How to Use This Website

Open Architecture is a practical tool for architects, engineers, and construction professionals who want to embed human rights into material selection, procurement, and design workflows. This website helps you trace the social and ethical impacts of certain materials and the decisions across the material lifecycle.

How to Use It in Practice

This section supports the specification for human rights by doing the following:

Specifications

This section outlines the product’s physical and performance characteristics, and it is designed to supplement manufacturers' information only. For detailed information, you will need to go directly to the manufacturer's website.

Modern Slavery Statement

Here you’ll find statements from the supplier or manufacturer, builder or current owner regarding their approach to preventing modern slavery. Use these modern slavery statements to assess the maturity and credibility of a supplier’s human rights commitments. You can cite statements when developing project tenders, supplier criteria, or project specifications.

Supply Chain Dashboard

This section summarises the supply chain history of the materials and their associated labour conditions. This provides a snapshot into the social history of the material and whether worker rights have been upheld or there are indicators of forced labour. Use this to quickly assess a material’s social value for inclusion in a project.

Labour Conditions Behind The Material

This section uses blockchain to trace the product’s journey across its lifecycle stages, from its manufacturer to construction (Fleetwood) to final delivery (Curtin). It visualises the touchpoints where labour exploitation or breach of rights may have occurred. Use this to identify low-risk stages and build human rights traceability clauses into your specification. This section provides lifecycle information on specific risk indicators related to the product. We use two indicators to assess a material's human rights:

1. SafeWorks Labour Rights in Australia
2. International Labour Organisation's indicators for forced labour.

These indicators, which can be present to varying degrees, often point to situations where workers are exploited and lack freedom in their employment. It helps you understand what kinds of exploitation are likely and where to look for red flags with the product. We have developed a traffic light system for easy specification.

• Green for no indicator and worker rights upheld
• Yellow for warning when breaches of worker rights have occurred.
• Red for indicators of forced labour.

Use these indicators as a guide to help specify, support supplier engagement, or undertake ethical risk assessments.

BIM Family

This downloadable component embeds the product into your Revit-based digital design workflow. It includes metadata that links to the social risk information on this site. Use it to enhance traceability and ethical design intent in your BIM models, enabling socially responsive coordination from early stages through documentation.