Digital Property. Open-source Architecture

Even more than authorship, ownership is challenged by the rise of digital and computational methods of design and production. These challenges are simultaneously legal, ethical and economic. How are new methods of fabrication and manufacture going to irreversibly change not only ways of working, but also designers’ ethics and their stance on ownership? In his 2013 second-term State of the Union address, President Obama stated that 3D printing ‘has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything’. Nowhere will the impact of 3D printing be felt greater than in the architectural and design communities. When anyone can print out an object or structure from a …