Friday, December 04. 2009900 Words About SustainabilityThe Jargon ETC team is finally publishing our comprehensive post on sustainability. We hold the issue quite dearly here at the blog, but have never gotten to a public definition. Given that sustainability is currently the hottest issue in architectural circles thanks to recent inciting articles by Amanda Baillieu and the upcoming Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, we feel like now is the opportune time to address the issue. Defining our sustainability strategy as functional would be to ignore the scope and imaginative potential of the issue. Many aspects of building, food production, transportation, and our very societies are unsustainable, and recent waves of eco-paranoia only make this more clear. Sustainability concerns every aspect of our daily lives, therefore the solution to managing resource consumption should, too. Socially, we are at once bombarded by energy-saving tips and accustomed to long, hot showers. Psychologically, we face "eco-angst." Morally, it's difficult to decide whether the perversion of nature is "wrong" or irrelevant, interesting and subject to further perversion. Politically, we are encouraged to trade in our clunkers, but suburban homeowners' associations forbid street-facing PV panels. Practically, how could we possibly know for sure whether organic produce from overseas is more sustainable than pesticide-coated local fruit? The misstep of architects would be to assume that meeting energy and spatial standards alone can cure the germ of today's ecological problems, let alone address our complex habits of consumption. I propose a temporal and geographical solution, a nomadism, part Johnny Appleseed, part wi-fi addict. Debord's notion that nomads endure a "content less freedom" is helpful to understand the proposal (The Society of the Spectacle, New York, Zone Books, 2006 edition). We can suppose sedentariness produces content (a content-full captivity), but this is obviously unsustainable today. We mustn't adopt new typologies, but radicalize our existing ones. There must be living rhythms and situations, beyond and behind our artificial gardens of Eden, that agitate normalization and make the earth's outside environment fertile and flexible again. ---------- Mr. Langevin Via Jargon, etc. Related Links:Personal comment:
"The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future." Friday, September 18. 2009Patrick Keller "Inhabiting spatial interferences" (Lift09 Asia EN)-----
Founding member Patrick Keller speaks for fabric | ch during Lift 2009 in Jeju, South Korea. Subject of the talk: Inhabiting spatial interferences.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art, Interaction design, Territory
at
14:05
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artificial reality, atmosphere, climate, computing, fabric | ch, globalization, interaction design, interferences, publications, publications-fbrc, territory, variable, weather
Tuesday, July 21. 2009City of London plans guerrilla allotments for vacant building sitesArticle from the Guardian by John Vidal (16th June 09) about temporary "grow gags" being moved guerrilla style across London to provide food for city dwellers.
----- Via Metabolicity Thursday, July 16. 2009Massive Multi-touch RFID Wall by SchematicTouchwall Demo from Joel on Vimeo.
----- Via City of Sound (via Spatial Robots) Personal comment: Euh... "Minority report"?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Interaction design, Science & technology
at
09:27
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, devices, hardware, interaction design, science & technology, software, variable
Monday, April 27. 2009First Look: Prada TransformerRem Koolhaas’s rotating Prada Transformer structure in Seoul By: Evan Ramstad- Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas turned a museum into a store for Prada in New York. And he built a store without a façade for Prada in Beverly Hills. Now, he’s created a building that moves for Prada on the grounds of a 500-year-old Korean palace. Called the Prada Transformer, the four-sided, pyramid-like building will open Thursday night with a gala hosted by designer Miuccia Prada and Mr. Koolhaas. The building is a steel frame wrapped in a polyvinyl covering known as “cocoon” that was initially developed by the U.S. Army to protect aircraft and vehicles in storage. Even so, the structure weighs 160 tons and takes four cranes to lift and rotate. The fashion house is using Transformer as a pavilion to house the company’s “Waist Down” exhibit, a series of twirling skirts that has already been shown in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, for the next month. Later, it will be used for a film festival, fashion shows and an art exhibit. For each new purpose, the Transformer will be lifted up by cranes, rotated and set down on another of its four sides. For the “Waist Down” exhibit, the building sits on a hexagon. For the film festival, a rectangle; the fashion show, a circle; and the art exhibit, a cross. “When you follow the concept form follows function, you want