From RIBA Journal, November 2008

Riba Practice - Technology

The first event in the UK focused on web 2.0 and the built environment, be2camp 2008, was held on 10 October 2008 at London's Building Centre. Described as an 'unconference', many formal structures that might be expected, such as a fixed programme schedule, were suspended, or at least loosened. Instead, the event was organised around the emerging conversations of delegates in the audience, on the platform and online.

Be2camp was conceived by Martin Brown, a consultant on change in the built environment, and Paul Wilkinson of BIW Technologies, as an online meeting place for people interested in relating the latest web applications and web design techniques to the challenges of building a better, more sustainable built environment. The be2camp event was charged with exploring the role that web 2.0 technologies might play in transforming the built environment. It was to ask, in the words of BioRegional delegate Tom Chance: 'How could a few trendy web tools help transform an industry so conservative that it has barely begun to understand how to design built environments that facilitate healthy, happy and sustainable communities?'

Technology is not in itself inherently progressive, of course. It is entirely possible that these 'trendy web tools' could end up supporting more unsustainable capitalist development. However, new technology is always in some sense 'up for grabs' – it is always a site of political and social struggle – and it was clear that for many of the delegates at be2camp 2008, these tools were part of a broader intellectual shift towards a 'networked ecological human-planetary systems' paradigm, which, it was argued, must form the essential infrastructure of any modern future post-capitalist sustainable society.

The presentations and discussions on the day focused on two main areas. First, the productivity and business communication tools, aimed at transforming construction practice. These are the sort of applications which superficially seem to replicate many traditional office management tools, from calendars to time sheets to meeting agendas and minutes stored in filing cabinets.

Following the shift from paper to digital information storage – which has been under way for more than a decade – contemporary web 2.0 developments come primarily in the form of 'software as a service' (SaaS) and more broadly, 'cloud computing' models. Rather than working with generic applications based on a local computer, these applications are stored and used online. Typically, they are more customisable and more industry and job specific, as they are based on 'wiki' models where user-created content allows the particular knowledge structures of a given job or organisation to emerge.

These new applications are also are typically 'mash-ups': that is they incorporate components and data from other online applications, such as maps, local weather and blog news feeds. The crucial difference here is the connectivity, and the facilitation ofcollaboration and partnering, that these online working practices bring. It is this difference which a number of delegates saw as powerful enough to shift construction practice forward, with regard to the aims of the Constructing Excellence agenda that came out of the Egan and Latham reports of the 1990s.

Recent developments with BIM (building information management) tools are an example of the above developments. A number of delegates referred to progress with file protocols, primarily the IFC file format which combines CAD and a range of other building information in a new industry standard. The combination of live online working and wiki-based knowledge structures might finally make BIM happen. As Brown stated: 'Sustainability can only really be achieved through collaboration, by working together, through supply chains, across sectors, and it is the web 2.0 approaches that will allow and enable that.'

The second main area of discussion is perhaps more challenging still to existing construction models. A series of contributors explored how an emerging distributed global network, made up of locally controlled user networks, might transform public participation and engagement with the built environment. Chris Leung presented the Pachube project he has developed with Usman Haque. The extended environments markup language (EEML) they have developed could become a really important piece of work, allowing people to connect real-time environmental data from objects and spaces around the world, both physical and virtual.

Grounded in similar ideas around ‘ubiquitous computing’, Filip Visnjic and I presented Working Architecture Group's Open Tables, an application that has a local interactive physical environment as front end, instead of a computer screen.

The potential to generate a new conception of the local was also raised by Tom Chance, who explored how 'participatory mapping', facilitated by web applications such as Open StreetMap (this can apply just as well to GoogleMaps or similar) form the basis of new communities, or new modes of expression for existing communities, by documenting local information and opinions which might go on to inform and instigate local building development and change.

In a similar vein, Asesh Sarkar described the successful implementation of community building application ResidentsHQ in a London development. 'Prior to our launch there was very little interaction between residents and little community activity. Since our launch, residents have initiated football clubs, running clubs, poker nights, mother/toddler groups and a party in the local park, to mention just a few,' Sarkar told delegates.

For several sustainable systems design theorists, such as John Thackara and Ezio Manzini, the holistic systems views that these design tools can bring into focus are key to implementing the kind of thinking that Manzini has described as 'changing the change'. This is the proposition that we can redirect and reform information and communication technologies-generated changes to the global economy in such a way as to bring about the changes that we need to shift to sustainable global economic production models.

Jon Goodbun is a founder of the Working Architecture Group. He can be contacted at jon@wag-architecture.co.uk

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Notes

• Be2camp was part-organised by BIW head of corporate communications Paul Wilkinson, and BIW Technologies sponsors the Be2camp website.
• A version of this article also appeared on Jon Goodbun's blog here.
• The text of this article is also available on the RIBA Journal website here.