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This paper shares my transdisciplinary pedagogy developed through founding the Design for Performance and Interaction M.Arch programme, which seeks to detect and nurture emerging fields of creative production, and to stage architectural education as a holistic environment for initiating new forms of practice. Its experimental approach combines physical and virtual prototyping to critically examine future applications and socio-spatial implications of emerging technologies. The article contextualises the programme’s development in relation to the field of media art and presents both the structure of this transdisciplinary course and preliminary reflections from its first three years.
Co-authored with Vasilija Abramovic and Bas Overvelde. We argue a way of creating intelligent architecture, not through classical Artificial Intelligence (AI), but rather through Artificial Life (ALife), embracing the aesthetic emergent possibilities that can spontaneously arise from this approach. In order to make these ideas of emergent life more tangible we present this paper in four integrated parts, namely: narrative, material, hardware and computation. The Edge of Chaos installation is an explicit realisation of creating emergent systems and translating them into an architectural design. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of a custom CA for maximising aesthetic impact while minimising the live time of architectural kinetic elements.
Co-authored with Syuko Kato. The analogue and digital notational systems for documenting choreographic movement provide alternative strategies for spatial design. These strategies overlap architectural design and dance choreography to explore reciprocal exchanges regarding the body, geometry and methods of spatial notation. ‘Performance-driven design’ and ‘data-driven fabrication’ are combined, resulting in a spatial design and construction system that incorporates interactivity between human and robotic performers.
Co-authored with Vasilija Abramovic and Henri Achten. The rise in robotics is not only changing fabrication research in architecture but increasingly providing opportunities for animating the materiality of architecture, offering responsive, performative and adaptive design possibilities for the built environment. A fundamental challenge with robotics is its suitability to safe, and comfortable use in proximity to the human body. Here we present the preliminary results of the Roamniture Project, a hybrid approach to developing kinetic architecture based on a combination of rigid and soft body dynamics.
Harnessing live sensor feeds, social media, maps, and a deluge of datasets gathered by networked devices and distant servers, context-aware computing is changing our means of engagement and occupation of the city. But this appears to be just the tip of an iceberg. Internet-enabled devices are bifurcating, promising to do to our buildings what they have done to our cities. Virtually every corner of product and service design is investing itself in ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things (IoT)—call it what you will. If it lives up to its evangelists’ promises, we should expect embedded sensing and computing to saturate our homes and workplaces: billions of active devices building dense, rich layers of real-time sensor data where even our own clothes may monitor our biodata to share with the ‘cloud’. These vast datasets, latent with novel applications for consumers and industry alike, beg the question: what does a world of hyper-connective, high-definition sensing offer architectural design?
Co-authored with Elite Sher and Angelos Chronis. Adaptive architecture is expected to improve the performance of buildings and create more efficient building systems. One major research area under this scope is the adaptive behaviour of structural elements affected by load distribution. To achieve this, current studies develop structures that adapt by either following a database of pre-calculated equilibrium solutions or by using self-learning algorithms to acquire active control systems for structures. This paper examined a case study element that demonstrates adaptive behaviour in real time, based on self-learning abilities. The focus of this experiment was to gain control over a structural system as a whole (not only on a singular component) according to both objective and subjective parameters—that is, both load distribution parameters and spatial parameters that are design-related….
Designers do not require the most advanced electrical, mechanical, or computational engineering to build highly sophisticated interactive devices, art, and architecture. What is crucial is that the conceptual framework within which they are conceived has a thorough understanding of interaction. A common misconception fostered by so-called ‘human–computer interaction’ design is that giving functional devices or aesthetic works of art and architecture the ability to ‘react’ in some way to the stimuli of a ‘user’ qualifies these artefacts as ‘interactive’. Such an oversimplification trivialises the powerful and productive quality of interaction. This paper insists on interactivity as a more advanced and productive form of reactivity, and explains the process of interaction as a conversational activity between participants. The conversational model is examined through this author’s recent art installation and reflects on the powerful precedent Gordon Pask provides for understanding interaction through the experimental machines he built to embody his Conversation Theories.