to express every program in the form of an entity. So we decided to make a movable object, which represents every single program in an ideal way,” says Alexander Reichert, senior architect for Koolhas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Rotterdam firm that has done numerous projects for Prada. “The concept really is that it has a life, which is expressed through its rotation,” Reichert says. Prada decided two years ago she wanted to do an attention-getting project in South Korea, a growing market for luxury brands that is often overshadowed by nearby Japan and China. The country’s own fashion industry is still relatively small and South Koreans tend to be more communal than individual in style. But Seoul’s university-age women and men are starting to display more flair. And the city’s mayor is behind a design campaign to both beautify its cluttered neighborhoods and build its reputation among the global architecture crowd. “There’s a lot of interest in this project,” says Ahn Song-eun, one of eight South Korean university students whose designs were selected to appear with Ms. Prada’s in the “Waist Down” exhibit. “Many Koreans are amazed this is happening in Seoul.” Local officials initially suggested locating the Prada pavilion in the park that was the site of the 1988 Summer Olympics, off on the southeast edge of the city. But Koolhaas and Prada wanted it in a place closer to business and shopping areas. The space between the outer and inner gates of the Gyeong-hui Palace, adjacent to the Seoul Museum of History, seemed perfect. The palace is the smallest and least-visited of three palaces near a giant boulevard in the heart of the city. But its setting, rising up a small hill on one side and looking down a street of new office buildings on the other, is by far best-suited to a visually-striking addition like the Transformer. “You have a horizontal, very grounded palace and a modern, rotating object,” Reichert says. “Visually as well as conceptually, there are two worlds of architecture next to each other. The pavilion benefits from the palace and the palace gets something from the pavilion. It’s just a beautiful background, one way or the other.” The elastic membrane around the around the structure brings a level of abstraction to the Transformer that Reichert describes as between art and architecture. “There are elements in there like the air conditioner that make the structure very sophisticated,” he says. “Even though it is sophisticated, it doesn’t appear as such. That’s why I think it’s like something in between.” Of course, on another level, the Transformer is also a giant engineering problem: a four-story object that’s supposed to be rotated every two months or so. Construction crews earlier this month held three practice sessions doing just that. Preparation takes a few hours but, by the third session, the crane operators could do the actual rotation in just 20 minutes. While that had been the idea since the project’s conception, seeing it happen still awed Reichert. “They were sitting in the crane, smoking cigarettes and playing with a building like it’s a big toy,” he says. For an eyewitness account of the Transformer’s opening night, see Part 2 of Evan’s report tomorrow. --- The Prada Transformer got its name because architect Rem Koolhaas designed it to be lifted up and placed on a new side for each of four different shows that Miuccia Prada has designed for it over the next six months. But at its debut gala Thursday night, the 66-foot-tall pavilion showed a different reason for the name – its high-tech translucent skin, which casts shadows inside during the day, sends them out at night. The changing silhouettes of party-goers inside the pavilion gave a sense of performance to those outside on the grounds of Gyeong-hui Palace, where the building will stand for the next six months. Prada’s namesake designer was joined by Patrizio Bertelli, the CEO of Prada, and Koolhaas in hosting about 1,500 people at the opening night of “Waist Down in Seoul,” the exhibition of Prada skirts that has previously visited New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Shanghai. The party drew some of South Korea’s A-list models, actors, designers and other artists. I watched as strikingly tall cover girls Song Kyung-ah and Jang Yoon-ju hung out together, taking pictures of each other and friends at the champagne bar. Jang has been called Korea’s Carla Bruni after recording her first album last year. Actor Daniel Henney, a Korean-American who has been in TV shows and movies in both countries, says it was his last night in the country before heading back to the U.S. to do more promotion for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” in which he co-stars. Henney and the movie’s star, Hugh Jackman, drew a huge crowd earlier this month at an event in a city park just a few blocks from the palace. Among the most excited to be there were eight students from fashion design programs around South Korea who were chosen to exhibit their work with Prada’s, the first time the “Waist Down” show has expanded in such a way. Ahn Song-eun, of