Stewardship and construction of the built environment require knowledge and skill. While the CLT can play a role in this by offering job training, open source design can also be an essential tool for sharing knowledge. Outside Development imagines a role for the architect that differs from a traditional architect-client contract, where design work is dedicated to providing the community with “design kits” to be deployed in the CLT’s construction and maintenance projects. These kits could focus on a range of projects, from garden maintenance (how to build a planter, or a hydroponic system) to a modular system for building ADUs sharing logics of assembly that are easily replicable and made available to all members of the CLT. As familiarity with them spreads, they become ‘custom standards’ used within the worker cooperatives. Here, the benefits of efficiency and cost reduction that come with standardization would go to the community, as these custom standards would lower the threshold of cost and make the training workshops easier to organize. By creating custom standards for local conditions and for community use, this project upends the binary between cheap industrially produced goods and expensive local production, helping to transition low income communities away from full dependence on industrial supply chains.
Eventually, as community members become more and more knowledgeable in the planting and construction techniques, the standards would fall out of use, having served simply as a starting point for the building of vernacular knowledge after centuries of its erasure under global industrialization.