I attended a workshop last week in London on “Inhabiting Adaptive Architecture”. The workshop was part of a Conference on Adaptive Architecture, which I wasn’t able to attend. These are a few thoughts based on the workshop.
What is Adaptive Architecture?
I certainly didn’t know before attending the workshop and I’m not necessarily any clearer now. One of the symptoms of the academic condition is to constantly search for definitions of terms and to constantly ‘problematize’ language use. A couple of the people I talked to (and who had attended the whole conference) were still seeking a definition. My sense was that Adaptive Architecture is a useful catch-all term to get a bunch of interesting people in one place. There is a sense to which Adaptive Architecture is a topic formed around computational systems but the group in the workshop seemed to come from a wider range of backgrounds including studies of, for example, adaptive functionality and flexible spaces. In terms of computation there seemed to be people interested in Interaction Design or perhaps Interactive Architecture (although I suspect that this topic title has been replaced by Adaptive Architecture because IA leads to the obvious question – isn’t all architecture interactive?). This seems like a good starting point:
http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/~hms/AdaptiveArchitecture.html
It’s also worth noting that the conference itself was structured into a four subthemes covering a wide range of topics including, transformable structures, dynamic facades, bio inspired materials and intelligent systems. I’d have liked to see the whole thing.
Smart? Intelligent? Adaptive?
Each member of the workshop was asked to give a short 2 min presentation. I chose to pose the question – How adaptive are ‘intelligent environments’? My concern is that in installations such as Culture Labs Ambient Kitchen, in order for activity to be understood, the users interaction in the kitchen must be controlled. Activities must take place in predictable locations and predictable ways. In the context of the Ambient Kitchen this ‘programming’ of space manifests itself by engendering certain ritual behaviors in the user. To recognize that someone is making a cup of tea, for example, it helps if they take the teabags out of the cupboard put them on the surface with the RFID tag reader embedded get the mug out of the cupboard and put the kettle on. The more systematic these actions are the better the kitchen is able to recognize the users intension. This is turns into an advantage in the ambient kitchen because its intended users are people with early stage dementia who deliberately practice ritual behaviors which reinforce everyday actions and help with someone who has lapses of memory. But is this adaptive – surely the opposite is true. Unfortunately in a half day workshop we didn’t get to this but I’ll throw the question out to the research group…discuss.
A Note on Methods
Finally I wanted to raise a question about methods for generating ideas in academic contexts. There is a question over how to initiate and structure conversation and ideas generation in workshops and the method adopted by the organizers of this one consisted of a number of short round table discussions on topics picked by the organizers using personas (descriptions of people and situations we may design for, i.e. John and Margret – a couple in there late 70s in sheltered accommodation….). Confronted by this I immediately did the annoying thing of challenging the methodology. This was, in hindsight, a fairly unhelpful thing to do. Given the same event to organize I would probably use the same technique and the discussion was interesting (in parts) but I wanted to get a bit polemical here:
I’ve been attending workshops on various topics for the past few years and over the next 3 months I will be attending 3 more. At fist I joined in with enthusiasm but I’m now overcome with queasiness the moment I walk in to a workshop room and see a stack of post-it notes and a flipchart. Brainstorming has migrated from management schools and creative departments of design consultancies to become a weapon of choice in research environments as a way of generating and capturing ideas and in some cases developing funded research. Here are my problems:
1. Many academics are really bad at collaborative discussion of this sort. I’ve now been stuck, on a number of occasions, with Professor types who sit with distain quietly as everyone around the table fumbles around with ideas and, at the end of the session, tells everyone what they should have been thinking. Sometimes they say something which, below the layer of arrogance, is insightful and relevant. However, their comments are rarely recorded because the groups is frankly rather offended by being told what to think.
2. To work properly brainstorming needs to be structured with particular questions and tasks. However, I often have a feeling that just as interesting conversation breaks out a pragmatist in the group halts it by saying something like: “Yes but I think we should get on with the SWOT Analysis now” or “Can we sum that up in three words?”. The resulting post-it covered spider diagram (or theme matrix…etc) is often a pale imitation of the conversation.
3. One characteristic that separates the development of academic ideas from, for example, the creative design process is that academic ideas are often slowly developed. They develop over time and with the benefit of extensive literature reviews and depth of knowledge. Academia is also critical, based on the testing of ideas through skeptical enquiry. Brainstorming in a limited time needs to be a positive experience – free of skepticism and open to ideas no matter how outlandish. However, although I’ve now been in plenty of brainstorms which have thrown up novel ideas, I’ve yet to come across any results which throw up really exiting and original research proposals and too many where the proposals and ideas have been dubiously founded.
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