Seoul’s Ewha University, designed a skirt based on traditional Korean ink painting with strands of shiny silk to give it a futuristic edge. “I think it fits in this modern exhibition,” she says, looking off at the hidden machinery that spun and flapped Prada’s skirts. The 500-year-old palace provided a striking counter-point to the steel and polyvinyl-wrapped pavilion and the exhibit of Prada skirts. Opening night capped two-and-a-half months of construction. Among the people celebrating the opening with Koolhaas’ architects and technical crew was a group of executives and engineers from Cocoon Holland BV, whose business cards boast of “coatings, conservation and mothballing.” About a year ago, Koolhaas’ people called Cocoon to ask whether its plastic-leathery fabric, which can be sprayed into shape and is usually used to cover parked airplanes and tanks, could be used as the skin of a building. When they said yes, the Koolhaas team pushed Cocoon to come up with a translucent version of the fabric, an innovation that now seems to be one of the most far-sighted ideas of the Prada Transformer. In the daytime, bright light from outside sends shadows of trees through the fabric and into the pavilion. At night, the opposite happens as lights inside cast silhouettes on the pavilion’s walls. Cocoon managing director Alexander van der Zee never thought his business would be associated with a project such as this. And the gala was even more removed from his imagination. “We preserve airplanes, oil rigs, big spare parts for oil tankers,” he says. “Usually when we’re done with something, people just say ‘See you next time.’” Later this year, the pyramid-like pavilion will be rotated three times – its rectangle side used for a cinema, its circle side for a fashion show and its cross side for an art gallery. In October, construction crews will take it apart and recycle the membrane and steel to be used elsewhere. All photos courtesy of Prada and Evan Ramstad.
----- Related Links:Personal comment: The coming back of the old radical idea of a "movable", "variable" architecture (dated back from the "radical architectures" period of the late 1960ies --Archigram, Superstudio, Haus Rücker Co, etc.). In this specific case, it consist of a rotating structure (4 sides) dedicated to four different programs. Noticably, it is also a "communicating architecture" as it serves for the promotion of Prada's campain and shows in Seoul. Wednesday, April 08. 2009Postopolis! Reprocessed - Part 1[Dubai comes to Los Angeles / photo: Dan Hill] I'm still trying to make sense of the whirlwind that was Postopolis! LA. The event provided the most wonderful kind of sensory overload and reveled in variety, contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Between jetlag, academic administration and a nasty fever I've been tied up since arriving back in Toronto late Sunday night but my mind still hasn't stopped racing. What follows is a personal highlight reel from the multitude of architects, interface designers, geographers, activists and vampire fiction/gentrification experts (!!) that presented during the first half of the event. I'll share my notes for the remainder of the proceedings sometime over the next several days. fabric | ch / Atmospheric Relations / 2008 Fritz Haeg of Fritz Haeg Studio gave an overview of his landscape architecture, and park and garden design. Haeg highlighted his Gardenlab project and positioned garden design as a "counterpoint to the spectacle of architecture". Over the last several years Haeg has produced a series of Edible Estates that reconsider "green" space in both public and private contexts. Thus far eight prototype gardens have been developed in cities including Salina, Kansas, Los Angeles and London (as part of the Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibit in 2007). Patrick Keller of fabric | ch delivered a fascinating presentation on their work in developing and considering micro-climates. Fabric | ch describes itself as an "architecture, interaction & research" based practice and browsing their portfolio reveals some very exciting thinking (I'm definitely going to investigate and post about one of their earlier projects in the coming weeks). Keller discussed design projects such as their "informatic facade" for Atmospheric Relations and the interface for Philippe Rahm's Météorologie d'intérieur which was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2006. A large portion of the presentation revolved around Real Rooms, a 2005 proposal that breaks down climates into discrete, modular units that play out across a larger "programmable" complex. Fabric | ch is an edgy, precise practice experimenting on archi-fundamentals (time, space) with very sophisticated considerations of the environment and information systems - exciting stuff! [See Dan Hill's detailed summary of this presentation] Next up was Yo-Ichiro Hakomori of wHY Architecture who was interviewed by David Basulto and David Assael. This meandering conversation touched on a number of projects by the firm including the Grand Rapids Arts Museum and an Art Bridge. The latter project