New investigations in collective form : The Open Workshop New Investigations in Collective Form presents a group of design experiments by the design research office The Open Workshop that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist. Today society continues to face urban challenges from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment that in order to be addressed require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. Organized into five themes for producing collectivity Frameworks Articulated Surfaces the Living Archive Re Wiring States and Commoning the projects straddle the fine line between the individual and collective informal and formal choice and control impermanent and permanent In 1964 Fumihiko Maki published his seminal text Investigations in Collective Form which he framed as the beginning of a vast inquiry on collective form. In the text a young Maki grapples with the role of urban design and the urban designer who is charged with giving form to the city. The emerging challenges Maki witnessed for the urban designer resided in the series of recent changes to the urban realm including the coexistence and conflict of amazingly heterogeneous institutions and individuals; unprecedented rapid and extensive transformations in physical structure of society; rapid communications methods; and technological progress and its impacts upon regional cultures . What Maki so eloquently pointed out was the need for the designer to now think simultaneously about dynamic cycles time and transformations which he termed the master program and as well as how form (or in Makis terms the master form ) responded to these temporal scenarios. This shift demanded by Maki in the role of the architect was indeed a profound one as the architects role throughout history had been to determine lines that ordered the world. We could say that the majority of architecture and urban design of the twentieth century aimed to tame the contradictory heterogeneous and contingent urban environment both physically as well as socio politically. In the past two centuries as cities have rapidly expanded into vast urban territories that are organized through the negotiation of politics economics and cultural values the ability to determine such lines of order has become progressively more complex and suspect. Instead of controlling and assimilating the individual and the natural environments they inhabit the design research of The Open Workshop is focused on understanding how design can embrace the diversity and indeterminacy of the urban realm