(Above) AAC Student Marilena Skavara 2009

Examples of Work from the Digital Studio Module 2008 (Marionette Project)

AAC Student Agata Guzik

AAC Student Vlad Tenu

Examples of Work from the Digital Ecology Module 2009

AAC Student Kensuke Hotta Physical Game of Life 2009

Student Ritchie Jackson 2009

AAC Student Agata Guzik 2009

Example of Research & Design from the MSc AAC Thesis 2009

Marilena Skavara 2009.

MA Textile Futures

MATF Student Berit Greinke

The 21st century marks the beginning of a new textile revolution , and we believe it is smart, invisible, sustainable, ethical and poetic. Smart? The emergence of intelligent technologies such as conductive textiles, sensory fabrics, wearable computing, biomaterials, nanotechnology demand greater collaboration between science and design to transform textile design processes and products. Invisible? New fibers and finishings create textiles with invisible built-innovative functionality such as vitamin-enhanced fabrics, anti-stress fibre, solar-reactive yarns and composite materials. Sustainable? Increasing demands to consider sustainability necessitate more responsible approaches to textile design. Issues of production, waste and post-consumption drastically change potential design processes and outputs.Ethical? Demographics, globalisation, changing consumption patterns that impact on markets can be challenged by design. Poetic? Human need for inspiring aesthetics and comforting material persists. The aesthetic and emotional qualities of cloth and craft become even more relevant in a high-tech, high speed consumer culture.

MATF Student Chloe Albert winner of Apple Award for Digital Innovation

MA Industrial Design

MAID Student Bruno Taylor (2008)

The intention of the course is to create an environment of creative and critical experimentation and exploration in which students are encouraged to challenge not only the objects which are the result of the process of design, but the matrix of roles, responsibilities and relationships within which the designer might work.

MAID Student Sara Bellini 2007

“We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals, in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put there ourselves.”

“It is also quite easy to observe the full repertoire of behavior of these machines–even if it goes beyond what we had originally planned, as it often does. But it is much more difficult to start from the outside and try to guess internal structure just from observation of behavior. It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior… A psychological consequence of this is the following: when we analyze a mechanism we tend to over estimate its complexity.”

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology p2 & p20, Valentino Braitenberg.

A strange animal like character is often the unintentional by-product of objects with the ability to sense, make decisions and act on the world. The Bio-Intelligence workshop celebrated this as a potentially powerful aesthetic and functional opportunity, exploring the design of behaviour in ‘intelligent’ textiles.

From the simplest bacteria, crustaceans, arachnids, plants and insects, right up to fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals; from individual creatures to whole social communities, we investigated how nature uses its ability to sense, think and act on the world. With this understanding we explored how the mimicry of bio-behaviour can inspire new design opportunities and the creation of ecologies of intelligent textiles communicating and interacting with each other and the world around them.

A seven day intensive workshop bringing together Bartlett MArch design and MSc Architectural research students to build seven installations based on the seven dwarfs.

Following 2 days of rapid introduction to electricity, electronics, and programming students in groups of 3 experiment with a range of sensors and actuators to build objects and installations exhibiting particular behaviors triggered by human interaction.

Technologies examined included RFID, computer vision, digital and analog sensing, stepper and servo motor control, and rapid prototyping.

All of the final objects and installations were presented in an small exhibition in the Bartlett Lobby to test the public engagement with the work.

In June 2009 I organised and supported a  free public OpenFrameworks Workshop lead by Mehmet Akten, Marek Bereza and Joel Gethin Lewis which was hosted by University College London’s MSc Adaptive Architecture & Computation Programme which I teach on. This is intended to be the starting point for a number of workshops using OpenFrameworks with anand was run as an introductory session suitable for people with no “oF” experience but some basic understanding of scripting in Processing, Flash, etc.