Andreas Kamstrup
A study of crowdsourcing platforms for future architecture competitions
Crowdsourcing and the Architectural Competition as Organizational Technologies
Danish Architecture Center and the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS)
2011-2017
In a nutshell, what was the topic of your PhD project?
Danish Architecture Center launched a digital crowdsourcing platform (Innosite.dk) as an experiment to generate innovations on both the process and product sides of the Danish construction industry. In my project, I studied how this digital platform worked, what impact it had on the construction industry, and how the practices that unfolded on the platform might be characterized. Concurrently, I investigated a newly designed architecture competition and used insights gained from it as a lens to better understand the way the crowdfunding platform was used.
What surprised you most about the process?
The strong culture that exists around architecture competitions as a phenomenon in Denmark was “transferred to the platform”: In connection with the launch of the digital platform, the hope was to change the usual way things are done and to dare to do things differently. I was surprised to observe how much the platform ended up functioning like a classic architecture competition, even though the objective was to do things differently.
What is the most important thing you have learned from writing an Industrial PhD?
I learned two important things that are different and yet related: How to work in a structured manner and how to conduct research. When you start a PhD project, it is important to develop an interest in an area and to be able to delimit that area to make it tangible. When completing a PhD project, it is important to work in a structured manner with the empirical research, methodology and theory, reading of articles and, not least, you own writing process. My dissertation is around 200 pages long, and it required both structure and focus to be able to write that many pages of quality research.
What impact has your PhD project had on you, personally?
My project gave me the opportunity to explore some of the phenomena and understand them in more detail. It also gave me a chance to conduct research at Stanford University in California. From Copenhagen Business School, I was used to discussions with highly qualified research colleagues, but my sojourn at Stanford gave me access to the most recognized researchers in my field. Furthermore, it was a unique experience to live in San Francisco among the superimposed hippie values and high-tech startups, and I learned a great deal about both platform design and operations while I was at Stanford.
What key learnings resulted from your project?
The most important and key point from my research project is that when the competition format is changed (in this case from the classic architecture competition to other types, such as crowdsourcing and dialog-based competitions), the underlying premise and conditions change. In a classic architecture competition, the emphasis is on fairness, transparency and objective assessment criteria. My findings from the newer formats I investigated show that phenomena like efficiency, democratization of the process, innovative responses, and aesthetic products are given higher priority at the expense of a transparent process and the establishment of objective assessment criteria.
What makes your research relevant?
On a theoretical level, my PhD project is relevant because it was interdisciplinary and combined theories from different domains, primarily organizational theory, knowledge about architecture competitions and theories about digital platforms. On a methodological, my project was rather groundbreaking because I conducted an ethnographic study of a digital platform and spent more than 1,200 hours observing actions directly on the platform and in the project organization surrounding the platform. On a practice-oriented level, I showed how the importance of the assessment criteria in (architect) competitions changes when there is a dialog between the participants and the judges. This raises questions about a fundamental principle, which is being able to participate and be assessed on equal terms.
What are the perspectives for your research?
An important perspective for both participants in and designers of architecture competitions is understanding the implications of new, dialog-oriented competition formats. More dialog can make it easier to achieve consensus between, say, an architectural firm and a client, and increase the chances of achieving a good match with the lowest possible resource consumption. However, the price for this increased and concentrated dialog during the process is that the importance of assessment criteria is negotiated locally and that different architecture firms are not assessed on equal terms.