Workshops 2009

Light Ecologies

TU Delft: Hyperbody, Netherlands

3 Day Workshop held at for undergraduate students introducing principles of Cellular Automata the creation of complex behaviour coming from simple rules. This was followed by the makig of simple reactive circuits which were then combined to build an ecology of agents communicating through light.

Distant Earth Project

Our Lady Primary School, Fenton, Stoke-On-Trent, UK

A Five month workshop by Ruairi Glynn & Christian Kerrigan with the support of Creative Partnerships at Our Lady Primary School, Fenton, Stoke-On-Trent, UK. The principle aim of the workshop was to explore and expand the ‘young architects’ understanding of space. Using a range of traditional design techniques such as drawing, model making and story boarding alongside new technologies and techniques  including pressure sensitive video recording environments, telematic marionette performances and tangible interfaces, a class of 16 nine year old children explored space from the universe in scale, to the nano, from the 3Dimenional to the Nth Dimensional. At each stage they feedback into the workshops process leaving messages in the ‘Diary Room’ and through ‘Show and Tell’ sessions. Glynn & Kerrigan’s approach was to facilitate students own spatial exploration without predetermining the expected outcomes of the iterative fortnightly sessions. The final result of these collaborative design processes was a ‘floating city’ designed and built in an intensive final 3 day event.

Bio-Intelligence

Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of Arts London

“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.

Open_Sailing

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Link to all details
Photos from Workshop

2 Day public workshop on open source design strategies led by with Cesar Harada, Ruairi Glynn, Ollie Palmer, Carla Colet Castano. Themes included dance, sensible linear – branched and complex networks, mapping, tagging, geostrategy, group and decision making, adhocracy, object oriented politics, open architecture, town-planning, renewable energies, sustainable design, hedonism, fun, architecture of play.

Seven Seven Seven

Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

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.

OpenFrameworks

Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

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.