Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Edward Becker
How can distributed manufacturing and the innate intelligence of everyday materials be aligned to transform our built environments? How can increasingly accessible open source communities and affordable digital manufacturing tools help facilitate such a change [and fast!]? This paper posits that while accessible digital manufacturing technologies already allow consumers to become prosumers, albeit rarely taking prosumption beyond the scale and complexity of a tea cup or small toy, a powerful, potentially game-changing avenue for the discipline exists in the prosumption of high-performance building products or assemblies by the everyday citizen designer or citizen builder. The upcycling of embedded intelligence holds the potential to immediately impact how we practice and teach, but also how we collectively frame the role and agency of the architect in twenty-first century open-source economies.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.FALL.19.42
Volume Editors
Amy Larimer, Deborah Berke, Diana Lin, Drew Krafcik, John Barton & Sunil Bald
ISBN
978-1-944214-24-1
