RC3
Interactive Architecture Lab Domestic Ecologies
Lab Leader: Ruairi Glynn with William Bondin, Christopher Leung
Students William Victor Camilleri, Tania Chumaira, Dan Feng, Syuko Kato, Alex Kendall White, Aksa Khera, Danah Al Kubaisky, Renxiang Li, Ero Papavasileiou, Danilo Sampaio, Zhao Wei, Yanchao Xi, Yexin Xiong, Dongming Zhao Teaching assistants Francois Mangion Vincent Huyghe The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Thesis tutor Sam McElhinney Thanks to our critics and consultants Kaspar Althoefer, Kate Anderson, Francesco Anselmo, Angeliki Bakogianni, Nat Chard, Mario Carpo, Mollie Claypool, Amy Croft, Inigo Dodd, Ersinhan Ersin, Marlen Lopez Fernandez, Stephen Gage, Adrian Goodwin, Usman Haque, Sean Hanna, Colin Herperger, Shobana Jeyasingh, Mike Jones, Rolf Knudsen, Tim Lucas, Jonny Martin, Nicola McGowan, Kasia Molga, Hugo Mulder, Thrish Nanayakkara, Ollie Palmer, Bakul Patki, Beatrice Pembroke, Emmanuel Petit, Richard Roberts, Peter Scully, Qingling Tan, Chryssa Varna, Emmanuel Vercruysse, Michael Wihart, Seda Zirek, Fiona Zisch We are grateful to our partners Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Dept. Informatics King’s College London, King’s Cultural Institute, World Wilder Lab
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The Interactive Architecture Lab is interested in the behaviour and interaction of things, environments and their inhabitants. Areas of focus include adaptive, responsive, kinetic design and robotics; ecology; multisensory interfaces, and performance. Each year’s theme is intended to drive early research exploration and the development of core skills. However, the studio actively encourages students to break out and over the course of the year develop their own research agendas. ‘It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry.’ R. Buckminster Fuller 2014 Brief From wearable technologies, to the Internet of Things, from building managements systems to urban sensory networks, we are seeing the unprecedented saturation of the built environment with computation and embedded sensing. Billions of passive and active devices are building dense, rich layers of real-time sensor data where even our own clothes may monitor our bio-data to share with the ‘cloud’. These vast datasets, latent with novel applications for consumers and industry alike beg the question: what does a world of hyper-connectivity and high definition sensing offer design? What hybrid ecologies form out of the interaction of natural and digital agency? Ecology Our focus in Ecology was its driving principle of adaptation. A powerful and central idea of the past century, it has transformed the study of natural and social sciences, guided the engineering principles of computing and continues to offer us a mechanism to mediate between the natural, synthetic and digital. Ecosystems must be conceived as ‘whole systems’ including not only the living organisms (biotic factors) but also the physical environments (abiotic factors) which form their habitats. To design ecologically requires us to understand whole systems – materials, objects, spaces, and inhabitants – all in complex and continuous communication and interaction. Cybernetic Architecture Cybernetics provides a way of looking at the behaviour of all things, alive or synthetic, uniformly, enabling the science of ecology to share a common language with computational and design thinking. From it came the foundations of robotics, artificial intelligence, networked communication, and modern computing, among many innovations. The Interactive Architecture Lab’s agenda is firmly rooted in the ambition to make our built environment more responsive to human needs and catalytic to social interaction.