This platform was born out of a desire to share knowledge. No longer less than an elbow’s length away from our peers, whether in studio or lecture or the hallways of building 7, we felt a certain spontaneity in the transfer of information would be lost. Nothing feels casual on zoom, nothing serendipitous. As we typed away in our respective remote-classrooms, silos scattered across the world, we wondered what our classmates were making, and perhaps more critically, how they were doing it. Zoom lends itself (in some media, arguably well) to final products, but the messy bustle, the peer-to-peer trying, failing, learning, the “hey-could-you-take-a-quick-look-at-this-for-me?” of studio culture and of MIT as a whole was, in some ways, missing.

Open-source sought to make space for this messiness, these elements of process that don’t make it to the final review. The way we draw, the way we make, and where we do it. The miles of designer/writer/artist that exist before the pin-up.

“open-source is a project to showcase and share knowledge, with emphasis on methodologies and techniques gained from outside the canon of architectural education — a love letter to messy layer organization, model scraps, and the things that inspire us”

First we asked: where do you work? What happens when our morning commute gets truncated from a 15 minute bike ride to “15 steps from my bed to my desk”?

We hopefully (hopefully) spent less money on coffee, but perhaps also lamented over a loss in the clear distinction between the workspace and the not workspace, a healthy separation which was difficult to maintain in a normal year, never mind in quarantine.

Nevertheless, we still created, carved, sculpted, watched, listened, learned — all against a carefully curated Zoom background featuring all the best practices of exemplary mise-en-scene.

Our first collection — Workspace: a brief survey of MIT Architecture’s illustrious Work-From-Home (WFH) set-ups, a virtual studio map, some nice pictures. The locations? Various, but definitely not Building 7.

Next we asked: what does a page from your sketchbook look like? — for many, an extension of “how do you think?” Sometimes we sat down with intention: pen-pencil-marker-stylus primed, sketchbook-pad-journal-tablet open, on desk, in lap, and otherwise at the ready. Other times we mindlessly doodled, our attention drifting in hour 2.5 of a 3 hour zoom class, our tools expanded to and limited by what was within reach. Post-it, sharpie, crayon, index card, the backs of our hands.

Scrap Paper gave students a chance to pin-up the pieces of our projects we didn’t to the final -- the messiest sketches, the most incoherent babblings of thought. Unedited, unaltered, and unfinished.

Then we asked: how do you make?

Not everyone treated our remote-learning status as lost time for 3D making. For some of us it brought about the exploration of new territories, prompting investigation into “doing more with less” (less access to creative spaces, to certain materials, to certain machines).

Others found ways to compress those same processes into something more portable: the work-from-home studio/3D printer/CNC. Virtual work-arounds become work-inherent. Desks were cluttered. Forms emerged.

Still others of us capitalized on found time in the midst of quarantine, working on personal handcrafts as we commute between zoom lectures.

All in all, we made some pretty cool stuff. Maquette sought to feature some of that stuff — objects created for various courses within the department, and as personal projects.

It feels necessary now to give credit to the virtual infrastructure that got us here. Although a 5-person breakout room couldn’t replace 5 people around the same desk working on a single piece of paper, it did bridge some impressive distances. Friends, family, guests from out of state, out of time zone. Where group work was unattainable on the face-to-face scale, it's became increasingly more attainable on the face-to-zoom-to-face scale.

Open-source has aimed to celebrate the ways we’ve come together to discover new methods of partnership in translation from the physical to the digital. Miro boards, zoom rooms, screen-shares and screenshots, we then asked: how do you collaborate?

open-source collage party 3/3. A walk in the park.

Despite our community being physically dispersed across the globe, we found ways to come together, collaborate, and create in this time of extraordinary upheaval. Curated by open-source and Out of Frame, the [gallery]: end-of-year-exhibition aimed to showcase and celebrate this work for members of the greater SA+P community.

Come this Fall, we’ll all (hopefully)(likely) be back on campus, eager to reconnect and reconvene our work in a classroom setting. As we return to in-person instruction, we at open-source aim to ensure that an emphasis on process continues to have a place in the department, and look forward to transitioning our work into a more hybrid space.

Happy making,

O-S

[gallery] end-of-year exhibition

[Collection] Maquette