Version Control, founded by 2 Harvard GSD students, aims to bring open-source culture to the field of design via a new collaborative platform that empowers creators to showcase, collaborate, and critique others' unfinished work with version tracking. 

In our first phase of development, we are interested in fostering a discourse about the state of unfinishedness, prompted by the dissatisfaction we often feel at the end of a semester with many discarded versions of our work and several ends left loose on the "final" version. In this phase, we ask contributors to reflect on their nearly forgotten iterations, prematurely terminated ideas, half-baked concepts, works in progress, or any variation of the incomplete.  

The second phase introduces the idea of "version control" via the incorporation of version history and tracking into the web platform. Playing off of the software engineering term, "version control," we aim to create a space in which file revisions can be "compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged."  

Ultimately, we hope to bring open-source culture to the field of design via a new collaborative platform that not only tracks version history but cultivates a community for connecting like-minded creators and acts as a catalyst for collaboration and project acceleration.

innovation manager      

SIGNE FERGUSON





organization committee      

ALEJANDRA VALDOVINOS

contributors      

DAVIDE ZHANG
EMILY MAJORS
ALEJANDRA VALDOVINOS
CLARA HE
AUSTIN MADRIGALE
GABE COLOMBO
REBECCA ROMERO
HANS STEFFES
ELSA HOOVER
JEANNELLE FERNANDEZ
BEN SCHOENEKASE
BEN CREECH
AARON SHEFFIELD
NOLAN SUMMERHILL
PIETRO MENDONCA
PAUL McCOY
ALEXANDRA SANYAL
SEBASTIAN FATHI
COLLIN STONE
ERIC ANDERSON
VERONICA ROSADO
THOMAS HUANG
JOHN SARKIS
AYMAN MORTADA
PHOEBE RHINEHART

version       

[1.x] 

platform for unfinished/unpublished design work

We are Version Control.

We are interested in fostering a discourse about the state of unfinishedness.

What happens to work that is prematurely discarded by critics after a desk crit?

What happens when you hit “designers block” and never bring a concept to fruition?

Why do we consider work “complete” because the semester is over, even as many components are left unresolved?

What does unfinished mean to you? Is it a sketch, a screenshot, a render, a drawing set, or maybe an idea only expressed through text? 

“Ideas get trapped in certain stages of representation and are forgotten and removed from discourse. By showcasing unfinished work, we can restore their ability to contribute to conversation, long after a project has moved past them. We hope this platform makes us as designers more comfortable with sharing our half-baked concepts.”

version      

[2.x]

platform with version history and tracking

Can we quantify unfinishedness?

Can we tap into the potential of unfinished versions?

Can the state of unfinishedness be tracked and recorded so that the creative and collaborative potential of each version is maximized?

“A component of software configuration management, version control, also known as revision control or source control, is the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information. Each revision is associated with a timestamp and the person making the change. Revisions can be compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged.”

[wikipedia]

version      

[3.x]

a full open-source collaborative platform

We believe in authorship that includes every collaborator, not just the master-designer or the starchitect.

We seek to embrace truly collaborative design thinking and flatten the feedback hierarchy


Version Control can become a tool for connecting like-minded creators and accelerating collaborative efforts. By encouraging designers to engage with the “unfinished” work of other designers and speculate on how to accelerate the concept, participants will adopt a collaborative spirit that erases the singular author.


Version Control seeks to instigate candid conversations about works in progress to remove the hierarchical bias that exists in design criticism. Although some critiques are more useful than others, Version Control holds the belief that everyone, regardless of “status” or constructed “rank,” can and should contribute to the conversation and that all contributions should be considered equally

“The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration, meaning ‘any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and noncontributors alike.’ A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.”

[wikipedia]