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© moshe safdie - habitat 67
As much as I avoid reblogging, this picture goes very well with my last large post. It’s hard not to imagine a structure like this teeming with creatures, an ant hill on a much larger scale.
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I couldn’t help but laugh when I found this going through old AI files. It is truly unfortunate that I did (almost) all of the interaction design courses in my program when I was only in third year or there would probably be a lot more of these from year four to six.
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Photo of a skull by American photographer Irving Penn, triangulated using DMesh by Dofl Yun.
I was thinking about architecture for bats in the most non-vampiric way. Of what they would need in a building, and how we could create buildings that worked for them instead of just pigeons. It is sad that our statues, our buildings, and our general built environment has been shaped through thousands of years of practice and yet we so frequently ignore the potential for ecosystems in architecture. We create ‘living buildings’ that sit within artificial ecosystems of energy sharing and recycling and yet the primary living aspect of these buildings is flora and not fauna. Perhaps if we looked at a useful creature like the bee or the bat and could drop our preconceptions of them as dangerous creatures that in the worst case left you bitten with disease (either fictional or otherwise) or, in a slightly better scenario, with a mere sting while admiring the flowers, we could move away from the overused metaphor of the hive or honeycomb and towards a realistic integration of animal environments within our own. While the cube is not the most efficient shape for maximization of interior volume (see Fuller’s work with the Dymaxion House for a look at other forms) it is nonetheless the form we have most enthusiastically adopted. A city like Montreal presents interesting examples of two very different building types that show the range of possibilities for ‘habitats’. We have Fuller’s Biosphere and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67. While each are born of very different geometries they each explore the notion of a built habitat for either humans or animals. We are arguably the dominant species of life on this planet (aside from perhaps some form of bacteria that is ubiquitous in a way we can never be) but if we continue to think of ourselves as such we reinforce the idea of dominance itself, a concept that does not sit well with successful ecosystems.
In nearly every vision of the future of earth from Atwood to Asimov we find a land devoid of plant and animal life. These barren landscapes are surprisingly full of technological ecosystems. The buzzing of bees and transmission of pollen, essential to the reproduction of countless fruit and flower species, has been replaced by the transmission of bits and bytes. These pieces of digital pollen may propagate knowledge but do so in exchange for the propagation of equally essential nutrients. In many other visions of the future we often find a regression of knowledge or civilization in exchange for the reclamation of the earth by nature. Thinking of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the humans of the future are almost Neolithic in their capacity for expression. While they live in a land that is rich with natural life they are incredibly simple and preyed upon by the sinister underground race known as the Morlock. Interestingly enough, we yet again see the dominant life form as removed from nature, reduced to living in dark environments and relying on brute strength and aggression to rule instead of co-habitate. The Morlocks are an evolution of the working class of man and run the machines that make the paradise of the surface possible while living a drastically different reality for themselves. The same can be said of the characters in Children of Men, living in a dirty and infertile future on what could be the beginning of extinction. One scene in the film adaptation shows a child sitting at a table and entirely ignoring the conversation between the two adults in the room, entirely absorbed in his interactions with some novel device. I like to think that improved interface design and better tangible interaction is inevitable but hope that a similar detachment from society and nature is not as well. This field of tangible interaction design or tangible user interface is most interestingly known as natural user interface. With body control systems like the Kinect or countless Arduino hacker projects we have the power to design interfaces that use natural movement and gesture as input. For any interface there is a codified set of input to operate it, a language of interaction between human and computer. I often wonder whether the language we have adopted through devices like smart phones and tablets will survive much longer or if it will sink into obscurity, the Latin of the ubiquitous computing world. In thinking of language for natural user interaction I have wondered whether using a pre-existing and tested language would be more suitable. If we were to interact with systems using something like American Sign Language (ASL) then we would not only be empowering thousands of deaf individuals as natural masters of these systems but also reducing many of the barriers that the deaf face in communicating with the general public. If the languages we adopted for natural user interaction not only increased our ability to interact with computer systems but with other individuals then we could perhaps reverse the tendency for new technology to isolate us from social context. A language like ASL has other benefits that could lead to new advances in machine learning. ASL often allows the truncation of words or concepts into shorter gestures do as to avoid the rather lengthy process of spelling every word. Autocorrect or auto-complete could move beyond a sometimes frustrating function on your phone and into a useful application for shortening gestures. Autocorrect poetry, where writers let words emerge through a purposeful neglect of proper spelling, could move into the realm of full body interaction. Dancers in front of a screen could now dance poetry into existence, letting the formation of words with their body guide their movement and engaging in a co-authoring of poetry between themselves and the computer.
