Competitions in Architecture and Software Development

I had a chat with Rob Annable the other day. An excerpt:

Rob: had some good news this week, we won a competition that has one of these design codes I’ve been going on about

Me: I find the competition concept intriguing. I wonder what the effect would be on contract software development if we’d had to compete about them.

Me: Now, we do compete, but usually we don’t enter with designs ‘ only rough plans saying that “we’ll do this in six months and it’ll cost a hundred thousand pounds”

Rob: that’s how it should be. instead, the client gets 4 or 5 fully developed schemes and expects several offices to burn huge quantities of money for nothing – economically, it’s not that smart

Me: Yes, I realize that. But for software, I think it would also be good to be forced to work out designs that anyone, including your competitors, can take a look at. Public scrutinization would be good for this business.

Me: And I’d like [there to be] magazines where competition entries would be critiqued, and finished systems would be compared to the original entry, and so on.

Me: There’s so much crap software.

Rob: you’re right, but in architecture it’s gone a little too far, I can’t move a muscle until it’s been examined and picked apart by a hundred different people…it begins to feel like complete distrust

Rob: most would argue that we only have ourselves to blame though

Me: I guess it’s one of those things where short-term individual interests win over long-term collective ones.