Blockchain Grammars-Designing with DAOs: The blockchain as a design platform for shape grammarists' decentralised collaboration

This paper presents an application of Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) in the field of design and AEC industry. The model is applied in the realm of shape grammar proposing the possibility of allowing multiple grammarists to collaborate in the definition of a new grammar within a Blockchain environment that acts as a distributed ledger. DAOs systems and Blockchain are introduced as well as shape grammar and its fundamental rules. The collaborative nature of a DAO with the inner logic of shape grammar, which bases its principle and rules in multiple variations and combinations of simple initial shapes, brings to the problem of recording and validating changes and improvements in the design chain. For this reason, a voting system to govern the process is introduced, based on both quantitative values, i.e. number of votes, and qualitative power, i.e. the reputation of who votes, applying a factor that scales the vote according to the expertise of the voter. An example is provided showing a possible scenario in a design environment along with validation criteria, and predicting future stages applied in an always more BIM-oriented practice.