I heard an anecdote the other day regarding the ability of some architects to identify which program was used to model a building based on a quick look at the building itself. The constraints of 3D modeling software often leads us to alter our design decisions almost as much as the site itself. Look at Frank Gehry and the creation of Digital Project to allow him to represent buildings that are more sculptural than architectural. His buildings could not be created within the constraints of existing software so he designed his own to abolish these constraints. I believe that anything created digitally has some aspect of co-authoring as its creation is directly mediated by the rules of the software it is created in. What if our software was designed to co-author ecosystems? The challenge of designing an ecosystem often lies in the immense complexity of that system, complexity that is hard to handle when paired with the creation of architecture with a specific purpose. Architecture firms like MVRDV conduct research into software that optimizes the arrangement of space and functions, what if the inevitable leftover spaces could be used for networks of interconnected habitats for plants and animals? As I stated earlier, the cube and it’s derivatives remain the predominant building form despite their inability to maximize the use of space. I think that part of this inefficiency is due to areas like corners and the thickness of walls. Structural components that do nothing for our interactions aside from ensuring that the building does not collapse around us. While I appreciate this, I look to the software that allows my phone to run. To me the magic of the code is how it can run in the background and accomplish tasks that I need not be aware of. Folding@home allows you to connect your Playstation 3 into a network to analyze protein folding when not in use, what if the unused spaces of our buildings could function the same way?
When interviewing Jurgen Bey last summer he spoke of how much space is wasted in a building when most people leave for the day and only a few are left behind to work. If the space of the building could be reconfigured then the office could shift drastically from a spatial perspective over the course of several hours. Reconfiguring large spaces is not that practical, but building in little spaces for plants and insects to carry out functions that are not productive for a certain company but for the population in general is much more realistic. We should reconsider whether parametric and modular architecture is as flexible and practical as we suppose. Maybe we would be better of looking at parameters pertaining to ecosystems than those that control random undulations in a facade. Maybe we would be better off if we re-evaluated the language that we use to design buildings and, like with tangible user interface, made a shift back to something more natural.
In the 1920s there was a transition in the work of El Lissitzky from graphic design to a hybrid between graphic design and architecture that he called ‘Proun’. These works initially explored the Suprematist style through shifting axes and multiple perspectives. What started out as 2D compositions soon incorporated architectural notions like form, volume, and mass. Eventually these lithographs and paintings evolved into architectural experiments and exhibition design. All the time this work was governed by his edict of “task oriented creation”; art with a socially defined purpose. This same transition is happening to graphical user interfaces as we realize that the most interesting interactions happen not on a 2D plane but in three dimensional space. Fanciful explorations from science fiction are beginning to inform the design of systems for the real world. Samsung has gone so far as to take legal action against Apple, claiming that the iPad was inspired by tablet devices in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The case has not gone well for either party, and Samsung has recently filed complaints that Apple witheld evidence during the court case. The idea that the real interfaces of tomorrow could evolve directly from the imagined interfaces of tomorrow is an interesting one and a book is forthcoming on the topic. Authors Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel make the argument that all design is fiction until it is built. Viewed in this way, your favorite science fiction film of the 1980s could also be loosely considered a piece of design fiction. Researchers Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, in their paper “Resistance is Futile: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing”, discuss the idea that “science fiction does not merely anticipate but actively shapes technological futures through its effect on the collective imagination” (quote and a lot of inspiration from Near Future Laboratory). The idea that a generation can be inspired by Hollywood is by no means alien to today’s culture and with the increasing number of designers completing their eduction and entering the professional field it is no surprise that we see many striking similarities between the interfaces of tomorrow and the films of 20 or 30 years ago that inspired them. We may even be catching up to science fiction, with products like Leap echoing the gestural interaction of Minority Report and MIT’s new T(ether) UI for collaborative group work looking like a very early version of the systems that Tony Stark uses in Iron Man. Childhood dreams are increasingly realized with the increase in computing power and presence largely due to the rapid growth of mobile technology and culture. The Atlantic posted an excellent reflection on the remote control as subversive technology. The remote control was one of the first devices to be owned by nearly everyone and to allow them to decide how they interacted with television, the defining media of the last century. Instead of having to interact directly with a box on the floor, the remote control added a spatial element to our interaction. The Wii Remote is really nothing more than an incredibly powerful remote control. With the development of the Xbox Kinect the Wii Remote began to shrink in importance. Microsoft took the Wii Remote concept, that of an incredibly powerful and spatially aware remote control, and removed the clunky technology between the human and the computer. If the original remote control obliterated the need for awkward interactions with the television set and brought us closer to direct control of the system while actually being further away then the Kinect did the exact same. In many ways it simplified the interaction by removing the industrially designed aspect of the system. Systems are more permanent than objects and can generally be upgraded gradually without having to be discarded completely. Look at how many remote controls you own at home and think of how quickly one is rendered redundant by the development of a new feature for your DVR. Gestural interaction mitigates the need for industrial design and the fetishized objects that ultimately end up in our land fills. It focuses on the interactions and in using simple movements in combination with one another to accomplish tasks. Physical remote controls will remain more practical for many interactions for years to come because of the endless complexity of gestural interaction but, like the gigantic television or the supercomputer, they too will fade into the background in favor of less obtrusive technology.
