Responsive Environment

Responsive Environment book

> Traditionally , architecture has been about hardware, about form and envlosure by means of floors, walls, and a roof. Designers such as Dunne+ Raby, whose FLIRT project used 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 notions of space. 

>  This book also focuses on the relationship between the physical and digital, an 'in-between' space. Architecture sets its own programmatic agenda, without becoming art, and becomes intelligent , cybernetic, like natural artefactss that are themselves able able to evolve and adapt to their environment, their inhabitants and other sensory stimuli. 

> Artists such as James Turrell and Krzysztof Wodiczko were imaging new functions for urban objects and spaces.

>  Technologically- mediated ecologies

> We are using the reality that contemporary environments are dense with data and pollution. Living with the consequences can be made into something positive. 

> Considering future living in urban environments with an ever-increasing electronic component. Its electro-physical topography is defined by a number of design propositions for housing, employing 'noise farmers', and interactive ecosystem of interactive objects and sensor parks, areas of fenced off land with an array of monitoring and display system responding to the electro-physical flux of the environment. We are using the reality that contemporary environments are dense with data and pollution. 

> Like Haque, Swiss architects Decosterd + Rahm have explores the unstable impact of environments on our metabolish, sensory states of being and perception of our temporality. They want to understand better our relationship between the material world, of which architecture is a part with its specific constructions, and our ambient environments, and do this by creating prototype and demostration spaces, as well as modifying control of water, light, and air. By bringing about a physiological dstortion and expression through biotechnological means, affecting temperature, humidity and light, they provoke reactions and confrontations by the body.  Most of their installations to date have not been about form, size, colour of representation, like typical architecture, but about enlarging a sense of sensory information- or making, for their own means. a conscious lack of it, in the case of HORMONIUM. 

>> In 1980's and 90's 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. Art, meanwhile, has long since embraced the idea of the event. The very nature of responsive environments, involving functioning through interfaces that facilitate interaction, is a form of of mediation between the inner world of the self and the outside world, and it presupposes some kind of event that is not wholly pre-programmed. Input from the real world received vis sensors is essential, as are output devices in the form of actuators(mechanisms that transform an electrical  input signal into motions ), display or other sensory phenomena to engage with users. THat engagement is multi-modal across all the senses.