It had some of the following characteristics

1. Capacity to react/interact with human beings

2. Capacity to react/interact to the environment that it is situated within.

3. Multiple agents with capacity to react/interact between each other.

4. Demonstrate adaptive behaviour through use of coding strategies.

Thoughts of Designing Interaction for People Invitation and incentive play on motivation, and the role of the designer is to help the players envision the experience take-out. In presenting incentives, the designer needs to manage expectations and provide an interesting reward to keep people engaged. The sense of impact deals with awareness in the engagement. Players need to know they are active agents, that they are changing a narrative. The design of the interaction must comprise a response to the act of participation and this response must be understood as such. These feedback mechanisms are therefore key to sustaining the engagement. From seconds to months or years, consideration of timing addresses both the immediacy of feedback mechanisms and sustaining momentum over different periods of time. Planning contact in an interaction affects the level of engagement. A multi-sensory approach enhances the level of engagement and can make the experience more memorable. Designers provide the medium for the players to create their own stories within the grand narrative of a project. Rules affect the overall structure of the exchange and will directly impact the level of authorship given to participants. They facilitate lines of communication and help to establish clear roles for the players/participants. Authorship is the subject of a negotiation between the players. The more authorship is shared, the more it allows for many stakeholders to appropriate the piece, making it more customisable, and fostering a sense of belonging, empowerment, and responsibility.

workshop%20eth

STUDENT WORKS

Music Landscape : Jorge Orozco MAS ETH,

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nissan Ant GTR: Magda Osinska -MAS ETH, Andrea Vannini, Ciriaco Castro Diaz,Giulio Castorina -MSc AAC Bartlett Faculty of Graduate Studies

http://prezi.com/ifvu_tkfiqs_/nissan-ant-gtr/

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hideaki Takenaga MAS ETH,

Aata Muszynska  MAS ETH,Agni Kasparian Saraidari, David Andreen, Simon De Timary-MSc AAC Bartlett Faculty of Graduate Studies

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nikola Marincic  MAS ETH,

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sean Hanna comments

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jesper Thøger Christensen MAS ETH,

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aleksandar Lalovic MAS ETH,

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sean Hanna comments

Click here to view the embedded video.

“…It is also quite easy to observe the full repertoire of behavior of these machines–even if it goes beyond what we had originally planned, as it often does. But it is much more difficult to start from the outside and try to guess internal structure just from observation of behavior. It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior…A psychological consequence of this is the following: when we analyze a mechanism we tend to over estimate its complexity.”

Valentino Braitenberg, 1984, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology.

Learning from our natural environment

A strange animal like character is often the unintentional by-product of objects with the ability to sense, make decisions and act on the world. We will celebrate this as a potentially powerful aesthetic and functional opportunity, exploring the design of interactive architecture. From the simplest bacteria, crustaceans, arachnids, plants and insects, right up to fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals; from individual creatures to whole social communities, we will begin by investigating how the natural world uses its ability to sense, think and act on the world. Consider the following examples: Birds of paradise mating rituals, firefly’s synchronous light pulse dances, inter-continental whale songs, pheromone releasing ants, bioluminescent Angler fish… There’s a lot of inspiration out there to extend our understanding of how intelligence, even very simple intelligence can be both beautiful, functional and inspirational. We will explore how our understanding of behaviour can inspire new design and research opportunities and the creation of ecologies of intelligent environments that communicate and interact with each other and the world around them. Think about how nature moves, Interacts, Attracts, Repels, Feeds, Fights, Hides, Adapts, Thinks, Mates, Cares, Shows Emotion, and Plays.

Some insects demonstrate a simple type of learning that has been dubbed “learning by instinct”.It is hypothesized that honey bees for example are pre-wired to learn how to. distinguish certain classes of flowers, and to learn routes to and from a home hive and sources of nectar. Other insects, butterflies, have been shown to be able to learn to distinguish flowers, but in an information limited way [8]. If they are forced to learn about a second sort of flower, they forget what they already knew about the first, in a manner that suggests the total amount of information which they know, remains constant.

Rodney Brooks, 1987, Intelligence without representation

Our Focus

While there’s a growing body of architectural research exploring formal biomimetic logics, little research has been given to the complex and intriguing adaptive behaviours the natural environment displays. Greater understanding could provide critical knowledge to the design of ecologically responsive and sustainable systems within the built environment as well as suggest new forms of engaging and personalised human-architecture interaction. We will explore these ideas though a Cybernetic framework and look at the sciences that came out of Cybernetics including Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Computer Vision. In parallel we will look at the leading architects, artists and designers who are engaging with these technologies forming new hybrid art & science practices.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Bartlett Interactive Architecture Workshop

Our research is largely hands on, we build prototypes and mockups to test ideas and their technical and design implications. We also research the theoretical basis of interactive and time based architecture through critical scholarship. Our work occurs in two different areas:

We are interested in the way that the technology and craft of architecture can interact with the external environment. This has lead to applied research into passive and assisted passive ventilation systems [example, Gage, Top Down Ventilation and Cooling in Urban Areas], natural light and its intersection with artificial light [example: Gage, Light Pipe terminal], heating and thermal insulation and diurnal cooling [example: Gage, Leung, Deployable External Insulation]. Direct benefits in energy saving can be demonstrated.

A more intangible benefit is that through this kind of work it is possible to envisage environments where the natural world is not excluded from the built environment; where boundaries between the two worlds are ambiguous. An architecture that works in this way has the potential of offering a sense of delight to the occupants as it continuously changes in response to external stimuli. This has lead to the design of installation pieces that respond and adapt to external stimulae [example: Ayres, Leung, Sheil, Kielder Residency]

The other area of research comes from an interest into the time-based aspects of architecture, which relate to human occupation and building use and takes forward an interests in cybernetics and building brief writing.

We look at Place and Space using performance analogies, especially those developed by Bateson and Goffman. This in turn leads to an interest into ways that places and spaces might ‘put on’ performances to entertain and enlighten their occupants. Some of the reasons for these investigations are the obvious possibilities that arise from increasingly cheap sensing, computation and activation devices that can be placed in the built environment [example: Glynn Performative Ecologies].

The Bartlett Interactive Architecture Workshop has been at the center of Interactive Architecture Research for the past 15 years with both commercial [example: Jason Bruges] and research [example: Usman Haque] alumnae of international stature. Facilities available include the Bartlett Architecture Main Workshop and Cadcam Facility.