The Interface Research Paper

THE INTERFACE Martijn Dahrs

ABSTRACT In this paper a literature review is presented on the influence of the interfaces of the Internet, shortly called the Interface on the physical surroundings of humans. The Interface impacts the manner in which humans interact and engage with their physical surroundings and other humans. This impact seems to be especially apparent in the context of contemporary intellectual work, before often taken place in an office building. The definition of work is changing and subsequently its locational and spatial requirements. The research question of this exploratory literature research is: "What are the spatial requirements for a building that enhances the efficacy of work in the context of automation by the Interface?" The aim of the research is to provide a direction and a set of requirements with which physical environments for contemporary work should be designed in the context of the Interface.

The research is concluded with five propositions. The Interface is a deterritorializing force that alters the way people engage with their physical surroundings. The Interface creates information through the filtering and conversion of data and instigates new potentials for pragmatic action. The Interface automates and that substitutes the potentiality of accidents with comfort. Automation leads to technical activities substituting the notion of jobs, and a shift in work towards creation of information. An intelligent building is complementary to the Interface, interoperable and provokes accidents to enhance the efficacy of technical activities.

KEYWORDS Internet, Interface, Automation, Milieu, Work, Technical Activities, Comfort, Accident, Building

Martijn Geert Dahrs m.dahrs@gmail.com 4382250 Research Paper MSc 03 Explorelab Studio 29 26 03 2020 Technische Universiteit Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment Julianalaan 134, 2628BL Delft dr. Sang Lee, RA ir. Hubert van der Meel dr. ir. Stavros Kousoulas

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INDEX

04 INTRODUCTION

24 AUTOMATION

06 INTERNET

30 WORK

10 INFORMATION

36 COMFORT

12 AFFORDANCES

40 PROJECT

16 INTERFACE

44 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

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INTRODUCTION We currently live in a time of ubiquitous connectivity. Due to the Internet, and more importantly its interfaces we carry, humans can come into contact with almost any other human, as well as millions of commercial and governmental services. As we are often wirelessly connected to the Internet, we have gained the freedom to do whatever, wherever, whenever.

Whereas before the Internet, it seemed that what could happen was, to a larger extend, dictated by the specifications of a specific physical environment, time of the day, country or city, among others, nowadays these restrictions seem to have become obsolete. One used to be able to purchase goods only in a store during opening hours.

Or one could only meet strangers when entering the public realm of a city. Nowadays, many such actions seem to no longer be bound by physical limitations and constraints.

When actions are increasingly being undertaken on the Internet instead of any physical environment, it is relevant to look back at the physical environment and redefine some of its qualities opposed to the Internet to progress the approach to this physical environment.

The aim of this research is to explore the interrelations between the interfaces of the Internet, in this paper called shortly the Interface, and the physical environment of humans. This research follows in the long history of the relation between 01 02

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buildings and technology. Now seems to be a relevant moment to take a new step, in a context of a pervasiveness of interfaces, the advent of further smartification of the built environment01 and new territories of automation.02 This research should lead to an argument on the contemporary notion of labor, the impact of automation and contemporary technology on architecture, and what it means for a building to achieve an affective relation with this technology, the Interface. Furthermore, technology companies are increasingly focusing their businesses on the built environment. More specifically: technology companies are attempting to implement their services directly into the built environment. These companies call this smartification. It seems that the built environment is the next frontier of the Internet (more spefically the Interface since actual hardware of the Internet is positioned far away).

And therefore it seems relevant to look at the whole topic of the Interface from a spatial perspective and take an integral approach to the design of environments.

In this research paper, the question "What are the spatial requirements for a building that enhances the efficacy of work in the context of automation by the Interface?" will be researched. The research is conducted through a literature review with the aim of developing a theoretical framework that can

Amazon's Alexa speaker and Google's Nest thermostat could be considered as examples. But even more drastic architectural prototypes have been developed, like UNStudio's Reset Stress Reduction Pod, among many others.

Mobility and fabrication are important fields, but also in hospitals robots are being introduced.

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function as a foundation for a building design. The framework will be mainly developed through the definition of seven important topics related to the research question: Internet, information, affordances, interface, automation, work, and comfort. The extensive bibliography consulted and quoted consists of writings by architecture and design theorists as well as practitioners but also by philosophers (of technology), environmental psychologists, cyberneticists, and a neuroanthropologist among others, in order to arrive in-depth and coherent argument.

After this introduction, the paper is structured in eight separate parts to make an argument on how the Interface impacts our physical surroundings and our human actions. The first part, Internet, will be introductory. It explains how the Internet works diagrammatically and of what parts it exists. In the second part, a definition of information will be described based on theories of Gilbert Simondon and Gregory Bateson. Information is an especially important concept within this research in the context of the built environment as it could be said that information has affective and more importantly transductive qualities. In the third part, informational qualities of the environment are described using James J. Gibson's theory on affordances. Then in the fourth part, connecting the previous three parts, a definition of the Interface will be given. The Interface is seen as the most important part of this larger system called the Internet.

After this definition of the Interface, its main consequence, automation,

is described in the fifth part. And how automation particularly works in the context of the Interface.

Through automation, the Interface affects human actions. It creates new potentials for pragmatic actions but also reduces potentials as it has automated these actions. A context in which this seems especially relevant is work which will be explored in the sixth part. It could be said that the nature of work has altered making the labor-leisure dichotomy obsolete and this could be substituted, simultaneously with the notion of jobs, by Simondon's concept of technical activities. As working, in the sense of doing a job, is one of the most important mundane activities of one's life, it is a relevant case to further study the contemporary affects of the Interface. In the seventh part, another important consequence of the automated workings of the Interface is explored, that is, comfort. It could be argued that the aim of the invention of a new technology is often comfort.

Basically to reduce the effort to gain a desired result. This concept of comfort will be opposed to the idea of accidents. These accidents, within and outside the context of work, seem to be of paramount importance to the efficacy in one's working life. In the eighth part, an overall conclusions on the research will be drawn using five propositions. And this part, appropriately called Project, will be informative and the basis of the architectural project to be followed.

