What are the social, economic and political consequences of a shift towards full automation for the production of architecture – and, speci‐ fically, housing? It is a question that an experimental studio within the Design Computation Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London has been exploring for several years. The lab's co‐director Mollie Claypool discusses the philosophical, theoretical and design background against which their investigations have been carried out, and presents some of the housing fabrication projects that they have produced.

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Commoning embodies the product of social contracts and behaviors between groups of individuals. In the case of social housing and the establishment of physical domains for life, commoning is an intersection of these contracts and the restrictions and policies that prohibit and allow them to occur within municipalities. Via a platform-based project entitled Public Parts (2020), this article will also present positions on the reification of the common through a set of design methodologies and implementations of automation. This platform seeks to subvert typical platform models to decrease ownership, increase access, and produce a new form of communal autonomous life amongst individuals that constitute the rapidly expanding freelance, work from home, and gig economies. Furthermore, this text investigates the consequences of merging domestic space with artificial intelligence by implementing machine learning to reconfigure spaces and program. The problems that arise from the deployment of machine learning algorithms involve issues of collection, usage, and ownership of data. Through the physical design of space, and a central AI which manages the platform and the automated management of space, the core objective of Public Parts is to reify the common through architecture and collectively owned data.

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