| id |
acadia05_078 |
| authors |
Fox, Michael and Hu, Catherine |
| year |
2005 |
| title |
Starting From The Micro: A Pedagogical Approach to Designing Interactive Architecture |
| source |
Smart Architecture: Integration of Digital and Building Technologies [Proceedings of the 2005 Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design In Architecture / ISBN 0-9772832-0-8] Savannah (Georgia) 13-16 October 2005, pp. 78-93 |
| summary |
The paper outlines a pedagogical approach whereby a number of technology-intensive skills can be quickly learned to a level of useful practicality through a series of discrete, yet cumulative explorations with the design goal of creating intelligently responsive architectural systems. The culmination of such explorations in creating full-scale interactive architectural environments leads to a relatively unexplored area of negotiation whereby individual systems must necessarily manage environmental input to mediate a behavioural output. The emerging area of interactive architecture serves as a practical means for inventing entirely new ways of developing spaces, and the designing and building environments that address dynamic, flexible and constantly changing needs. Interactive architecture is defined here as spaces and objects that can physically re-configure themselves to meet changing needs. The central issues explored are human and environmental interaction and behaviours, embedded computational infrastructures, kinetic and mechanical systems and physical control mechanisms. Being both multidisciplinary and technology-intensive in nature, architects need to be equipped with at least a base foundational knowledge in a number of domains in order to be able to develop the skills necessary to explore, conceive, and design such systems. The teaching methods were carried out with a group of undergraduate design students who had no previous experience in mechanical engineering, electronics, programming, or kinetic design with the goal of creating a responsive kinetic system that can demonstrate physical interactive behaviours on an applicable architectural scale. We found the approach to be extremely successful in terms of psychologically demystifying unfamiliar and often daunting technologies, while simultaneously clarifying the larger architectural implications of the novel systems that had been created. The authors summarize the processes and tools that architects and designers can utilize in creating and demonstrating of such systems and the implications of adopting a more active role in directing the development of this new area of design. |
| series |
ACADIA |
| email |
mafox@foxlin.com |
| full text |
 file.pdf (3,688,626 bytes) |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
|
Chironis, Nicholas P. (1996)
 Mechanisms and Mechanical Devices Sourcebook
, Mcgraw Hill
|
|
|
|
|
Clarke, Arthur, C. (1964)
Profiles of the Future
, Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., New York, NY
|
|
|
|
|
Coen, M. (1997)
Building Brains For Rooms: Designing Distributed Software Agents
, American Association for Artificial Intelligence
|
|
|
|
|
Coen, M. (1999)
The Future Of Human-Computer Interaction or How I learned to stop worrying and love My Intelligent Room
, IEEE Intelligent Systems
|
|
|
|
|
Cuff, D. (1991)
Architecture, the story of practice
, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
|
|
|
|
|
Davidson, Cynthia (1995)
Guy Nordenson, Chuck Hoberman, Mahadev Raman: Interview: Three Engineers (Sitting around Talking) Any: Architecture New York
, v10, Anyone Corp, New York, NY
|
|
|
|
|
Fox, M. A. (1996)
Novel Affordances of Computation to the Design Process of Kinetic Structures
, Thesis M.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
|
|
|
|
| last changed |
2005/10/25 16:52 |
|
