Design offered up: Control and open outcomes in a digitally enabled design process

This paper presents the design of a digitally fabricated, customizable line of furniture and casework objects that leverage parametric technology and social networking to produce a highly collaborative distributed digital fabrication workflow. It describes how a furniture system, serving as an apprehensible model for architecture, was designed concurrently with the networked, multi-agent workflow that manufactures it and the layered user input that defines it. The furniture object designs are inextricably linked to their fabrication by a distributed network of small fabricators that supplant the single large manufacturer, and to their open outcomes that balance professional design expertise with user input. The paper concludes with describing how this model challenges the architectural profession's prevailing focus on the transactional and object oriented capabilities of recent digital innovations. By using such tools to design the objects within their systemic and networked relationships, architects might successfully create outcomes that better respond to society's increasingly complex demands.