Open Communitition - Competitive Design in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

The recent enthusiasm in popular culture for massively multiplayer online environments has proven that eclectic online communities have the potential to develop powerful problem solving capacities, through the enactment of a collective intelligence. Foreseeing a radical change in the identity of the architect, becoming but the designer of open systems of emergent communal design environments, this paper aims at making the case for an alternate CAAD model. Rather than a fully collaborative approach, the open system proposed here encourages direct competition within a shared online environment, based on an established precedent in an associated design field known as 'communitition'. After establishing this alternate position for collaborative CAAD, outcomes from a pilot study are discussed and the specification of a full case study is presented.