Introduction

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INTERNET

Initially, the Internet was a military communication technology developed by the United States Army. In collaborations with American universities, the US Army developed the ARPANET, which was a predecessor of the Internet, at the end of sixties. With ARPANET data could be shared. One of its main features was its robustness. It was of paramount importance that the system would continue running under harsh circumstances, for instance a Soviet nuclear attack. The solution found to forestall issues of system malfunctioning was to set up the network in a decentralized manner. This meant that data sent from one location to another had more than one route to arrive at its destination. In a simple example of situation when a cable is cut, the data will arrive through an alternative route. In the beginning, ARPANET was only used by the US Army, but later on, in the 1970s, in academia it was gaining presence increasingly. After communication, the focus shifted to a different functionality: data storage and sharing. More bits could be sent between entities. The World Wide Web, what most people colloquially refer to as the Internet, was developed in 1989 and reached the masses during the 1990s.

In this particular year of 1989, the Internet was opened up for the public and it became governed by non-profit organizations. Still to this date, these organizations, assign IP addresses and determine the protocols the entire Internet runs on. Due to its open organization everyone is able to contribute to the content of the Internet. Since the start of our millennium though, the Internet became increasingly a means for large multinational corporations to earn money through personalized advertisements. The vital data to create these advertisements is collected through the use of free services.03 The decisive invention of the Internet is its protocol, called the Internet Protocol or in short IP. During the development of the Internet, interoperability was imperative. This protocol allows all of the different types of software and hardware the Internet is comprised of to collaborate, but most importantly it allows each respective element to live a life on its own. It allows for each element, both technical and digital objects, to concretize independently while still functioning as an assemblage. It goes so far that the protocol itself is not even a stable fact. Through this independent concretization new emergent properties of the Internet itself appear, most importantly new functionalities.

Subsequently, the Internet should not be seen as a territory in itself that one can access.04 Instead, the Internet has four layers, see figure 1. Potentially, and actually most likely, each of them could be located far away from one another. The Internet consists of: infrastructure, data, interfaces, and users 03

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Barry Leiner , Vinton Cerf, David Clark, Robert Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry Roberts, and Stephen Wolff, A Brief History of the Internet, pp. 22–31. And Sharon Eisner Gillet and Mitchell Kapor in The SelfGoverning Internet.

For instance as suggested by Mark Wigley in Network Fever, p. 83.

Furthermore, the word cyberspace seems to refer also to some physical place one can access.

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USER

INTERFACE

IP/ INTERNET PROTOCOL

INFRASTRUCTURE

DATA

Figure 1 Conceptualization of the Internet

Internet

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(human as well as nonhuman).05 These layers work together through the Inter Protocol, IP. IP is the Internet's fifth element, but should not be seen as a layer since it serves to connect all four of them. First of all, the infrastructure consists of servers, cables, routers, and other physical entities that make possible any connection. Through this physical infrastructure, data is sent using, very importantly, IP among other software protocols, standards, and languages. This protocol is what is keeping all the layers in check. Using this protocol and the physical infrastructure built around the entire globe, data can be created, stored and shared. This forms the content of the Internet.

So far, these two layers, infrastructure and data, are hardly accessible and graspable for ordinary people, unless you are for instance a computer scientist or electrical engineer. To overcome this issue, lack of meaning, and legibility an interface is needed. The interface is the part that is directly affecting most humans, its users.

The Internet, especially concurrently with the advent of its interfaces, could be seen as a disruptive, or deterritorializing, force on humans. The Internet came from an invention for a purpose, communicating and data storing and sharing, initially unrelated to the general public and, perhaps also the built environment. But over a course of thirty years, the Internet has been increasingly altering society in more aspects than its initial purpose. The Interface allows us to do whatever, wherever, whenever.06 It looses up “old” assemblages between architectural space and bodies, or bodies in space.

Philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s words could be used to draw a link between the concept of deterritorialization while describing the affects of technologies on personal interaction during conversations: ‘Transportation and communication technologies, for example, can have deterritorialising effects on organisations similar to the effects they have on face-to-face interaction, allowing organisations to break away from the limitations of spatial location.’07 What DeLanda is describing for communication technologies could perhaps be broadened up for the system of the Internet, as the Internet is first of all a means of communication. Exactly this border between the Internet and humans should be understood and elaborated, in order to understand and design the built environment nowadays.

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This could be seen as a simplification of Benjamin Bratton’s Stack. In Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack and Benjamin H. Bratton, The Black Stack in The Internet Doesn’t Exist, pp. 279–97.

This statement is based on De Graaf’s statement: ‘The information revolution—the revolution of our time—doesn’t change buildings; it changes the way we use them. Its effects on architecture are limited. In allowing us to be productive regardless of circumstances or location, it even reduces the demand for buildings. We do whatever, wherever, whenever.’ In Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, p. 71 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, p. 32

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Internet

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INFORMATION It is important to state the difference between data and information that will be used for the rest of this paper. Data is seen as all the content stored on servers, meaning binary code that is unreadable for most people. This data is a means to describe worldly matters like the weather, the history of a country, who one’s closest friends are, what one would most likely purchase next, how a tomato can be distinguished from a strawberry when seen on a photograph, and many more things accumulated in a huge amount of data warehouses distributed around the globe. Data is even said to be the most valuable commodity surpassing oil just a few years ago.08 Information should not be seen as identical to data, though their definitions overlap. Information is only the little part of the massive amount of data that is informative to a user at a specific moment. The relevant difference here should be seen in terms of meaningfulness: information is meaningful to people as it is understandable whereas data is not understandable.

Thus, data is not of any relevance to the topic being unfolded in this paper.

Information is the concept to be scrutinized further. Following philosopher Gilbert Simondon, information should not be seen as something abstract but rather as something real that is affecting reality.09 This affective quality of information has transformative capacities. The process of when information is changing something from one state into another is called transduction.10 To explain the meaning of transduction, one of Simondon’s favorite examples to explain information could be used. ‘One of his favorite examples is the air-cooled engine versus one that is water cooled. In the air-cooled engine, the informational properties in the air perform multiple functions, whereas the water in the second performs only one and acts as an addition.’11 Through the process of transduction, information generates real ontological effects and therefore potentiality for pragmatic action. Simply put, pragmatic action refers to action that is considered with doing opposed to speaking, drawing, or writing to convey information. Thus, information is not merely linguistic or based on imagery but a pragmatic action itself can also be informative.

