Towards a Responsive Architecture

The author explores the realm of intersection of pervasive computing with architecture in order to propose new modes of interaction between people and their built environment.

Author: Omar Khan

One of the unique ‘affordances’ of digital media is interactivity. This word has come to stand for all manners of engagements between people and things but as Malcolm McCullough in Digital Ground reminds us "the word implies deliberation over the exchange of messages. Thus, you don’t interact with a book, you just read it…using electronic communication, you can interact with other people who are not physically present, or who take part in the interaction at some other time.” In this regard, digital media provides the possibilities for both indirect and remote communications between deliberating subjects. 'Things' or architecture would be exempt from this mode of communication since, in a likewise manner, we don’t interact with a door, we simply open it. However, computing provides a reflexive twist for it is not only the means through which we indirectly communicate with others but also a subject with which we can directly interact. Not to put undue humanity onto the machine but as far as “things” go computers are a different species. They solicit information and based on the deliberation we ask them for return responses. This quality of computing, especially as it becomes pervasive, has profound implications for architecture and urbanism. When computation becomes embedded into the very materials, we build with their nature as inanimate objects become questionable. Our environment itself becomes the interactive subject through which we can inquire about our condition, perform diagnostic and projective tasks or most significantly converse to discover more about ourselves and our surrounding.

My work explores the intersection of pervasive computing with architecture in order to propose new modes of interaction between people and their built environment. I am particularly interested in the projective and performative aspects that this confluence opens for architecture. This work follows a line of enquiry that was actively explored in the sixties and seventies by architects, artists and technologists like Cedric Price, the Archigram Group, Nicholas Negroponte, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Haacke, Nam June Paik and Gordon Pask. It is with Pask’s ideas of a mutualist environment, wherein people and computers engage in conversations in order to learn and adapt that I am most drawn. This requires the architecture to become more responsive, that is, deliberative and purposeful with its engagement with people and its environment. I will elaborate on this idea through two projects that we have recently completed. Since this work remains experimental there are few precedents and opportunities to build at a large scale. However, these prototypes should serve as viable demonstrations of the type of work that will very soon become the next step in digital architecture.

SEEN (Screen Enabling Employed Narratives) – Fruits of our Labour (2006)

SEEN, designed with media artist Osman Khan, was a commissioned work for the ZeroOne San Jose Festival that looked at the heated issue of immigration and the globalisation of labour through three communities sharing San Jose’s labour needs. These include technology workers of Silicon Valley many of whom are recent immigrants, undocumented and migrant workers from Mexico, Vietnam, etc. engaged in San Jose’s service industry and remote call center workers in India to whom customer service and tech help has been outsourced. The project sought to clarify in practice how these economically and geographically disparate groups form a community. A survey was conducted that asked everybody a single question: what is the fruit of your labour? The project collected responses to this question and during the weeklong festival displayed them back to the general public on a large infrared LED screen located on a prominent public plaza. The screen’s display technology plays a critical part in fostering more meaningful interactions between people. It uses infrared LEDs as opposed to visible spectrum LEDs. The unique technological possibility offered by infrared is that although they are invisible to the naked eye, they can be seen through all digital imaging devices, including still, video and cellular phone cameras. This is because all CCD (charge coupled device) sensors in addition to being responsive to the visible spectrum are also sensitive to infrared wavelengths. So when the screen is viewed without the aid of a mediating device its black acrylic surface simply reflects the viewer. But when viewed through an imaging device the projection’s content is revealed. SEEN provides a curious sight; a crowd of people looking at a blank screen. It engages the public through a protocol that requires little training and more importantly can be accessed through their own devices. This personalises the information and the consequent capture and sharing moves the work from the public realm into more private communication channels. SEEN also forces the public to work for this information. Freedom of access isn’t to be taken lightly and this precious collection can’t simply be displayed to become yet more visual noise. This is why the interaction is purposely hidden and slow. Finally, the public is encouraged to add information to the database through a website (www.fruitsofourlabor.org), which opens the work to the general public making it an accessible archive of shared aspirations and continued conversations. SEEN is an interactive architecture through which people proximate or remote can communicate with one another. While its form and technology is quite determinate its use and potential purpose is left open to the people that interact with it to decide.

Open Columns (2007)

Open Columns is a system of non-structural columns that reside collapsed in the ceiling of an existing space. They are made from composite urethane elastomers and can be deployed in a variety of patterns to reconfigure the space beneath them. These patterns create gradations of enclosure, either in plan through the full deployment of columns, in section through their partial unfurling or a combination of the two. The system is a mutable and kinetic architecture that can change the perception and inhabitation of the space within which it is deployed. At its most trivial it can be preprogrammed to deploy itself in prescribed configurations. In this way it can reshape a space in plan and section, which can be effective for re-proportioning a large space into smaller spaces or reorganising the circulation of people through it. A more complex programme ties the columns to real time sensing such that they have direct reaction to inhabitants’ perturbations in space. In the current setup, two columns work on a simple set of rules in response to data coming from a carbon dioxide (CO₂) sensor. In a reasonably enclosed environment, CO₂ values can radically change with the inclusion of people. The columns are programmed to come down when CO₂ levels are going up which results in people dispersing into smaller groups. If the CO₂ levels are going down the columns respond by going up, effectively inviting people into the space. If however, the CO₂ value stays static the columns cycle through a random set of configurations until the CO₂ either goes up or down. If a particular configuration causes the CO₂ to change it is put into its memory and reused the next time a static occurs. If that stored configuration does not yield the necessary response it is lowered in rank and purged on subsequent uses if it doesn’t perform. In this way the columns themselves learn and adapt to their specific context. They have no predetermined programme but a set of simple rules, which they use as a guide to come up with purposeful configurations. This results in a teleonomic environment that is in perpetual change, responding to the flux and flow of CO₂ caused by people or the environment itself.
Open Columns is a responsive architecture through which people become acutely sensitised to each other’s presence and the changing physiology of the space around them. The system senses, deliberates and performs in response to the changing chemical composition of air. This is not what we have traditionally expected from our architecture but it is an extension of its possibilities as not simply a passive but deliberative shelter. This has profound ramifications for not only the way in which we will use space but also more pragmatic concerns of energy conservation, adaptability and healthy environments.

Let me conclude by readdressing Pask’s seminal contribution to this way of thinking and this type of work. Pask, a cyberneticists and designer of interactive learning environments, wrote a critical essay “The Architectural Significance of Cybernetics” (Architectural Design, 1969) in which he proposed a cybernetic design paradigm for architecture. A key point is worth quoting, “Specification of the purpose or goal of the system (with respect to the human inhabitants). It should be emphasised that the goal may be and nearly always will be underspecified, i.e. the architect will no more know the purpose of the system than he really knows the purpose of conventional houses. His aim is to provide a set of constraints that allow for certain, presumably desirable modes of evolution.” As computing becomes ubiquitous and our building materials capable of processing and communicating information we will need to reconsider our expectations of our architecture. Perhaps our architecture will truly surprise us as its goals become underspecified. But this is easier said than done since workable strategies for regulating controls and freedoms within a design remain the central question. To this end perhaps few questions will help: How open should the architecture be? What role should people’s participation play in its design? It’s evolution? Is adaptability situated in the technology or the context within which the technology is deployed? Who or what controls the system’s objectives? Designer? Participant? Technology?