Firstly thank you for including WikiHouse here on the P2P Foundation – it is very exciting to see it gradually gaining support and generating debate as it is still in a very early stage of development!

Eric, thank you for the thorough feedback. Your comments are very astute particularly in relation to the implications of plywood as a building material. One note on this – we have tried to limit the possible wastage caused by future adaptation of structures by reducing the number of screw-fixings as much as possible, limiting them to internal linings as far as possible and avoiding the need for any glue in assembly. Whilst this obviously assumes a degree of care in staged demolition/adaptation it is in theory possible to surgically extract individual sections of the house and adapt primary structure (which simply relies on ‘bolt and wing-nut’ type connectors). We have also been looking over the past few days at solutions which rely on no bolts at all, but simply on plywood connectors wedged together and malleted into place. It is arguable whether this helps to ‘future-proof’ the structure, but it may help to reduce the number of secondary fixings. This is one amongst the many issues we hope will be explored and improved on by an open community of developers.

Regardless, it is our hope that the principles which WikiHouse embodies (namely the sharing of architectural design ‘codes’; the use of flat-pack components cut via CNC, to allow for maximum adaptability and reductions in procurement time; and the use of intuitive and accessible design tools – all of which you correctly posit above!) can be applied to other materials and that further experimentation will yield other innovative results.

The MIT work around the Fab Lab House has indeed been an inspiration for us, as have a great many other projects around the space of Open Hardware and Design including the Hexayurt (for its easy of assembly and instructions), the Open Architecture Network (for their aspiration to open access to architectural designs), the Blackfoot CNC machine, RepRap, and similar projects (for their intention to lower the threshold for access to personal fabricators), and a great many others – many of these will be credited and showcased at the Gwangju Design Biennale as part of the WikiHouse exhibit.

In relation your points about sharing the source files rest assured we have no intention of keeping these under wraps and are working hard to get a proper site and files online within the coming week. WikiHouse has received a lot more interest within the first few days than we had anticipated so the holding page is already proving inadequate and the need to get the content online is obviously pressing. The only reason we have not already shared SketchUp files is because we have been refining our design guidelines and models following lessons learnt from our own prototype, as well as being very busy finishing the website and preparing for the Gwangju Design Biennale generally. We are nonetheless very much prioritising getting these out! The plugin is also still in development, and whilst we can (and very likely will) be sharing content without it, it should help the workflow for anyone wishing to develop WikiHouse.

We are certainly not planning to launch ‘black box’ at the Biennale in Korea as we share frustrations about supposed ‘open-source’ projects that are anything but… Rather we aim to get content online with some weeks to spare before an open submission/contribution is actually selected for assembly at the exhibit towards the end of September. At the Biennale we will be providing two-three sections of house as a starting point and then waiting for contributions to determine the form of the last parts assembled at the exhibition. After the Biennale we fully intend to help drive WikiHouse forward.

I hope this helps to address some of the points raised above. Again, thank you for your insights, and please feel free to discuss and critique the project as it progresses because the feedback is invaluable!