In Simondon’s example, the air is more affective, meaning that it has informative qualities to more parts of a car engine. This does not take the actual effectiveness of the cooling itself into consideration, since water has become the most used cooling medium for cars a long time ago already.

Information, subsequently, should be not be assessed based on what it is but on what it does instead. Therefore, information should not be seen as a thing

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See https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-mostvaluable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data This statement is based on Iliadis’ interpretation of Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective in Iliadis, Andrew. Informational Ontology:The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation., pp.

1–19 Ibid., p. 12 Ibid., p. 13

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but rather as a measure of difference.12 The difference could be temperature, like in the above-mentioned example of the car engine, but also knowledge between people for instance. This can be expanded by cyberneticist Gregory Bateson’s famous sentence: ‘Information is definable as a difference which makes a difference.’13 Similar to Simondon, Bateson looks at information in affective terms, in terms of what it does. When informative, the difference between entities leads to a change, or transformation, of entities involved.

Information has the potential to be transductive. ‘Transduction signifies a process or an action that leads to the transformation across different domains.’14 Information leads a process or an action to generate difference and the concept of transduction therefore goes beyond mere communication.

Human interaction with the Internet, therefore, has transductive qualities through the information it conveys which subsequently leads to pragmatic action and subsequently new information.

The relevance of the concept of information to, what has been introduced as, the Internet will be elaborated further in the chapter Interface.

The transformative forces of the Internet on humans will be defined, conceptualized, and explicated as an attempt to arrive at a contemporary understanding of assemblages among humans and their built environment.

Information in spatial practices is part of what could be called affordances in the science of environmental psychology.

12 13 14

Terrence Deacon writes about Gregory Bateson’s information theory in Incomplete Nature, p. 332 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 229 Yuk Hui also elaborates on Simondon in his paper Induction, Deduction, Transduction, p. 11

Information

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AFFORDANCES Animals live in an environment that allow or disallow them to do certain activities. Within the context of the Internet we will only focus on humans here, instead of all types of animals. An environment contains information readable by humans in terms of potential pragmatic action. This can be exemplified by a plank lifted about fifty centimeters from the ground by at least three sticks strong enough to carry up to about one hundred kilograms.

When ones sees this, one can perceive this as a potential to sit down and calls this particular part of the environment a chair, although an extremely basic one. This phenomenon has been coined by environmental psychologist James J. Gibson as affordance: ‘The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’15 According to philosopher Anthony Chemero who builds further on Gibson’s concept, affordances are neither part of the environment nor of the perceiver, but affordances are ‘relations between the abilities of organisms and features of the environment.’16 In the context of the chair described above, the abilities of an organism are related to the potential to sit down on this basic chair, meaning that the chair might be too high for a child or unusable for someone in a wheelchair. Furthermore, what Chemero calls relations between the organism, the human, and its environment, could be considered as information.

The features of the environment could be divided into two groups: natural and artificial. Natural features of the environment exist without the interference of an animal, again in this paper a human, for instance a fallen tree that offers a place to sit down or a cave that offers protection against wind and rain. Not only can a person use the environment as it is directly offered but a person can also manipulate the environment in order to make it offer more, better or simply different affordances. The manipulation of features of the environment, through addition, removal, adaptation, among others, results in artificial17 features. Searching for potentials in the environment to manipulate is done through a process that philosopher Lorenzo Magnani calls abduction: ‘Abduction describes all those human and animal hypothetical inferences that are operated through actions made up of smart manipulations to both detect new affordances and to create manufactured external objects that offer new affordances[.]’18 Through abduction, new potentials in the environment or for the environment are found and subsequently created. Information is thus used to alter the environment which subsequently generates new information that can be abducted, in Magnani’s sense. This could be further elaborated using philosopher Gilbert Simondon: ‘the world influences man 15 16 17

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James J. Gibson, The Theory of Affordances, p. 179 Anthony Chemero, An Outline of a Theory of Affordances, p. 189 This understanding of artifical coincides with Benjamin H. Bratton’s statement: ‘The artificial is “anomalous regularity.” It is the order that exceeds what could normally be expected or possible without deliberate intervention.’

In The Terraforming p. 17 Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and EcoCognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning, p. 318

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just as man influences the world.’19 Architect and scholar Harry Mallgrave even goes as far as to state that ‘the organism both shapes the environmental field and at the same time is continually being shaped by it.’20 The creation of new affordances by humans offer intended and unintended affordances that creates new potentials of pragmatic action and room for a continuation of abduction.

Whatever is created could be considered as technology. This new technology that was created could be seen as “physical memory”21 in which the solution of a problem is saved and passed through to other users, within and between generations and geographical areas. This removes the need to overcome the same problem multiple times. When tired of standing up, one is not required to invent something to sit down because the technology of the chair has been passed through already over many generations. About this process of inventing new technical objects, Magnani asserts that ‘humans extend their minds into the material world, exploiting various external resources.