is an infrastructural intervention that provides pedestrian movement across the L.A. River while framing views of the water below and an expansive public mural. Midway through the discussion Hakomori mentioned that he considered Louis Kahn's Salk Institute one of his favourite project and this makes sense as wHY Architecture has developed a similar restrained monumentality. The next session featured Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Collaborative, also fielding questions from Basulto and Assael. This experimental practice has executed some stunning installation work and the studio was commissioned by Ai Wei Wei to produce a residence as part of the Ordos 100 Villa project. As evidenced by projects like their 2008 Live Wire exhibit at SCI-Arc, it wasn't too surprising to learn that Oyler has collaborated with Lebbeus Woods in the past. Daivd Gissen / Reconstruction - Smoke / 2006 Mary-Ann Ray of StudioWorks kicked off the second day of talks with a presentation on Chinese urbanism entitled "Towards Ruralpolitanism". Ray is working on an illustrated lexicon that indexes the intersection of massive Chinese cities with villages as there is no North American or European point of reference for understanding how cities and villages engage and interpenetrate one another in China. This research also extended into the cultural realm as Ray discussed a variety of principles pertaining to land ownership and management that roughly translated as "stir fried land" or "illegal mess" - she's trying to catalog these phenomena and engage them critically. Since there is no "suburbia" in Urban China, how do rural and urban systems respond to industrialism and agriculture? How does the population float back and forth between these urban typologies? The next presenter was David Gissen of the excellent HTC Experiments blog. A historian and theorist at the California College of the Arts, Gissen expressed frustration with the gap between theory and and the practice of everyday life. He highlighted work such as Michael Caratzas' proposed preservation of the Cross-Bronx Expressways as being emblematic of ways that architectural historians might more directly engage the systemic nature of the city rather than just cordoning off specific buildings. Urban Ice Core - Indoor Air Archive, 2003-2008 is a "fantasy archive" in which Gissen proposed to collect and store indoor air for future analysis. Gissen closed his presentation with an utterly fascinating anecdote about his neighbour's parrot, and how it functioned as a mimetic device and imitated the ambient soundscape of the city - perhaps historians need to operate in a similar manner? Robert Miles Kemp of Variate Labs presented a stellar body of work that blurred the lines between interface design, robotics and architecture. Kemp highlighted the impending fusion of physical and informational systems and identified an interest in thinking of software as "artifact" rather than control and robots as "systems" rather than anthropomorphic entities. Kemp showed a flurry of interfaces, dashboards and a homebrew multitouch display but what struck me the most was his 2006 thesis project Meta-morphic Architecture which proposed not just parametric design, but parametric space. Kemp maintains a research blog Spatial Robots - interactive systems fans take note. Next up was an overview of Polar Intertia, the self described "journal of nomadic and popular culture" as edited by Ted Kane. Los Angeles is an idiosyncratic city full of storefront churches, mobile taco trucks, cell towers masquerading as palm trees and the like. Rather than homogenize discourse about the city (and urbanism in general) Kane parses the logic of these networks and phenomena. He presented an exciting overview of the politics of RV parked residences in Santa Monica and Venice and detailed how local legislation was creating a migrant population within these municipalities. Kane's journal looks quite exciting and I look forward to digging into it further. The final presentation on Tuesday was Stephanie Smith of Ecoshack. Smith presented Wanna Start a Commune? which, by my reading, applies a veneer of revolutionary thinking and social activism from the 1960s (she identified The Diggers as a key influence) on top of a generic technology startup. The project aspires to monetize the toolkit required for microcommunity building, but I couldn't get past Smith's marketing rhetoric and ascertain a tangible position on what community was, let alone any kind of political stance. I wasn't at all surprised to learn she studied under Rem Koolhaas but her take on the intersection of capital, space and utopia seemed more crass than nuanced. Stay tuned for my notes on the second half of Postpolis! LA. I'm also planning to provide some commentary on the organization and context of the event in relation to online media.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design
at
15:54
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, artificial reality, climate, conditioning, fabric | ch, globalization, interaction design, monitoring, publications, publications-fbrc, talks-fbrc, variable, weather
