Evan Martinez

Omar Khan
Mark Shepard

Architecture Graduate Thesis
Fall 2019

MArch

Blockchain technology is being adopted into many different fields and applications, and proponents of the technology ensure that it will revolutionize how we interact with others online. The technology has many implications for how relationships between individuals, institutions, and technologies are changing. For many, blockchain represents ideologies of the new digital revolution, in which collaboration and interactivity are at the forefront.

Blockchain technology has the potential to empower the individual and return the control of our online data into our hands, as it redefines what it means to transact with technology and institutions over the World Wide Web. If, in fact, blockchain technology will become ubiquitous, it is critical to understand how this technology will change the way individuals practice design. The purpose of this research is to speculate on the possible implications of blockchain technology on the professional practice of architecture, specifically investigating its role as a potential facilitator of an open-design process.

The research explores themes of authorship, agency, trust, security, and liability as they pertain to the architectural profession. In current practice, liability is spread among the multitude of stakeholders who provide input into a building. Trust and security are established through traditional contract terms and agreements, which serve as the basis for their relationships. However, there is often a lack of trust and security that is evident in these contractual agreements, often mitigated by the threat of costly litigation. Navigating these relationships has become a large part of the responsibility of architects. There are also questions as to the agency of individual stakeholders and how much influence they have over a design.

Clients often have limited access to the initial design phases of a building and are thus excluded from the process. On the other hand, while architects remain responsible for a majority of the design, the authorship of a design is lost as various consultants, specialists, and engineers provide input into more and more complex building systems. The result is a complicated web of relationships between various stakeholders in the execution of a project, and an amalgamation and compilation of liability, trust, security, and agency which dilutes and disperses the authorship of any single building among this interconnected network of designers and builders.

Digital technologies further exaggerate this dispersal of authorship, as designers now operate on a global scale. Authors such as Mario Carpo and Kyle Steinfeld address the issues that arise in the new predominantly digital method of working in the architecture profession. While they both recognize a loss of authorship for the architect, they also imply that there is a corresponding increase in authorship and agency by other “actors,” such as the computer or other participants in the design process. This is most notable when discussing Building Information Modeling (BIM) and its ability to coordinate different participants in order to achieve both efficient flows of information and a consensus across all of its users, or when discussing the role of the algorithm in comparison to the role of the designer in a parametric model.

Discussion of user-participation and a democratic design process is also relevant to the question of authorship, along with the already complicated network of stakeholders in a traditional design process. Blockchain technology, being a distributed method of connecting peer-to-peer, may have the potential to increase the agency of the client in the design process.

aBlock: a Distributed Design Platform synthesizes emerging information on blockchain technology and its goals for creating an open, transparent, and democratic society with earlier agendas in architectural design theory to open up the design process to individuals and eliminate the hierarchical patronization of expertise in the profession. The research builds upon these ideas as a basis for speculating on the changes blockchain technology will have on the architecture profession – specifically looking at its potential for changing the relationship between the architect and the client. 

By designing and specifying a prototype for a decentralized application that would be operated on a distributed ledger (blockchain), the goal of this thesis is to test out ideas through scenariobased fictions in pursuit of revealing the changing role of the design professional in the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.