For “external resources” I mean everything that is not inside the human brain, and that could be of some help in the process of deciding, thinking about, or using something. Therefore, external resources can be artifacts, tools, objects, and so on. Problem solving, such as general decision-making activity, for example, are unthinkable without the process of connection between internal and external resources.’22 From this, one can attempt to argue that human intelligence is not only inside the human mind but also in the environment of the human. And that one depends heavily on the information residing in one’s environment. Philosopher Andy Clark calls this the extended mind: ‘If the resources of my calculator or my Filofax are always there when I need them, then they are coupled with me as reliably as we need. In effect, they are part of the basic package of cognitive resources that I bring to bear on the everyday world. These systems cannot be impugned simply on the basis of the danger of discrete damage, loss, or malfunction, or because of any occasional decoupling: the biological brain is in similar danger, and occasionally loses capacities temporarily in episodes of sleep, intoxication, and emotion. If the relevant capacities are generally there when they are required, this is coupling enough.’23 We could say that humans can only properly function within an environment that they can perceive in terms of affordances.24 For instance when a Westerner gets accidentally dropped in 19 20 21

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Gilbert Simondon, The Genesis of Technicity, p. 4 Harry Mallgrave, From Object to Experience, p. 52 Mark B. N. Hansen citing philosopher Bernard Stiegler: ‘This account draws on Stiegler’s earlier reading of the Simondonian preindividual as the domain of tertiary memory, which is to say, of the sedimented discretizations of experience that are preserved technically and thereby available for future adoption (Stiegler 1993).’ in Stiegler, Philosopher of Desire?, p. 175 Magnani, p. 332 Andy Clark & David Chalmers, The Extended Mind, p. 11 Magnani calls perception semi-encapsulated. This means that perception is not detached from learning and experience and that this informs the understanding of one’s environment. p. 341

Affordances

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the middle of a jungle, they cannot function. When the information contained in an environment is unreadable to a human, they cannot use a part of their brain, meaning that a part or their intelligence, which is residing in their environment, is inaccessible. Referring to the information-data discussion above, we could argue that the environment in this scenario only contains data that does not become informative and is therefore meaningless.

The concept of the extended mind can even elaborated further when introducing computer scientist Mark Weiser’s ideas on ubiquitous computing.25 Ubiquitous computing implies that the computer leaves its container, meaning that the computer becomes immersed in the surroundings of the human so that the human interaction with the computer becomes frictionless and seamless. This concept could be explained in two ways. The first would be a literal understanding that every ordinary object in our surroundings will gain computation capacities.26 This seems what Weiser was aiming at when writing his article The Computer for the 21st Century in 1991. But nowadays it could be asserted than computation power has become part of the human body instead of the environment, when looking at the enormous use of smartphones, smart watches, smart speakers, laptops, and more and more, so-called, smart devices and appliances. The environment here is understood in terms of human perception of their surroundings rather than literally one's physical environment. Even though it is still true of course that what constitutes one’s perception is based on what information actually can be perceived from one’s physical surroundings, like Gibson, Chemero, and Magnani have asserted above, the Internet's interfaces can be considered what Weiser called ubiquitous computing. We carry a pocket computer everywhere the coupling with the human mind seems evident.

When assessing the informational qualities of one’s surroundings, it could be argued that information resides in two places. The first is the actual physical constellation of the environment. This is the theory of affordances applied in a rather strict way. When looking at the environment in terms of human perception, information is also continuously transmitted through the computational device connected with the Internet that people carry everywhere. One’s environment assessed in this way is what ethologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll calls Umwelt27, from the German word for environment.

This concept of Umwelt has been further developed by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and that will be investigated in the next chapter.

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Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21 Century, pp. 94-104 This is similar to what inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil writes in the Singularity is Near: ‘By the second decade of this century, however, most computing will not be organized in such rectangular devices but will be highly distributed throughout the environment. Computing will be everywhere: in the walls, in our furniture, in our clothing, and in our bodies and brains.’, p.

120 The work of Von Uexküll has been interpreted and elaborated by biosemiotic Kalevi Kull. In On Semiosis, Umwelt, and Semiosphere, pp. 304-5

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Affordances

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INTERFACE In the end the only thing that matters is that you can connect to the Internet whenever you want it. Through a laptop or phone, but also increasingly to so-called smart devices.28 All the cables are buried under ground, and the connection made to you is often made wireless and its emitters invisible.

This interface is part of a device but the device is not entirely an interface. The interface is part of the device, and when connected it is subsequently part of the Internet. It is the part with which one can interact with other entities, humans, non-humans, and services. Often, this interaction takes place on a screen, but definitely not exclusively. Increasingly, one can also talk or gesture in order to get understood by the technology. An interface, does not only mean a touchscreen, GUI, voice recognition tool, or any other digital technology specifically but can be seen in a much broader perspective. This is what architecture and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton does when saying: ‘An interface is any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems. Levers, steering wheels, doorways, mobile Apps, fences, office layout schemes, international borders, telecommunications infrastructure: these are all interfaces.’29 An interface could also be placed between machines, even more than two. It is not a part of the Internet per se. Simply stated, there are interfaces that directly affect a system and there are interfaces that are affective only through an interconnected communications network, the Internet. The second is what will further be called the Interface here. The Interface could be part of a cell phone, in that case called a smartphone, or laptop in more common instances, but, similarly to Bratton, it could be argued that every object could operate as the Interface. Similar to the Internet, the Interface itself hides the technology that allows it to function. All the complicated mark-up languages, scripts, and other codes are hidden away by clear imagery and texts, legible for everyone.

The Interface is the threshold between the user and the rest of the Internet.

Even though the Interface is positioned at the border of the Internet, it should be seen as a vital part of the Internet. It is here where information appears out of the vast quantities of data. The two systems interacting here are the vast network filled with data, the Internet, and its user. The Interface filters data and converts it into information, see figure 2. On the servers data is stored and information is retrieved.

The workings of the Interface could be explained using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of milieu. The coming about of a milieu happens through the interaction of rhythms. The world is build out of chaos, since there is no overarching plan determining reality, and humans cannot directly interact with this chaos since sense cannot be made out of it. Chaos consists of many different rhythms that interact with one another or they do not and remain part of the chaos. Rhythms are temporal occurrences that upon interaction form a milieu, see figure 4. ‘If milieus concern what happens where, rhythms are about how and when things within and between milieus happen, and 28 29

Again, see for instance Amazon's Alexa speaker or Google's Nest thermostat Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack p. 360

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USER

INFORMATION

INTERFACE

DATA Figure 2 The Interface

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hence the flexibility and survivability of a milieu is a rhythmic concern. If milieus primarily refer to spatial arrangements and the constitution of components, rhythms are the ‘particular temporal form’ that maintains a certain measure of continuity and coherence.’30 Many things could be seen as a rhythm, like humans passing by on the streets, the weather, fluctuations on the stock market, traffic. When specific instances of these rhythms coincide a milieu starts to appear. This notion of milieu resembles what architectural theorist Christopher Alexander called a semi-lattice network. His example of a semi-lattice system could be used to also show the workings of rhythms and the coming about of a milieu. ‘In Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day’s papers are

Newsrack People crossing Traffic light

Figure 3 The corner of Hearst street and Euclid street in Berkeley, USA

displayed [see figure 3]. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait. This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people’s pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system—they all work

30

Elizabeth Grosz is quoted here by Arjen Kleinherenbrink. Both of them base their thinking on territories and rhythms on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. In Territory and Ritornello, p. 215

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together.’31 The fluctuations of the traffic light is a rhythm. The same can be said of the headlines from the day’s newspapers, the traffic itself, the flow of people, and so forth. What Alexander calls semi-lattice system that is interactive, Deleuze and Guattari would call a milieu.

