Alastair Parvin believes in making architecture accessible to 100 percent of the population.

“As a society we’ve never needed design thinking more,” says Alastair Parvin, but most people — particularly those in cities of growing density and poverty — can’t afford it. Parvin, who was trained in architecture but chooses to make a career looking for ideas beyond its conventional framework, wants to change that.

He is one of a team behind WikiHouse, an open-source construction set that allows anyone to freely share model files for structures, which can then be downloaded, “printed” via CNC cutting machine and easily assembled. Parvin calls WikiHouse a very early experiment, the seed of what he sees as design’s great project in the 21st century: the democratization of production.

“The uncomfortable fact is that almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world’s population.”

— TED