Acadia 2018 Paper Platforms for Architecture: Imperatives and Opportunities of Designing online networks for design by Jose Sanchez Abstract: The rise of platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Uber while initially celebrated as part of a disruptive new era of the internet, has slowly been re-assessed as a problematic and unregulated form of 21st- century info-capitalism that contributes to inequality, mistrust, and polarization of its users. The internet has become a place for content creation, not only consumption, and the content freely created by the network of users has defined a self-organizing system of ad-hoc audiences following eco-chambers organized through artificial intelligence, which amplifies previously identified trends. While a large portion of the content created by users seems to be aimed at personal forms of entertainment, a few remarkable projects, such as Wikipedia, have afforded the orchestration of hundreds of users to contribute to a collective goal. While we can observe that the platform model has appeared in diverse disciplines allowing the creation of content from news articles to music, we have not seen the emergence of a robust design platform intended to proliferate and advance the discipline of architecture. This paper makes the case that video game technology and its audiences have reached a state of technical capability that could allow for architectural platforms to emerge, one in which players could learn, create and share architectural designs. Such a platform comes with a series of ethical imperatives, questions of value proposition, and liabilities, as well as a high potential to communicate and proliferate architectural knowledge and know- how. Common’hood, currently under development will be used as a case study as an aspiration to engage the development of an ethical architectural platform that develops a proposition towards authorship, ownership and collective engagement. Keywords: Platforms, Capitalism, Network, Video Game, Combinatorics, Information Theory, Entropy, Co-ops, Platform Cooperativism, Extractivism, Privacy, Encryption.