The concept of milieu can be expanded further. Deleuze and Guattari distinguished four different types of milieus interacting with one another: an exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an associated milieu.32 These milieus respectively refer to: material ‘outside’ the organism, the organs, the membrane or skin of the porous body, and energy resources such as food, light, and air, see figure 5. Organisms, but here it will be first explicitly applied to humans, are actually comprised of these milieus, instead of inhabiting them. The examination of milieus here continues to focus more explicitly on the associated milieu and the intermediary milieu, or membrane. ‘[T]he associated milieu is at once both an external and an internal milieu, and is not equivalent to a physical or external environment; more precisely, the associated milieu is that with which the individual enjoys relations of communication and of energetic exchange that give it, or rather the system to which it (together with the associated milieu) belongs, “internal resonance.”’33 It is important to note that what is called a system in the quote above is not the same as Bratton’s system in his definition of an interface, where an interface is any point of contact between two complex systems.

Bratton’s systems could be either an exterior milieu, interior milieu, or an associated milieu that are connected by an interface, the intermediary milieu.

Deleuze and Guattari are referring to the entire interactive chain of milieus when using the word system.

The associated milieu is where surrounding materials and internal functions, of a human in this case, interact. For instance solar energy is processed within the photosynthetic organs of the plant. It would be food or oxygen for humans among many other options. Therefore, the associated milieu is where one conducts its actions-perceptions and where one’s actions-potentials reside.34 The medium of the communicative exchange of the associated milieu could be information: information as a rhythm. And information received through the Interface is an increasingly pervasive rhythm in contemporary society.

Again, Information is not merely something, but it is something that does something. It initiates transduction, changing something from one state into another. Expanding on Bratton’s definition of interfaces: an interface could be 31 32

33 34

Christopher Alexander, A City is Not a Tree, p. 14 Based on philosopher and environmental scientist Brett Buchanan’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari. In Onto-Ethologies, p. 175. The associated milieu is also often called annexed milieu and the intermediary milieu is also called membrane. This is due to different translations from the French works of Deleuze and Guattari. For this essay, Buchanan’s use of words will be continued with.

Mark B. N. Hansen, Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century, p. 35 Arjen Kleinherenbrink, Territory and Ritornello, pp. 213-14

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seen as the intermediary milieu of a human, the membrame. Since through this milieu the exchange between interior and exterior and interior and associated milieu happen. An interface makes possible what actions one can take at a certain moment. An interface is not directly part of the human body, as the initial concept of the intermediary milieu seems to suggest when the term skin is utilized. It is not only literally the skin of a human. But it is an integral part of the functioning of a human. Everything that organizes the informative exchange, energetic exchange, and actions-potentials could be considered an intermediary milieu.

Expanding on the manner of interaction between the Interface and a human, its user: the information on the Interface is delivered through digital objects. Philosopher Yuk Hui has developed this concept as a contemporary elaboration on Simondon’s technical objects. Digital objects are fact-based data that is made graspable in structural forms.35 A simple example could be a Facebook image or YouTube video. ‘Digital objects appear in three phases, which are interdependent of each other but cannot be reduced or generalized into oneness: objects, data, and networks.’36 This coincides with the conceptualization of the Internet above. Objects could be interpreted as whatever is displayed, not necessarily visually, on the Interface. What Hui means by data is the same as what has been discussed here before in opposition to information. And the networks is what brings the objects and data into contact. Again, from these three categories, what humans usually interact with are solely the objects. The Interface makes data meaningful.

It turns data into information. It could therefore be said that information receives it rhythmic quality whenever it appears on the Interface. As data is impossible for most people to be understood directly it remains chaos. That is why data itself is not rhythmic.

The Interface at hand is a discrete approximation of continuous reality.

In order to act, influence, or alter particular things in life, one has to act through an interface and also increasingly the Interface, meaning that there is a proximal control system, the Interface in this case, that affects a distal controlled system following Magnani’s conceptualization of affordances.

A distal controlled system should not be understood as to be located far away necessarily. Instead, it means that one cannot directly interact with it.

Though, the distal controlled system is what is supposed to be altered as it has a direct influence on a human life. For instance when it is too bright in a room due to too much direct sun exposure one can press a button to close the blinds. The button is an interface, a proximal control system, which affects the distal controlled system which is the sun exposure in a room. To explain the practical operation of a proximal control system and a distal controlled system, Magnani refers to a research done by Byrne et al. on the implications of pilots navigating their aeroplane through the various interfaces of the 35 36

Yuk Hui, Induction, Deduction, Transduction, pp. 4-6 and Yuk Hui, What is a Digital Object?, pp. 380-95 Yuk Hui, What is a Digital Object?, p. 390

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m

m

yth Rh

Rh y th m

m Rhyth

Rh yth

MILIEU

Rh yth m

MILIEU

MILIEU

Rhythm

MILIEU

Figure 4 Rhythms and milieus

EXTERIOR MILIEU

INTERINTERIOR MEDIARY MILIEU MILIEU (Human) (Interface)

ASSOCIATED MILIEU (Information)

Figure 5 Four milieus

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cockpit. This study showed that ‘the airline pilot’s performance in landing and taxiing to the gate in foggy conditions by showing, thanks to an ecological analysis, how the cockpit artifacts (and their interfaces which provide proximal cues/chances for action) affect the overall cognitive performance.

