Softspace: Contemporary Interactive Environments

In 2007, Tate organised a talk called Softspace based around the AD publication '4d Space: Interactive Architecture' Whilst some of the projects are quite dated, I would recommend watching the talk by Usman Haque. He presents an interesting theory about what interactive architecture is, providing a critique on projects that go 'beep in the night'! In his argument, he says that interactive architecture is like a conversation between two people where the outcome of both people is changed by each other and is unpredictable. The crucial thing in his argument is that for architecture to be truly interactive it is impossible to predict how the thing will react, meaning that the user has control on the input but also an effect on how the output is calculated.

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/38445461001#media:/media/38445461001/24906131001&context:/channel/most-popular

Media Facades and the Library of the Future

The HMNYC Project- An Interactive Window Display from Emily Ryan on Vimeo.

This project is one of many similar projects that incorporate a person texting or calling into a window display and then you appear there. A more recent example of this has been the Variate Labs Office façade which allows them to do similar things. An interesting critique of the media façade was presented by Usman Haque and he commented that these were merely reacting to the public, not interacting. He then goes on to say that for something to be truly interactive it needs to be more like a conversation where the user has an effect on how the output is calculated as well as having an effect on the input. Therefore, the crucial thing is that it is impossible to tell how the thing reacts.

Interactive Facade from Variate Labs on Vimeo.

What this made me think about was a discussion that our group had in a meeting with Jamie Allen, Assistant Director of Culture Lab, Newcastle, UK and how I can relate his project ‘On Site’ to some of my project thinking and this got me asking a few questions:

1. How can this concept of spreading knowledge throughout the city that Jamie presented be integrated into the libraries of the future?

2. Is the library of the future as much about one building as it is about something that is weaved into the fabric of the city through shop fronts? Something that can be readily accessible by all?

To answer the latter question, a system that could integrate this type of thing is the media façade and taking on what Haque said, how can I make this a more interactive system than something that is just reacting?

What happens to shop windows when not in use?

How will the notion of the space around the shop windows change? Can they serve as some kind of public function?

As a final thought, this gave me an idea. Is the library instead the creation of a series of public spaces/plazas scattered across the city, that form the points of social gathering?

It's Ours, Not Yours!

Over Easter I have been paying more attention to the high-streets and not just the shops, knowing it is the realm where I want my project to grow. Walking around it feels like the majority of the high street is controlled by something bigger than us. Although now and then there is a splash of public intervention, whether that be graffiti or guerrilla knitting, reassuring me 'they' are not completely in control!

I came across a lovely example of 'claiming back the streets' and creating an unseen community in the book Sentient Cities.

Yellow Arrow is a global public art project in New York. Yellow arrow stickers can be obtained from their website and placed anywhere in the public realm. When encountering a sticker on the street, you can send the unique code printed on it as a text message to a particular phone number. Moments later a text message will be received with a message left by the sticker's original owner.

The yellow arrow indicates that that particular spot means something to someone and there is a story to be told about this place. The Yellow stickers have grown, being placed in 467 cities and 35 countries since first appearing on the streets of Manhattan in 2004.

The times I don't know what I'm doing...

I've been thinking a lot about how bad I am at making, keeping, and referring back to notes. I wonder whether there's not some way of Life Blogging that could remind me of things at an opportune moment? Or could I create something that communicates a state of mind?

There are plenty of people already wiling to tell the world they're stressed, its what Facebook's for, but some have gone a little further in describing the architectural experience...

Book Complexities

Book Complexities is a student project about how a bookshelf can show something about your identity as a person. My interest in this has reference to my previous blog post Visible Trails of Memories Left Behind and is a great set of images that depict different trails that can be left behind on books.

Visible Trails of Memories Left Behind

An observation that I have made when researching interactive architecture is that a trend seems to be about interactions that are associated with leaving something behind once a surface has been touched or approached. Examples of this have been when a person puts a cup on a table, the colour changes and when the cup is removed the altered surface colour gradually decays back to the original colour of the table.

A more visual example of this is the Venetian Mirror by Fabrica (depicted above) that was exhibited at the Decode exhibition 2010, V&A London. In the later project, a person stood in front of the mirror and a faint image of the gradually built up and then decayed over time once they left the sceen. As new people walked in front of the mirror, their self-image gradually materialises but the last persons images is still faintly visible.

What I find interesting about these two projects is the idea of a visible trace to remind people that someone has been there before. I feel this avenue has many possibilities to develop in interactive architecture and is something that I would like to potentially develop further.

One idea that got me thinking is how this could be applied to the Patina project. What if when we touch a book, our trace is left behind for others to follow our research trail. Furthermore, we could also see other people’s research trails based on the current book we were holding. For example, I could pick up a book by say Peter Zumthor and then after reading this, research trails of people who also picked up the Peter Zumthor book become visible. I may get a trail that then leads me along a path about atmospheres or alternatively, the path could take me outside of the architectural discourse and lead me on a path un-thought of before.

A few questions that could be asked from this are:

1. How would this make ourselves perceive Libraries and the notion of research?

2. Can these trails leave us around a city or place, not just one building?

3. How can this information be visualised and two who? Could you track the research paths of colleagues like a book version of Google Latitude or is it something more private and anonymous?

4. How do we leave the trail, is it something physical or is it digital? What are the meanings of these two types of traces?

5. Would this replace the book and be a complete digital realm or is it a digital/analogue hybrid?

Projection Atmospheres

Living Room from Mr.Beam on Vimeo.

Living Room is a project by Mr-Beam.

What I find interesting in this project is how projectors were uniquely used to instantly alter the atmosphere of the space by projecting images onto a white walls, floors and furniture.

Author wall

Author Wall from Electroland on Vimeo.

Author wall is an installation by Elctroland where a collection of authors are projected onto a wall and controlled by a touch screen. When you select an author on the touchscreen, the authors biography and famous quotation is projected onto the wall. I personally feel that this is a poor piece of interactive architecture and I find the information presented both meaningless and useless. A user is given a random selection of authors to choose from which may or may not bear any relevance to the user and the information provided is nothing interesting or useful. However, if we put the poor content to one side, this projects underlining concept has some credit and is something that could be used as a base to work on. An application that sprang to mind was the way we use libraries and the Patina project. What if the list of authors that we see collected on a screen were related to us. This could be achieved by scanning the ebooks on our tablet and profiling us to make a best match judgment of adjacencies of authors. As our search through new relevant authors continued, the matches to new authors would further develop. These links between other relevant authors could continue further into the software too. As well as linking with new authors, the software also has the potential of linking new authors with your existing e book collection.

Data Landscapes

I'd like to share this data-rich piece of research on how a child learns language. The researcher explains how he tracked the way his son learns words from activities within his surrounding social environment by using video analytics tracking the movements of his family members, leaving visual 'interaction traces'.

My interest was in the Data Visualisation and Analysis bits; the minutes 8-11 show the analytical approach by moving time to the vertical axis, and reading the structures of the 'social hotspots' and then tagging the activities that accompanied certain words to figure out the relationships between language learning and social activities. Intensively rich data is visualised in a form of data landscapes that reveal interesting relations.

The video is on TED:

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-03-15&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Changing Faces.

I have recently been thinking about how a building could possibly change its face when I came across this piece. I think it is just awesome so I decided to share it!

PERSPECTIVE LYRIQUE from 1024 on Vimeo.

The piece is by 1024 Architecture. They focus on the interaction between body, space, sound, visual, low-tech and hi-tech, art and architecture. This piece was projected on the side of an old theatre in Lyon, France, and the deformations were all controlled by the audience, using an audio analysis algorithm.