The relationship between two dimensions and three dimensions can be tense or incredibly powerful. A sculptor may not be able to paint a masterpiece (and vice versa) but they tackle the same issues of form, lighting, and volume with their work. I feel that the design of any object sits in this tension between 2D and 3D. Some designers could fill books with orthographic views of their work, industrial objects rendered flat through photography yet still portraying highly physical notions like tactility and weight. The progression that Lissitzky made was inevitable and highly logical. He realized that form could not be explored within the boundaries of two or three dimensions exclusively, form is the discussion between both. Interface design is making this same progression as we not only tire of sitting at computers and pecking away at highly developed typewriters. Much like the architecture that I discussed at the beginning of this essay, the screen, not so different from the cube, has been the dominant form of interface and interaction design for years. And, like architecture, this brings with it huge amounts of waste and ignored potential. The screen ignores all of the amazing things sitting at its edges, capturing our view and drawing us back in. The screen presents a series of overlapping planes with hierarchy that is meekly enforced through drop-shadows instead of things like perspective. Like architecture, it builds walls around our interactions and ignores the potential for many of those divisions to serve a much greater purpose. As new techniques in architecture allow us to tear down many of the physical walls that divide us I hope that gestural and embodied interaction will help us tear down the digital walls that cut us off from our surroundings. I think that metaphors for the interactions of the future should be closer to the way that a birds wing cuts through the air than to how the Neolithic man awkwardly smashes with his clunky tools. There is a beauty to handwriting and the fluid movement of the hand that cannot be matched by the inefficiency of separate keys hit sequentially. There is a need for a shift to interactions both on the screen and around us that consider the environment beyond the traditional lens of what we may think it means to be human. Let’s work to accelerate that shift and be mindful that when we do, we don’t leave the natural world behind.
Julian Bleecker - Design Strategic Projects studio, Nokia Design
Prior to the expansion of highway networks in the United States in the 1920s the electric vehicle was actually quite prominent in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Substantially easier to start than the internal combustion engine (which lacked a quick and clean starting system for quite some time) the electric vehicle took advantage of the electrical infrastructure already found in the average home to accomplish short trips. As our capacity (and desire) for electricity in the home has undoubtedly increased it would be fair to say that many of the electric vehicle designs of the 1800’s and 1900’s could work in a contemporary setting if we were to ignore many of the other shifts that have taken place since then. Of course, it is these shifts that are most important. The rapid growth of the automotive industry was spurred on by developers and industrial suppliers, not least of which was the oil industry. Environmental regulations have had some positive effects on the exhaust produced by vehicles though at the same time ‘trade-it-in’ or recycling programs for older vehicles convince us that we are better to discard a vehicle that works but is outdated for one that is newer and therefore ‘greener’. These marketing campaigns consciously ignore many of the myths about recycling (particularly as outlined in Cradle to Cradle, where many good discussions are had on the relative uselessness of many materials after they are ‘downcycled’) as well as the amount of energy required to create a new vehicle. These vehicles may be more energy efficient during operation but their lifecycle, one which involves the destruction of a functioning vehicle and still has planned obsolescence built in, can hardly be seen as ‘greener’ in a holistic sense.
