Over the ensuing decades, the movement expanded globally, encompassing various initiatives ranging from organizational efforts to community design centers sponsored by academic institutions.
(Schaban-Maurer, 2013: 11)[5] Since its inception, the citizen-centered design movement has expanded its influence beyond architecture, engaging practitioners and academics from various fields in interdisciplinary collaborations, publications, conferences, and international exhibitions.
They aim to engage and harness the knowledge of ordinary citizens in the design, development, and implementation of urban policies and projects that directly impact the communities where we all live and work.
New economic models, exemplified by incremental microdonations and crowd-funding strategies like Sponsume and Kickstarter, offer new modes of project initiation and development, destabilising the traditionally feudal hierarchy of client/architect/occupant.
With crowd-funded models, forms of engagement are built into the process, enabling a kind of emergent urbanism, in which use of space is optimised on terms set by its users.
The establishment of common, open, modular standards (such as the grid proposed by the OpenStructures project[6] addresses the problem of hardware compatibility and the interface between components, allowing collaborative efforts across networks in which everyone designs for everyone.
Rapid prototyping and other 3D printing technologies enable instant production of physical artefacts, both representational and functional, even at an architectural scale, to an ever-wider audience.
Embedded sensing and computing increasingly mesh all materials within the larger "Internet of things", evolving ever closer towards Bruce Sterling's vision of a world of Spimes.
Crucial system feedback is supplied by a wide range of users and occupants, often either by miniature electronic devices or mobile phones – crowdsourcing (like crowd-funding) large volumes of small data feeds to provide accurate and expansive real-time information.
If tomorrow's buildings and cities will be like "computers to live in" (see also: smart city) open-source architecture provides an open, collaborative framework for writing their operating software in real-world conditions reflecting the principles of the citizen-centered architecture movement, as well as, the mindful policy engagement field, namely, unique designs for unique contexts, reflecting individual users' values through value rational planning and engagement-based praxis.