Collective Intelligence

Journey

The Collective Intelligence Class relates to the idea of understanding the interactions and values between a community and its individuals, how they relate to each other, and how the logistics and organization of a distributed network can mean something powerful to rethink how we work, share and spread knowledge to impulse more idea diversity and collaboration to aim innovation with united connections. The class introduced the idea of Distributed Design, how it works, and which projects can be implemented to emphasize different creators open to sharing their processes, techniques, and technologies used in projects that envision creating a community.

During day one we tried as a community in our class to cluster and quote important topics for the individuals in the class to understand our collective values and why they matter to us. We had to split into different groups and answer specific questions that could make us reflect on our perception of the values and propose possible ideas of how the students could implement them to emphasize our aims and the connections between us. In sequence, the students had to mix between the groups and explain what they were brainstorming, analyze others' topic perceptions, and question if it made sense.

The second day was marked by the introduction of Distributed Design, its concepts, and how it's being applied through IAAC and other places around Europe with the reflection to understand how the design was in the past, considering design education, accessibility, and some principles that are still defining what we understand from the field today, and how this could be improved to more effective transformation in society. Two principle books were very emphasized and commented on by the professors, who shared a compilation of projects that follow distributed design concepts and how they work in practice.

On the third and final day of class, some examples related to DAPs (decentralized applications) and Web 3.0 that tried to exemplify the implementation and importance of community on a large scale and how the interaction between the users is important if we tried to focus in the exchange between the users and how they sustain and logistic model that supports everyone whose using it. Some of those examples were quoted by another institution that represents a channel between the Distributed Design institutions network, located at Manchester University in the UK, and in sequence, we had the opportunity to play a game during class that simulated how the importance of collective intelligence between distributed channels can achieve its aims by developing something together thinking about the whole and not specifically individually.

Reflection

Shows a great vision through Distributed Design and how communities could be more engaged between a network that connects multiple individuals, institutions, and organizations. The Collective Intelligence journey targets a more open world that gives visibility to more people and tries to empower them, to improve or change the complications that settled in the past, and tries through a vision that implicitly tries to disrupt the majority system we know through different ways of logistics and transactions. However, even with that, it's important to analyze and understand the risks of possible modifications in the world we know and how feasible they are considering the reality we live in, with big corporations already established into the economic system which they will never settle down.

Bauhaus was another example in class that made me reflect, even if considered a mark in the world of design and architecture as we know, socially and equally, Bauhaus had made patriarchal influence that clustered women and men throughout its history, something that Distributed Design corrects as new movement from design that empowers people and place a space on the table for new voices. However, it's important to enhance that the German movement made concepts still apply to today's reality, considering the ontological aspect of design not ecstatically but philosophically. Then, at last, distributed design consolidates itself as a big opportunity not only to think about your ideas individually but also to share and improve them together as a community that goes in the same direction, an open space for collective improvement and a richer design process through different perspectives, but one question remains the same:

"In a capitalist where society values individuality and each one has to pay their pay bills, how many of our irrational voices que take advantage of the openness of somebody else process and projects to earn benefits alone from it?"

Creative Commons and blockchains seem like good alternatives. Maybe the answer to those questions lies in the bureaucracy and legislation of the projects being developed by the distributed communities and the countries' laws each one has to follow.