The standards that will govern your work are being written now. You can help write them, or inherit them.

Architects, engineers, and builders work today without shared specifications. Every offsite project re-invents its own details. Meanwhile the standards that will soon govern this work are being drafted in earnest, and most practitioners have no seat at the table. The field is shifting from custom projects to products. A practitioner who sits it out keeps no edge when it arrives.

Participation is the business edge

Collaboration is more productive than competition. You are welcome to join CfOC as it builds the consensus that will define the product-based marketplaces of the very near future. By doing so, you shape the field instead of inheriting it, and you gain subject-matter expertise that puts you ahead of your peers.

Help write the standard. End the coordination meetings.

Consider where your hours actually go. Much of an architect’s or engineer’s career is spent in coordination meetings, reconciling conflicts in an evolving design. The meetings breed homework. The homework breeds rework. Both drag on productivity through schematic design, design development, and construction documents, project after project.

A connectivity standard erases that work at its source. It is a contract to connect a certain way, agreed between parties who never meet. It scopes the engineering down to a clean problem, solved within constraints the standard states plainly.

CfOC writes these standards through an ANSI-accredited consensus process. The process is open, balanced, and public. Practitioners enter as the user voice that keeps a standard honest and buildable. You apply, you are vetted for balance, and you take a real vote on what the field adopts. A seat is earned through the open process, not handed out.

Do this work well, and it becomes the last coordination meeting you ever attend at the dwelling-unit level.

Join the research. Choose your track.

The Senior Research Fellows are CfOC’s research engine. They build the three things the field will run on. A Fellow chooses where to contribute, and the application invites you to declare it. Your strongest track follows your own background, whether technical, legal, or design.

• The standards. Fellows lead the open connectivity standards through the ANSI-accredited process. This is the work for those who want to define the interface itself.
• The agreements. CfOC is writing the standard forms of agreement that builders will use to contract for product-based methods, in alignment with the Uniform Law Commission. The whitepaper is written. The drafting teams form this year. This is the work for those with legal and contractual judgment.
• The software. Fellows are defining an open file format for interoperable design models, and building the tools on top of it. The format lets hundreds of designers configure solutions from catalog parts, instead of drawing each one from scratch. This is the work for those who want to build what design software cannot yet do.

A Fellow brings practitioner judgment that no academic body can supply, and leaves with authority few credentials confer. This is the deepest way in.

What the Center for Offsite Construction does

All the CfOC work proceeds in four steps, which help everyone understand where their contributions make the most sense:

1. Name the shift, so your practice can see what is coming.
2. Map what it requires, so the work is finite and shared.
3. Ship the open-source pieces through the consensus process you can join.
4. Help early adopters apply them on real projects.

Already producing

• The Models of Delivery map was authored by the Fellows.
• The first open connectivity standard is now in active development through the consensus process.
• The standard forms of agreement are scoped in a published whitepaper, with drafting teams forming this year.
• The model curriculum and the inaugural symposium already convene the field’s leading practitioners.

Two ways to begin

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Want to keep learning? The Philosophy essays on this site make the deeper case for why building is changing and what it means. →