Towards an Architecture of Collaborative Objects Alexander Grasser 1 1 Institute of Architecture and Media, Graz University of Technology 1 contact@alexandergrasser.com Towards an Architecture of Collaborative Objects, explores the potential of playing with Collaborative Objects in real, augmented and mixed realities. A multi-player game platform App: VoxelCO, developed by the author, provides a speculative playground to research, the interaction with objects, things and people, as well as provokes new opportunities to engage deeply with its content and context. Furthermore, VoxelCO, reveals new modes of participation, to design and collaborate in real-time with augmented reality, using millennial tools: mobile devices. A case study project, the VoxelStage, offered an opportunity to apply VoxelCO to design a stage together with a group of students. To merge the collaboratively aggregated virtual objects of VoxelCO with reality, real WireCubes were augmented and assembled, proposing an architecture of socially augmented fuzzy formations. Keywords: Collaborative Objects, Augmented Reality, Realtime, Fuzzy, Play Introduction to Collaborative Objects “Technology has already transformed our lives, bring- ing together people, ideas, and information in unimag- inable ways. We’re hard at work in a new technolog- ical chapter that connects the digital world with real- ity”(Niantic 2019), a statement by Niantic, a company that recently blurred the boundary of what is digi- tal or real on a massive scale. The expertise of Ni- antic, developed among others from being involved in creating project Keyhole, which later evolved to Google Earth. Further on they developed their first geo-location based mobile game Ingress which al- lowed the users to claim virtual territories in the real world as well as enabled them to create content, doc- umenting and mapping the real world and merging it with the virtual game. Building up on the collected data of Ingress, in 2016, Pokemon GO launched like a rocket, leading in the app charts for the follow- ing years. Besides the geo-location implemented in the game, advanced social concepts to collabo- rate, trade and raid, as well as augmented reality were introduced, mixing the realities of the game content. As Mario Carpo suggests, “Every technology is a social construction: innovation only occurs when technical supply matches cultural demand, and when a new technology and new social practices are congruent within the same techno-social feedback loop.”(Carpo 2017, p.159) I argue that social network platforms, enabling interaction with digital or real content, objects and people, as well as a technology like augmented real- ity allow for new forms of collaboration in architec- ture to emerge. It’s time for architecture to inves- tigate those ‘unimaginable ways’ to bring together people, ideas, information and objects. Therefore Collaborative Objects are introduced as conceptual Design - COLLABORATION AND PARTICIPATION - Volume 1 - eCAADe 37 / SIGraDi 23 | 325