The concept of mixed demo­graphics is an important strategy to accommodate individuals with a learning/research/communication platform they can use and feel comfortable with outside the institutional.

With InsideOpen the collaborative is addressed by the proclamation of identities constantly being readjusted (blogs accumulate post after post, profiles are adjusted, images up­dated) through the notion of these reuse mechanisms linked to cooperation, con­frontation and possibly integration of viewpoints.

InsideOpen is set as a framework to appropriate and study these mechanisms of reuse. In doing so, two important aspects need to be identified; source (or origin of information) and target (the way this information is used vis a vis a particular design task).

Individual blogs, when they are used to describe a design/research discourse, can accommodate the construction of target situations (setting out a design task) yet at the same time act as source situations for others. The retrieval and selection of source situations will be analogous to particular target situations. Indirectly one could therefore expect bloggers, through the use of comments, to start engaging in the adaptation of their source situations to accommodate their target situation signaling the birth of a col­laborative.

Here reuse is bipolar and not just one person seeking inspiration by looking at the work of others but becoming actively engaged with the work of others just by the nature of the blog.

My main interest here is the coinciding of source and target situations through the network of blogs indicating a collective authorship. Implicitly this collective authorship nurtures the erosion of hierarchy. Or at least provides the opportunity. Between practitioners this might be less important but as an academic instrument my role as ‘contributor’ is structurally identical to a student’s role as ‘contributor’ providing the opportunity for relationships and dialogue clearly different from that what is experienced in a typical classroom…