Paragraph from Responsive Environment Book

Responsive environment

·  Traditionally, architecture has been about hardware, about form and enclosure by means of floors, walls and a roof. Designers such as Dunne+ Raby (Tony Dunne, born London, 1964 and Fiona Raby, born Singapore,1963), whose 'Flirt' used a mobile telephones and software programs to investigate the relationship between digital communication and how people experience their environments, have radically departed from the traditional architectural notion of space. p.10

·  Evolving effective responsive systems, and creating a credible interface between the work and the user, requires an awareness of many different types of users, contexts and function, as well as the phenomenonological aspects of social and environmental conditions. p.10

·  In the 1980s and '90s a good deal of cutting-edge architecture relied upon theory alone. Now it ironically risks becoming a screen-based medium in its adherence to imagery, with drawbacks as well as advantages. p.9

·  The very nature of responsive environment, involving functioning through interface that facilitate interaction, is a form of mediation between the inner world of the self and the outside world, and it presupposes some kind of events that is not wholly pre-programmed. Input from the real world received via sensors is essential, as are output device in the form of actuators (mechanisms that transform an electrical input signal into motion), display or other sensory phenomena to engage with users. The engagement is multi-modal across all the senses. The question is, what happens next?

·   If intelligent spaces were truly intelligent, we might not like them, because we want them to be intelligent but acquiescent.

·  Usman Haque feels that 'new media artists and architects do not necessarily need the precision and accuracy that scientist do in order to explore the poetries of interaction.' p.14

·  When architects want to experiment with responsive system concept, particularly on large, urban-scale project, Haque feels that the complexity, logistics or sheer costs prevent their prototype research unless a suitable investor or sponsor can be found. A solution lies with what he calls 'open-source architecture', combining reusability and low tech. Putting in this global, industrialized context, experimental design of this kind is made under conditions where productions where production possibilities are changing all the time, and desktop digital media is affordable; in the developing world, reusability and low tech are a necessity. p.15

·  The emerging of architectural and artistic skills to make responsive environments has resulted in the blurring of professional boundaries. This is allowing work to be created that explores questions about the various legacies of modernity- climate homogeneity, CCTV, and a whole range of potential communications- through bodily relationships, between humans mediated by technology that would otherwise not be tapped into. Participative works represent ongoing research into the architecture of non-visual environment, using sound, smell, and electromagnetic and thermal phenomena, and strive to go beyond what we already think we know. This work builds on the pioneering design researches of the 1970s into 'design primario', focusing on the user's direct physical perception rather than semiotics of form, and the interest in'info-eco' idea of John Thackara, Ezio Manzini and Marco Susani. p.20

·   Responsive environments- by definition spaces that interact with the people who use them, pass through them or by them - have in a very short space of time becomes ubiquitous. Not just confined to the fantasy worlds of films like 'Minority Report', 'Existing Z', or 'The Matrix', digital technology-enabled spaces, notoriously employing unprecedented levels of CCTV as well as demonstrating the seemingly infinite powers of multimedia, have invaded our lives, fundamentally affecting the identity of public, corporate, retail and cultural spaces, and connecting remote environments. The widespread impact of personal digital technology has reached the point where both Britain's queen and the president of the US own iPods.