Often the problem is related to the fact that technologies exhibit a discrete ecology that does not sufficiently involve the approximation and convergence performed by continuous ecologies of natural environmental structures.

This fact for example explains why it has been recently shown that current design of cockpit automation leaves pilots less supported in special uncertain (and more challenging) – unsafe – situations: control systems proximal to pilots are discrete, whereas the behavior of the distal controlled system – the aircraft – is continuous.’37 What Magnani calls a proximal control system could as well be seen as an intermediary milieu or membrane, as an interface or, in this case, the Interface. The distal controlled system is either an interior or exterior milieu. The Interface filters and complexifies interactions between humans and their environment. Through selective conversion, although this selection is only partially made by the user, the Interface operates as filter and determines what output a system gives. It creates information, through filtering data and making it meaningful, and the Interface therefore initiates new potentials for pragmatic action.

37

Magnani, p. 342

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Interface

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AUTOMATION In contemporary discussions, automation is often used among terms that are thought to be relevant and impactful nowadays, like artificial intelligence and deep learning. In contrary to automation, these concepts are strongly tied to computation and they are potentials of computers and their software.

It is important to understand that automation is principally a technological concept that does not necessarily relate to the potentials of computation.

Although, computers do automate many actions as cultural theorist Luciana Parisi states: ‘The centrality of automation in contemporary capitalism has coincided with the proliferation of software protocols, databases and interfaces.’38 Automation has gained more relevance and it potentially has a direct impact on humans. Automation means that actions that used to be done by humans are now done by technology. It is automation of action, this is why Bratton calls it artificial embodiment.39 It is a term that refers to a process. Actions originally undertaken by the body are externalized into technology. The question of automation in the context of the Interface is what will be scrutinized here. But first automation will be explored in more general terms before it will applied to the Interface.

To dive further into the workings of a specific technical object within the framework of affordances, we could describe these workings as automation in certain cases. We can speak of automation when a range of actions that used to be done by a person or a(n old) technical object to pursue a specific goal is replaced by a (new) technical object. Basically, we could say that automation is happening when specific actions are no longer happening, but the result is still achieved`, see figure 6. A banal example of automation could be the toilet in its entirety. A toilet collects human excrement in a bowl.

After the collection process is over, the toilet can be flushed to deposit the excrement to the sewage system. One can assess this technology using the concept of automation. The bowl itself allows for the toilet to be always in the same place whereas previously one had to find a safe spot outside or dig a cesspit from time to time. The flushing removes the necessity to deposit the content of the bowl manually or find a bucket filled with water to wash away everything inside the bowl. Therefore one could say that the toilet is a collection of automated processes, or better said: an assemblage of automated parts. New affordances, through the invention of the toilet, have appeared due to automation and the abduction of the environment.

Thus, through abduction human actions are automated, subsequently new affordances appear.

Historically, humans have always created technology in order to automate certain actions to gain surplus value either in time or in production output value. A moment in history of significant increase of human processes being automated is called the First Industrial Revolution. That took place at the end 38 39

Luciana Parisi, Automated Cognition and Capital, p. 59 Benjamin H. Bratton in The Terraforming: 'Automation can be a form of artificial embodiment, but only in relative terms by which it is never fully autonomous.' p. 30

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of the eighteenth century.40 The steam machine and the application of steel as a construction material mechanized many things. The steam machine and steel were the basis of many inventions that lead to the creation of new building types. For instance the train lead to the train station and the sewing machine led to the textile factory. After the first came the Second Industrial Revolution, around the end of the nineteenth century41, in which oil and subsequently the car were altering the operation of the economy. Highways and petrol stations were spatial types resulting from the popularization of the car42, but also new typologies of residential buildings were invented.

Eventually, in the Third Industrial Revolution in the 1960s43, computation and the Internet44 took over the place of the car. For instance, this gave rise to large rural warehouses, either stored with data or commodities sold on the Internet. The phase we are in now could be considered as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It encompasses the development of the merging of the digital and the physical and it ‘focuses on combining technologies such as additive manufacturing, automation, digital services and the Internet of Things[.]’45 As stated before, automation in general should not be seen as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In fact, all of the four revolutions are revolutions of automation. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the period it is said we live in nowadays, straightforward examples of consequential building types are not that easy to find. Often vague terms like smart buildings and smart cities are applied more often in commercial contexts, to indicate the spatial implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally different from the previous three, especially in terms of automation. It used to be the case that muscle power was substituted by mechanization or repetitive administrative tasks by software scripts. Now, simple cognitive tasks are also beginning to be automated. Bratton states that ‘any action that transforms the world can be absorbed into a technical process that no longer demands subjective volition for every operation. Not only is the action automated, the volition is as well. [...] The pervasiveness of automated machinery (both in reality and in projective planning) demonstrates not that animated machines are clearly separate from humans, but that the entanglements of mutual prostheticization between them operate in diverse and various ratios and asymmetrically distributed agencies and counter-agencies. Their position in the “user” layer shifts from moment to moment.’46 Actions like decisionmaking and learning things (still relatively simple and isolated) are also being automated now. Artificial intelligence could be regarded as a form of 40

Mahesh Velliyur, The Fourth Industrial Revolution Is Here - What Makes It Different?

41 Ibid.

42 Miguel de Beistegui, The New Critique of Political Economy, pp. 183-84 43 Velliyur 44 ‘Information superhighway’ is the term used by Miguel de Beistegui p. 183 45 Andrew Maynard, Navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, p. 1005 46 Benjamin H. Bratton, The Terraforming, p. 31

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automation: the automation of finding correlation among large quantities of data.47 The volition, the intention to initiate an action, is a cognitive action. The initiation is automated as well and therefore the user is not always in charge.