Monday, July 30. 2007Variable_environment/Via WMMNA ----- Over the past year, i've spent an impressive amount of time ogling a blog called Variable_environment. It had all the key ingredients that get my attention: pictures (many, lavish, big, most of them snapped by Milo Keller), inspiring collaborators (including architect Philippe Rahm, multimedia designer Ben Hooker, researcher and designer Rachel Wingfield and architect Christophe Guignard), mini robotic guest stars, and great content. The blog posts document a fascinating research project called Variable environment/ mobility, interaction city & crossovers. The project starting point is the fact that our living environment and the way we live have tremendously changed over the past few decades. The postmodern city made of signs and infrastructures that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have described in the '70s in their book Learnings from Las Vegas, have been progressively "enhanced" by new layers: more signs, spaces and objects, arrival of new technologies, increasing mediation of our relationship to space, intensification of transport. Variable environment/ is a research project that explores the new challenges faced by our living environment, focusing on interaction design as well as architecture and environment design. An activity report has been recently published that details the Variable_environment/ project. Selected images and texts have been entirely drawn from the blog and reorganized to allow a linear reading of the project. You can download a pdf version of it (161 pages mixing french and english.) I contacted Patrick Keller and asked him to give me the lowdown on variable_environments/. Patrick is responsible for the coordination and art direction of the project but he is also one of the founder of fabric | ch, a studio for architecture, interactions and research, and a teacher at ECAL. You wrote on the blog that "the interdisciplinary challenges and themes relating to the creation of contemporary environments should be tackled through a collaborative efforts of designers (interaction design, design product and graphic design), architects and scientists. This transversal approach hardly ever happens in Switzerland and Europe." Why do you single out Switzerland and Europe? Have you seen examples of interdisciplinarity and collaboration between design, architecture and scientists in other countries or continents? Well, I should first say that I had to single out Switzerland because the project was done in the teaching and research context of Switzerland (the texts in the blog are the same ones that I snail mailed to the experts who funded the research): the Variable_environment/ project was linking the two high-schools of ECAL (Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne ---Arts & Design---) and EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne ---Sciences, Architecture & Engineering---), which was kind of a new education situation in Switzerland. But this small country can in fact be considered as a good representative for the rest of Europe though (regarding education in design, architecture and sciences, there are quite good high-schools in Switzerland like ECAL, HGKZ, Accademia Mendrisio, ETHZ & EPFL) and especially because like in most of Europe, art & design disciplines (at the exception of Architecture) are usually taught in different schools, structures and locations (and btw with less money) than the rest of disciplines at university level like humanities, engineering, life sciences, etc. Christophe Guignard and I did a round trip two years ago for ECAL, visiting lots of schools and universities in Europe and United States to see what kind of collaborations were going on between designers and scientists. So for example there is a clear difference between the way Design is being taught in Europe and in the United States or Canada: most of the big universities in the US (Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, etc.) include Art, Design and Architecture schools on their campuses. This should allow for a common knowledge of the work of each other, a sort of base on which you can start, but it also mainly allow for potential easy collaborations on a daily basis. Of course, it is not because it is possible that people are taking advantage of it... Curiosity is still needed in this context because it is usually not part of any regular teaching cursus at the moment. Architecture is a bit different, it has now a long history of collaboration with engineers: since the modern period and the industrial revolution, it's teaching has left the art schools and integrated the Universities nearly everywhere. Mainly all good architectural schools (with some few exceptions) are now part of big universities or polytechnical schools. In this sense, what has been done with this particular discipline and its teaching in the early 20th century could serve has a reference for some areas of contemporary design, even if the architectural field should also clearly rethink and instigate its relations to other disciplines now.
