Each WikiHouse is more than a "digitally fabricated plywood chassis” or "a big IKEA kit for your home.”
What makes that difference are the WikiHouse Design Principles. They express a philosophy regarding how our economy should look. They acknowledge that WikiHouse isn’t just about supporting one technology,
"it’s about establishing the fundamentals and the principles that create a foundation for many different technologies."
Visual representation of the WikiHouse Design Principles.
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The 15 Principles
1. Share globally, manufacture locally
"It is easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits" — John Maynard Keynes
2. Be lazy like a fox
Don’t keep reinventing the wheel. Take something that already works, copy, adapt, give credit and re-share. (Thanks Linus Torvalds via Eric S Raymond)3. Design to lower thresholds
Design to lower barriers of time, cost, skill, energy and resources at every stage. Elvis Costello wrote all his songs to be played on the cheapest transistor radio.4. Share and make shareable
Publish your work under an open-source share-alike license, documented and codified so as to make it as easy as possible for others to understand, modify, improve, distribute and use it, including commercially.5. Open standards
Where possible, work to existing standards or seek to establish intuitive new ones.6. Open materials
Design for cheap, abundant, standardized, sustainable, and, ideally, circular materials.7. Human-friendly
Seek to preserve and maximize the safety, security, health and well-being (physical and mental) of all participants at every stage of a product’s life.8. Start somewhere
No one can solve everyone’s problems. Design something that works where you are, then share so others can adapt it for their own economy, climate and culture. Let solutions adapt like Darwin’s finches.9. Modular
Design hardware and software that is robust, interoperable, product-agnostic and flexible, so elements can be independently altered, substituted or upgraded.10. Include, keep including
Look for ways in which age, race, gender or disability might be barriers, and try to design them out. Try to design products, processes and documents that are accessible, intuitive and non-discriminatory.11. The new "normal"
Avoid design that would be considered "alternative," "boutique" or only for the rich or poor. Instead, design for the new normal: products most people would consider desirable and affordable. As beautiful as Apple, as open as Linux.12. Mistake-proof
Make it impossible to get wrong, or not a problem if you do make a mistake (a Japanese term for this is “Poka-Yoke”).13. Whole life design
“A home is not something you finish” — Stewart BrandDesign for the entire life cycle of the product, from manufacture to assembly, use, maintenance, adaptation, disassembly and re-use.
14. Superpower the users
"Give power to the fine tuners" — Cedric PriceAfford as much power as possible to the end users, from procurement to privacy to electricity. Democracy is a design diagram.