This means that human agency can be shifted to the automated technical object. From an environment based on decisions and dynamism, automation of cognitive actions leads to a predictable environment that is given. The automation of cognitive actions could have serious implications on everyday life, especially related to work which is often discussed by politicians, scientists, journalists, and entrepreneurs. Besides what is automated, the way of automation is also different in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The limitation of feedback loops in mechanized or electrified automation are no longer prevalent in contemporary automation. Because of the algorithmic workings of contemporary automation, the quantity of feedback loops is virtually endless, only limited by computation power. Parisi discerns algorithmic automation opposed to automation before the 1960s, which was mechanization and electrification. ‘Algorithmic automation involves the breaking down of continuous processes into discrete components whose functions can be constantly reiterated without error. In short, algorithmic automation means that initial conditions can be reproduced ad infinitum.’48 Automation has become infinite. It has its own volition apart from human interference and proceeds whenever it pleases.

Automation leads to new human association and action.49 If we look back at the example of the toilet above, this can be exemplified by the wellknown saying that business is done in the men’s bathroom. As bathrooms in public buildings are usually organized in bathroom blocks where each toilet is inside a small closed-off room, the bathroom space, where one washes one's hand or fixes one's hair, is an intimate space. People can find themselves in a one-on-one situation opposed to a larger meeting room or hallway. Within this intimate space covenants and compromises can be made outside of a business meeting, in order to find an agreement that is advantageous to the people involved and that cannot be found in a collective meeting. This situation can be seen in the light of affordances as well. As the spatial organization of bathrooms is a type of environmental manipulation or the result of abduction, it creates new affordances. Some affordances are intended results from manipulating, this means that a specific problem needed to be overcome by technology. But not all the created affordances of 47

48 49

26

Artificial intelligence here is not seen as the artificiality of human intelligence in its entirety but merely finding correlation among datasets which is one of a human brain’s many capacities. See Matteo Pasquinelli, How a Machine Learns and Fails, or Chaterine Malabou’s definition of intelligence in Morphing Intelligence, that will be discussed below.

Luciana Parisi, Automated Cognition and Capital, p. 72 This statement is expansion of philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote that could be applied to automation: ‘[...], “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.’ In Understanding Media, p. 9

The Interface

INTERFACE

ACTION 1

ACTION 2 New potentials for pragmatic actons

ACTION 3 New potentials for pragmatic actons

Time scale Figure 6 Automation and potentials for pragmatic action

INTERFACE

AUTOMATION 1 AUTOMATION 2 AUTOMATION 3

Time scale Figure 7 Centralizing automation

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a technical object are intended and some are mere side effects. About these side effects, architect and writer Reinier de Graaf asserts that ‘[t]echnology solves problems, but it also gives rise to new ones.’50 These new problems can be seen in a rather strict way, meaning that these new problems are negatively experienced and to be overcome. This is the way De Graaf thinks problems when asserting that ‘[t]he more technology we have at our disposal, the more technology we need to deal with the consequences.’51 But problems can also be seen in the way philosophers and scientists often see it. The problem of bringing a human to the moon is not necessarily problematic in the sense that it might be threatening in any way if it will not be done.

When looking at De Graaf’s new problems, we can also call these for instance appetites as architect Cedric Price does52 or simply new potentials. Then, we start to look at our environment in terms of affects, how the environment is affecting human action in terms of affordances. The creation of these new problems could be seen as the creation of new information as well. These problems could be seen as new potentials for pragmatic action that were not there before, for instance due to a lack of time, money, strength, or stamina.

Though, the opposite is true as well: automation degrades information into data.

Returning to Bratton’s broad definition of an interface given above, where he sees an interface is any point of contact between two complex systems that governs the conditions of exchange between those systems, we could attempt to investigate what could be the precise difference between the Interface and other (previous) interfaces. It could be said that it used to be case that there were many different interfaces, proximal control systems, controlling many different machines, and subsequently affecting reality, distal controlled systems. For clarification purposes, when narrowing this statement down to building appliances to give an example, it could be said that it used to be the case that opening windows, heating a room, cooling a room, changing the volume of a soundsystem, opening a door, watering plants and closing the curtains all had their own interface, like knobs, buttons, and toggles, to interact with the respective system. Whereas nowadays this is or will be increasingly done by just one Interface. Although it is paramount that the implications and possibilities of the Interface should be seen much broader than just home appliances. What the contemporary automation sets apart from previous automations is its centralizing nature, see figure 7. In contrast to the externalization through the creation of a distant technical object, the Interface is close to the human body. For most humans, the Interface is always in close reach, in a purse or pocket. Because of continuous close

50 Reinier de Graaf, p. 93 51 Ibid.

52 ‘So that is another rule for the whole nature of architecture: it must actually create new appetites, new hungers - not solve problems; architecture is too slow to solve problems.’ Cedric Price and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series, Number 21, p. 68

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proximity, the Interface can be considered a prosthesis of the human.53 It is important to note that it is not a prosthesis in the sense that is technology added to the human body to overcome some physical shortcoming. Instead, it should be seen as affective excess culminating into a technical object that has almost become part of the human body. This make the common expression that technology is an extension of the body54 rather literal. Technology is the externalization of the organs that subsequently is internalized again. Through the creation of technology, bodily features are converted into a technical object which is positioned externally from the body. This technical object is internalized when it is being used again. It becomes an integral part in the functioning of a human, as elaborated above using Magnani and Clark. The body has been given a new role, since he body itself, including the mind, is ultimately what is designed through new technology.55

53

54 55

Mark Wigley, The Architecture of the Mouse, p. 51-3. For instance in his statement: ‘One no longer needs to move towards an interface or even to extend an arm. The interface is already well inside our reach, touching the body before we touch it. Or, more precisely, the act of reaching out has become even more compact, even intimate, with the sliding of the fingers across a screen. This intimacy intensifies the prosthetic amplification. The shrinking device has an ever expanding reach.’

See for instance Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media See for instance Common Accounts (Igor Bragado & Miles Gertler)’s article Planet Fitness, or more elaborately Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley’s Are We Human?