Which challenges does such inter-disciplinary element face? Do you think that it would be easy for scientists, architects and designers to find a common language and work in synergy? I don't really believe in the model of the "designer-coder" who would be formed in a design or art school. Design and code, these remain two different formations where different skills are needed if you want to reach a high level, unless you are ready to study in high-schools for 10 years to reach a Master level. But on the other side, it's hard for those disciplines to work together because the rhythm of work is quite different, especially in a research context. So what could be the solution? Of course, it's now absolutely necessary that designers understand code and scripting, because design happens also at the level of code nowadays. And in a more general way, it's important that designers are regularly confronted and include/understand the works of scientists because major transformations of societies are now happening through the applied impact of scientific researches and developments, often without the (critical) input of designers. But I also think that it's absolutely necessary that each discipline keeps its edge and profile, its own goals (or lets say its own difference) so that collaboration can be rich. And that's true for any type of collaboration, might it be design and life-sciences, architecture and nanotechnology or whatever. Some collaborations are nowadays experimental (i.e. Architecture and life sciences), some are no more but were it hundred years ago (i.e. architecture and civil engineering that has built most of our contemporary landscape). So, those we need today in the transversal areas we are interested in are designers that understand code/some sciences and engineers that understand design, a common knowledge and then highly creative and critical collaborations of any type between them. For this, the way we teach and the structure of teaching in Europe should me modified because we will never reach this common knowledge while keeping the high-schools in design and sciences separated as well as their budget so different.
Could you tell us a few words about the AiRtoolkit and in particular about one of its application the "AR ready" project? The AiRtoolkit project has three facets I would say: first one is the redesign (with interaction design considerations) of a known open source software (ARtoolkit, a marker based augmented reality application), second one are the " AR ready objects" while third are some uses you could have as an end user with such a software coupled with the "AR ready" objects. Each facet of the project is not so particular in itself. It is when you think about combinations of the three that it gets exciting. When you think of a technology like the (now old) desktop computer, you usually think and focus on what you see, the screen and its content. You think less about what you don't necessarily see anymore: the way it has modified your daily working environment. As an exemple, think about the typical office table: the computer has "aspired" many objects into the screen (the famous "office" metaphor): pictures of relatives, music, mail, etc., finally even the table, that has been replaced by your own knees! Most of those objects or supports are now into the "black box", non material anymore. But what you have "gain" are hundreds of plugs and cables, a whole in the table to make way for them, a "bag" under it to hold them, headphones, remote controls, etc. So to say, a technology could be considered as the thing in itself and all its potential "collateral effects". "AR ready objects" are about these "collateral effects": the marker based Augmented Reality technology induces invisible/digital content (usually 3d) that you'll only see through the live eye of a mobile camera (would it be a cellphone camera or a hi-tech headset), on top of what this camera is capturing. But to see this invisible or "augmented" content, you'll have to put a visible marker in the physical environment. That's in fact what we thought was interesting in this technology (beside the possibility to mix the physical and the digital): to put a visible sign to say that there is something invisible, something you can't see with your eyes and that there is an all new visual and functional level that can only be reached through the vision of your camera. We were interested to examine how such a strange environment might look like visually and redesign or distort many known objects that would use this visual language for cameras. We knew at that time that AR technology without markers was under development, but we thought that keeping the markers was a more interesting approach for the physical environment.