Outside of the purely automotive (cars and trucks) discussion on electric vehicles we see a rise in the use of electric powered or assisted bicycles (which to me might as well be one and the same). The current discussion on cycling in cities is huge and multi-faceted so I will just say that I adore cycling and leave it at that. Electric bicycles on the other hand, I am less fond of. Being someone that cycles for fitness as well as for fun I can be considered part of that ridiculously clad group of individuals that would rather cycle in a skin-tight suit than regular clothing. But, to put my fashion faux-pas aside, I question the role of electric bicycles in a society trying to shift towards sustainability. Interestingly enough, bicycle components producer Shimano has a system for shifting that is electronically assisted and used by many professional cyclists. This system overcomes many of the mechanical inefficiencies associated with traditional cable-operated shifting while replacing variables like cable tension with signals that can be read instantaneously and will never vary. The difference between this and an electric-assisted bicycle is that while they both overcome mechanical inefficiencies (in one case, changing gears, in the other, turning them) they do so for different reasons. While I would not object to electronic shifting on my bike it is both prohibitively expensive (for a recent graduate, anyways) and lacks the satisfying and sometimes startling sounds that accompany mechanical shifting. Similarly, there is something incredibly satisfying in a bicycle that is powered solely by human effort. Whether it be the endorphins released during exertion or just the sense of accomplishment one gets when cycling long distances there are things that cannot be replaced. There are many cyclists who prefer not to use gears at all and instead ride fixed gear bikes. While this is a cultural trend it has many valid applications for training or certain kinds of racing. Having ridden on the road and on the track myself I understand the connection you feel to a bike when every revolution of your legs is paired to the revolution of the rear wheel without alternative. You cannot stop pedalling even if you wanted to for fear of being thrown off of your bike.
With all of this taken into account I am not surprised by the rise in popularity of electric bikes, but I am a little disappointed in it. To me, the rise of the electric bicycle parallels the rise of the gasoline-powered vehicle. Whereas a bicycle can be timeless the introduction of electricity to it moves it from the realm of bicycle into the somewhat more easily discarded realm of gadget or ‘new technology’. I feel that designs with electricity can be timeless but provided they introduce a novel interaction or make a previous interaction drastically better. I look at the introduction of the electric guitar or the Moog synthesizer. Both changed music drastically and did not reduce capacity for use but extend it drastically. While the electric bicycle can drastically extend the range of a trip I doubt that this is the kind of capacity we should be extending. I would rather see a group of commuters on electric bicycles than occupying their own automobiles and soaring down a highway but I would far rather prefer a better integration between public transportation and cycling routes. I still wonder sometimes when I see a new bike lane being put into downtown Vancouver. To me the issue is not getting people to cycle in the city as I think that many people that live close enough to commute by bike will do it regardless of how many new bike lanes are put in place (to a point, of course). The issue is how to get people in the suburbs cycling and connect them with public transportation so that instead of adding bike lanes we are removing the need for lanes dedicated to cars. A street is still a street with people or bikes on it, and does not lose its purpose without them. A street is a wide space that facilitates movement. Currently the North American approach to streets is to segregate functions in a very clear manner. Where I live now, in the Netherlands, they also make space for cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, but there is so much more emphasis on methods of transportation that place you firmly in the public realm than those that isolate you in a sculpted piece of metal.
A cultural shift is needed in our cities of course, but also a technological shift. I would argue that things like cycling are not necessarily best left-alone, but they are certainly not better off through the introduction of expensive bicycles that lack the feel and rewards of traditional bicycles. Instead of companies like Audi designing electric bikes that help you do tricks and meticulously record your data we should apply this same kind of thinking to visions of the futures of our city that integrate technology (like bicycles and buses) that already exist. We should augment systems instead of replacing them completely.
Ernest Hemingway once said that “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” I think that to know our cities and ourselves better we should avoid the mistakes made by the automotive industry that extended our range and focus instead on truly enjoying the things close to us in a more connected way, however many hills be in the way.
Like a techno-mythology come true, the gods and demi-gods of yesterday are replaced by the technological mythology of tomorrow. Scientists trying to control lightning stay up late at night scribbling notes on Thor and Zeus, and like Da Vinci achieved the designs that Icarus could only dream of, they seek inspiration long lost in lore. As radar signals stream into bases located so remotely that if not for the steady hum of information and the electricity in the air that the men could think themselves alone in the world they strive for new magic to course into expired schemes. Schemes drawn from science fiction as they too seek to author the impossible and thus render it fact. And all along some demi-god of physics sits unknown to them in an area equally remote. From his mountain top perch he sees the clouds and the sky in startling clarity as like a conductor he wields control over the cacophonous magics and sciences that pulse within his machines. And clouds float slowly from his figurative fortress, clearly defined for a kilometer or so until the sky and the elements rage against his creations and render them natural again. Like lines scraped in the sand that are washed away as the waves beat the shore, clouds extruded into beautiful sculptures that are born on the wind and die there just as quickly.
