C00 Conclusion

The aim of the investigation was to inform physical spaces with new digital media and interaction technology, blurring this threshold between the physical and the virtual, between the local and the global.

C01 Architecture as media

Many new social conditions make these issues relevant to work with for architects. Since our environments are more and more defined by technology, or memories become mediated (viewing the world through representations) these media should be included within the tools an architect works with. How material qualities can be extended through media and how this can mediate local spaces to distant spaces. The social habits for this are already existing with the use of mobile phones, Internet, etc.

For being new, one can not really know its qualities without testing, again, this has been the reason for 1 to 1 scale prototyping.

The tests have showed that these qualities can create a strong personal or communal experience, later stages speculate on larger scenarios, even suggesting possibilities for building or city scale applications.

C02 Systems thinking – Interactivity

There is a fascination in looking at buildings as complex systems, with dynamic nature. How the space becomes aware of us being there through inputs, outputs, sensors. Perhaps this resembles nature itself.

Interactivity on its own generates non-uniform output, breeds diversity, variety because of different people have different uses – example of the backpack, no two persons have danced the same way. This also relates to the creativity of use, user of architecture is invited to share the authorship.

The different prototypes function as parts of a rhizomatic system, they inform each other, the qualities get refined over time, but looking back from each point gives new inputs from the older parts. The whole project could be seen as an interaction device on its own, or more like a genetic process where I the designer am the mediator, trying to relate to it as being the hive mind.

C03 Various platforms

Part of the work has been produced on external platforms, besides the main line being developed at A+URL. There where research organizations like the Interactive Institute, art venues like the Fisher Gallery’s Responsive Environments exhibition, commercial tests at Allende Arquitectos in Madrid, and so on. It was very interesting to see how the different contexts can take on different qualities of this research, how things are tested between different professionals.

Also, the author is teaching as a student teacher, and this was taken as an opportunity to introduce some of the concepts in some courses, and getting input from how others related to them.

As for the idea of a mastermind for the design, and the question of authorship, with re-appropriating existing products, using computers and software designed by others, this becomes scattered anyhow. Open source.

C04 Playfully abusing technology

Re-appropriating mass produced tools from their original use. Also interesting that this is not creating new things, it’s rather altering existing ones. Is overconsumption related to overproduction?
Should I create new things or should I alter existing ones?

D01 Glossary, Bibliography

- The mediated city is a new phenomenon involving the emergence of new technologies of connectivity, network, communication and information technology. Additionally while these factors are technological and in many ways not physical, they are modifying economic, social, political aspects as much as they are transforming the physical nature of cities and their relationships across scales whether on the level of the virtual city or on the level of the massive market of mobile phones in third world countries that are changing the role of infrastructure, or on the level of ‘network server farms’ that invisibly place demands on the city and its resources. These factors are presently debated within sociologists, cultural studies writers and more academic theorists, but are not actively dealt with by architects. We will ask how architects can work with both cities; the physical and the mediated.

Peter Hasdell + Ana Betancour, A+Url course handout, 2001 q4

- Imagination, Reality, Automata,
concepts used from Vilém Flusser Glossary
Edited by Andreas Müller-Pohle and Bernd Neubauer
From www.equivalence.com

- Systems thinking, non-linearity,
concepts used from Philosophy of Complexity, Chris Lucas at:
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/philos.htm

- Use and abuse of the tools, term borrowed from
Fredrik Jönsson artist/webdesigner

- Is overconsumption related to overproduction(of the artist/designer)? from a lecture by David Cross, Artist, UK

- Creativity of use
from a lecture by Jonathan Hill discussing
The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes

- Emergence, Memory concepts, Hive mind
Kevin Kelly: Out of control