OP-OD seeks to turn users, building owners, and experts (i.e. professional stakeholders) into idea contributors and architectural solution developers with an equal standing. The authorship of these solutions, hence usually of the final design as well, lies with the collective. This is the sum total of committed individuals – specialists as well as laypeople – and hence not an anonymous mass.
Working collectively in the creative field is currently just as much established as it is, possibly, a frivolous fashion. In recent years, many new collectives have been set up, both in art and architecture. However, working on architectural designs has been teamwork on a daily basis for a very long time, although so far it has often been a very hierarchical form of teamwork.
Lately, formal collectives have been translating this back into a form of collaboration that is as hierarchy-free as possible – into a shared, thus joint authorship. Yet applying the OP-OD method generates an authorship that is somewhat different from what we traditionally know by individual architects or self-initiated collectives in architecture.
The mechanics of the OP-OD method are based on integrating participation or, more precisely, user participation, into a collective design method. Or, in other words, participation becomes an integral, no longer detachable component of the collective design itself. One could also say that in the case of OP-OD or similar methods, participation and designing collectively should become synonyms.
The OP-OD method does not abolish authorship; neither does it anonymise the persons involved in the design. On the contrary, by mentioning individual names in an egalitarian way, it distributes authorship of the design across many more shoulders or individuals than has hitherto been customary. It also no longer makes any distinctions between the disciplines or stakeholders involved; instead, it gives all authors an equal standing. Thus, in a way, OP-OD deprives authorship of its absoluteness. However, it places it in a specific relationship to individual process steps, though without later overemphasising or even deliberately quantifying any parts of the whole.
Within current cooperative planning and construction procedures, participatory processes or elements are an essential part of the project identity. They can significantly shape the development and testing of new structural and programmatic conceptions, or even make them possible in the first place. Participatory methods can be used to jointly negotiate high demands in terms of social affairs, solidarity, integration, inclusion, and the environment. Thereby, the user perspective is available at a very early stage of building conceptualisation and planning.
The background of the OP-OD method is in fact to be found in the particular experiences of a cooperative (Kooperative Großstadt eG) with its own residential projects. OP-OD wishes to lower the inhibition threshold for collective, participatory processes, fostering them far beyond the field of cooperative housing construction. Thanks to the clear framework provided by a planning method such as OP-OD, the advantages of collective, participatory processes shall also be made available to private and municipal housing associations, as well as to self-initiated citizens’ assemblies and, in a wider perspective, to the public sector as client. A transfer to construction tasks other than housing is also desirable.
But who are the participants in OP-OD, who actually makes up the collective? As many representatives as possible of all major interest groups (i.e. stakeholders) concerned by a project should be able to participate in a planning process using the OP-OD method. However, an important characteristic and hence a prerequisite is a multiple casting of the various roles. In order to promote the greatest total amount of intersubjectivity, not just one person should be cast for a role — neither within a specialist discipline, nor as building owner, nor as user. Usually, in addition to users and building owner representatives, a large number of experts, such as architectural planners, landscape architects, technologists, experts in the fields of sustainability, social affairs / sociology, accessibility, and so on, through to neighbours and representatives of the public interest, should therefore be involved through multiple casting. The OP-OD method distinguishes between the roles of ‘idea contributor’ and ‘developer’ during the planning process. The developers are recruited from all process sub-groups. For example, representatives drawn from the user group may also take on the role of developer.
In this sense, OP-OD is similar to (open) competition procedures with regard to specialists. Here, too, many people from the same disciplines participate or are members of the jury — with the difference, however, that they are working on distinct, full project proposals in competition with each other, or evaluate these as a jury and select the winning project to be realised. The OP-OD method seeks to bundle and use all these competencies through a common, collaborative procedure and a specific way of working. Representatives who, during competition proceedings, would normally only be jury members can and should become part of the planning collective under the OP-OD method and, in this way, also become co-authors of the project.
However, the documentation of the process on the digital platform makes all contributions and design steps transparent; currently, these can even be traced back to individuals.