"Techno-mediated" is a subset of "mediated" and man probably maintains an increasing mediated relation to its environment since the time he built tools, his first shelter or cultivated its first seeds. He has put the natural environment "at a distance" and still tries to format it (or literally "inform" it) according to its needs, even if he fortunately still has to deal with natural conditions due to the limited energetic resources he can get. Therefore a car, a house, a cellphone, a plane, a virtual environment, a space station, air conditioning, a computer, a tool, language, agriculture, etc., can all be considered as mediations to environment as well, or to inhabitable space, other humans, etc. I agree with you that the mediations to environment are definitely increasing and that they get now for some decades "techno-mediated", provoking lots of perceptive interferences (with time, distance, location, relation to climate, etc.). These existing interferences created by those techno-mediations bring new design areas and challenges where designers could potentially work with time, distance, instant, climate, etc. and where, as architects, we are interested to work into (at least that's the area of work which we are exploring the most now with fabric | ch, the architecture, interactions & research agency I'm working with). Is it getting too mediated already (I wouldn't make a distinction with techno-mediated)? I will tend to answer by the affirmative: any mediation has an energetic cost and we can all witness that there are energetic problems now and a clear negative impact of energy consumption on climate and natural environments, therefore on our fair existence as a group on this planet. This "climatic alarm" is probably a first strong sign telling us that we are living with too many mediations to our environment, mediations that consume too much energy (at least if we don't find new and cleaner sources of energy). We'll need to redesign our relation to environment with less (techno-)mediations at less energetic costs, or maybe rather with variable densities of mediations over time and situations.
Are you optimistic about the future of the "interactive" city? The "interactive city" is with no-doubt already here, even if it's not looking so "sci-fi" at the moment or even remains quite hidden in fact. Shopping, transportations, banks, communication, voting, state management, etc. are already interactive-like experiences, even if most of them are consumer-driven, profiling and very functional experiences. At the moment, the interactive city is getting built mostly by the private market (and therefore private interests), a bit by the state and a bit by engineers. Nearly no architects or designers are involved in the conceptualization and realization of big public projects (at least I haven't heard of it, please let me know if I'm wrong). This probably also because most designers and architects are a bit conservative and remain kind of blind to contemporary stakes or don't get enough involved into it. Anyway, I think that the "interactive city" will increase, still mostly driven by private interests at first (so no, I'm not so optimistic about its future). The "real" will certainly become more and more digitalized when all kind of computers, sensors and actuators will enter the building and urban design economy (see for example the ZigBee Alliance like consortium). Then we will get an enormous amount of data from these sensors (and to whom will belong those data, captured by which programs of which companies ---proprietary or open-- will become a big question!) The city and buildings will probably first start to "speak" (i.e. "too hot" or "too many people" here, "too much traffic" or "too poluted" there, etc.) allowing for some kind of automated tasks, which is not a very interesting approach. But then, these data and spatial computing will also allow for crazy architectural projects and an all new condition for the contemporary space we will live in. Do you plan to develop the VE project any further? So, from next October, this lab will be open and collaborations between the schools will increase. All kind of collaborations between design, architecture and sciences will be possible among many teachers and students (there will be no initial thematic limitations). Engineers from EPFL will follow courses in design (object, graphic, interaction), before, hopefully, designers start to follow some courses in computing and sciences. The Variable_environment/ research has mainly served this "big picture" project for research and education in Switzerland. But in itself, the project will surely continue within this new academic context even if many opportunities are still open at the moment and if we don't know exactly which ones will go further yet (we might go to preproduction with the (Web)Cameras, continue to work on the "AR-ready" Objects and the AiRtoolkit and/or do a European research project as a big extension to what has been started with the Rolling Microfunctions (in collaboration with the Royal College of Art / Tony Dunne). Thanks Patrick! Photo credit: Milo Keller, ECAL.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Design, Interaction design
at
12:20
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, design, design (environments), design (graphic), design (products), fabric | ch, interaction design, interferences, mobility, publications, publications-fbrc, research, robotics, variable
Thursday, February 09. 2006"Knowscape Mobile at DIS2004, Cambridge", Across the Spectrum – DIS 2004 SIGCHI Conference (Cambridge, 2004)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, catalogue, data, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, interaction design, interferences, mediated, networks, opensource, privacy, profiling, publications, publications-fbrc, research, territory, variable, web, worldbuilding, xr
Monday, February 06. 2006"Version B – Electroscape 002", Attitudes – Le journal n°9 (Genève, 2002)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art
at
09:16
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artificial reality, design (environments), exhibitions, experimentation, fabric | ch, publications, publications-fbrc, variable, vr, web
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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