I have been travelling to a lot of interesting cities lately (Eindhoven, Amsterdam, and Utrecht in the last two days) and speaking to even more interesting people. Being the design-minded person I am, I’m fortunate that a lot of these encounters have led to interesting ideas. I would love to write about them but as you can guess from the first sentence of this paragraph it has been a very tiring couple of days.
However, I am very proud to say that my capstone project, the theoretical culmination of my four years of education in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. was recently featured in USA Today. USA Today is the second most read newspaper in the USA and to be featured by them for an article on green technology for Earth Day is truly an honour. You can read the article here and see the website for Mitto, our portable rainwater collection and filtration system, here. The project started as a service design proposal that was meant to assist residents (many of them homeless) of the Vancouver Downtown East Side (DTES) in finding fresh water to drink and food to eat. While some people may have trouble finding potable water, residents of the DTES are sometimes so desparate for a fix that they will use water from puddles to help them inject their drugs. After two weeks of research into the proposal and a draft ethics form we realized that the DTES already has a surprisingly resilient system for sharing food and water that exists almost entirely due to those who care enough to volunteer their time to help those in need. Our team shifted focus to rainwater collection systems for personal households but wanted to try our hand at industrial design so we thought even smaller. Eight months, many bouts of laser cutting, and hundreds of dollars and hours worth of 3D printing later our work has paid off. While I do not imagine that I will work as an industrial designer (at least not without learning how to do some more presentable sketches) I loved the chance to work in a discipline other than my own. Over the past year and a half there have been many projects like this that have helped me to narrow down my passions to a blend of architecture and tangible interaction design (specifically for musical instrument and machine interfaces). While that may seem broad it is a lot closer than I was even a year ago. ‘Architecture’ may seem vague but I do intend to sleep at some point so I won’t even try to cover all the tangents that I could launch upon. During my visit to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven this weekend I became acquainted with the Russian Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun. As it is Futurist I expect that it is plagued with some rather aweful ideas but I am determined to read it nonetheless. A lot of my thoughts on architecture lately have been in this vein (Futurism and theories of architecture or design that now seem abominable) so I have started the draft of a short, fictional design narrative to explore ways of expressing these ideas.
But first; sleep.
I just booked a weekend trip to Rome and it had me thinking about F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto. While it is a little ridiculous and many of the ideas (if not all) are entirely destructive and would wreak havoc on a lot of the good changes cities all over the world are making there are a couple good points on museums. Marinetti speaks of Italy and its many museums that glorify the past without every looking toward the future. I hope to visit Amsterdam this weekend and am all to aware of some of the negative comments that have been made against it as a ‘museum city’. When speaking with Eva de Klerk at the NDSM Werf project in Amsterdam Noord she discussed how the housing market of Amsterdam was heavily influenced by the number of museums in the city. More museums generally leads to greater cultural capital in an area but it can also draw in tourists and spike housing prices, making it very hard for creatives to find space in the city. To touch only lightly on this it’s interesting to think of the number of artist squats in Europe and then wonder where they can be found in Vancouver or another North American city. Ultimately I’m not sure whether the difference is huge but I imagine that a country of citizens that is more acclimatized to exorbitant prices due to museums and tourism could also be more likely to take action against such issues. If we were to follow Marinetti’s manifesto we may destroy cities and some great urban life but we may also create cities that are greatly devalued and thus more open to interpretation by external and internal forces. I read this manifesto once with Italy in my mind, and the second time I thought of Detroit. I thought of how brute force and speed were valued over innovation and culture. I thought of rash disregard for the environment led to huge increases in production rates and how patriotism spurred sales. Finally, I thought of a dead city, one which valued speed over the life of the city, and is now a ghost town. Interestingly this also means that Detroit is now vastly more affordable and some artists have gone so far as to buy and turn entire houses into art pieces. Forget F.T. Marinetti and the Futurist manifesto, let’s think of Chrysler and the Detroit manifesto. Let’s think of the innumerable companies which turned their back against the arts, culture, and the city and thought only of the beauty of speed. If we don’t want our cities to become like Detroit (or our countries to become like Russia) then perhaps backwards is the appropriate way to look in order to step cautiously forward. I should get back to work (my own work), and you should watch the trailer for Surviving Progress.
I would like to write more on the Futurist movement in the future but in case I forget, you should also look at Jeremy Rifkin’s work on the third industrial revolution and the Stelka Institute in Moscow.