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WORK Work is done by everyone about a third of one’s time, if not more. Therefore work impacted by contemporary automation through the Interface and the creation of new information, could be seen as a relevant topic for buildings ‘because it has ramifications in the realm of the domestic and the mundane rather than the spectacular.’56 Work can be defined in a myriad different ways. One is working when spending time in the office. One is working when studying at a university. One is working in the gym. One is working when manufacturing a car. Nowadays, more and more is considered work, las architecture historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina asserts when noticing that ‘[w]aiters in restaurants in the United States ask if you are “still working on that” before removing your plate or your glass.’57 And even that ‘[e]verything done in the bed has become work.’58 To dive further in the contemporary meaning of work under automation of the Interface, work will be investigated first in a rather abstract way using the theories of neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon before it will be applied. Deacon thinks work based on physics, that is, in terms of effort. Work could be understood ‘as the organization of differences between orthograde processes such that a locus of contragrade process is created. Or, more simply: Work is a spontaneous change inducing a non-spontaneous change to occur.’59 Thus, Deacon discerns two types of change. The first type of change is one that will happen in any case. This is called orthograde change, or process as Deacon does, and could be exemplified by aging, a piece of fruit rotting when exposed to sunlight and air, or everything with a mass falling down to the surface of the earth. If one would challenge oneself with affecting one such process, in other words change this orthograde change, one would need to put in work.

It is taking an effort to alter, the process of altering could be understood as the spontaneous change, something that is inevitable, a non-spontaneous change. Simply put, work is the production of contragrade change.60 This does not only refer to physical work or actions which seems to be easier to relate to this definition. Thinking is also work as it is an effort to avoid the idle state of daydreaming. There should be made an opposition between work and labor, in order to engage in a analysis of leisure and how these terms could be defined in the contemporary context. Following Deacon’s definition of work, it cannot simply be claimed that work means doing a job and is an activity that solely takes place in, what could be called, a workplace.

Activities taken place in one’s free time, what could for now be considered as leisure activities, are work, too. For instance doing any sports or reading a book. Both rely on producing contragrade change. Labor could be defined as 56

With this quote Common Accounts (Igor Bragado & Miles Gertler) refer to the way Sigfried Giedion theorizes how death impacts industrial design and architecture in his book Mechanization Takes Command. It could be asserted that this quote could be applied to work as well. In Three Ordinary Funerals in Imminent Commons, p. 370 57 Colomina, The City of Social Media in Imminent Commons, p. 238 58 Ibid.

59 Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature, pp. 334-35 60 Ibid., p. 337

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‘the process of biological survival.’61 In modern society, this basically means doing a job for money. Leisure simply referred to not doing labor.

Labor no longer happens in routinely eight-hour shifts in factories and also decreasingly in massive office buildings. Or at least in the West. In the nineteenth century, labor used to be driven by the mechanization of its tools.

Since humans were working in Fordist production chains, it was paramount that everyone was at the right place at the exact same time. In the twentieth century, labor was increasingly done in offices due to the change in nature of labor. Which allowed for a freer interpretation of working hours but still labor followed a rather strict temporal and spatial organization that was obeyed by the masses, following Taylorist office principles. The working condition, meaning both the time scheduling and spatial accommodation, seem to reflect, and perhaps even mirror, the workings of the dominant technologies of the work done. This should be seen beyond the metaphorical and instead seen in terms of affordances. Nowadays, it is still the case that work is strongly tied to the technology it utilizes. ‘[N]ew industrial technologies produce a new form of labor.’62 Labor activities have increasingly become decentralized and international. The Internet, one of the main drivers of contemporary automation, is based on a decentralized international network.

Automation through the Interface deterritorializes working conditions, labor and leisure, as it was known in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The assemblage of the conventional company has loosened its limitations to its constituting components, not only the employees but also its physical organization. The result is a rise of various forms of freelance workers, or alternative workers. ‘With the advent of social media, the internet of things, and all sorts of smartification supported by various forms of networks, we are witnessing the emergence and concretization of new organizational forms of transindividual relations.’63 In the Netherlands for instance, the amount of employees with a traditional contract has been decreasing for over a decade now which has been countered by the rise in popularity of several types of flexible contracts.64 There are currently many different types of flexible labor one can engage in: from being entirely self-employment and free to choice what work to do and for who to on-call employment for a corporation. The way the workers of these various different type of flexible work engage with their spatial environment differs a lot among them and therefore they shall not be homogenized in terms of spatial and environmental requirements.

61 62 63 64

Here, architecture theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli is paraphrasing philosopher Hannah Arendt from her book The Human Condition. In Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, p. 97 Yuk Hui is rereading and expanding on the work of Karl Marx in On Automation and Free Time Yuk Hui, On Automation and Free Time See OECD Input to the Netherlands Independent Commission on the Regulation of Work by Commissie Regulering van Werk (Dutch Commision Regulation of Work)

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What could be seen as the common denominator among them is that their work is largely organized around interacting with the Interface. Throughout history, work has always been a technical endeavor and currently the increasing technologization, especially through computational and robotic tools, of work applies to the work of traditional employees as well. Besides the differing human interaction, the contemporary automation of cognitive action also ‘allows for relatively automated technologies to occupy positions that have traditionally been held by humans and vice versa, in principle allowing us to move into other areas of active labor — or not.’65 Thus, in the contemporary context of work, the relations among humans and relations between humans and technology have changed and new ways of working appear and old ones disappear.

The division between labor and leisure is being blurred both in spatial and in temporal terms, as already implied above in Colomina’s analysis. Meaning that labor can be done anywhere anytime and the same can be said about leisure. This was already shown by Hans Hollein 1969 project Mobile Office and described in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media.66 Automation is part of labor as well as part of leisure, meaning that aspect of one’s working life as well as leisure activities are automated and therefore require less physical effort. Interestingly enough, one of the many trendy flex office rental companies has even called itself Second Home to emphasize that labor is leisure and leisure is labor.67 A 24/7 working life is being advertised by them.68 An office should feel like home now; it is even almost one’s home.

What was once called an office, is now positioned in between the places one lives and one works.69 Colomina expands on this: ‘In today’s attention-deficit65

69

In this quote, the acronym “AI” is substituted by the term automation, since artificial intelligence could be seen as the automating of searching for correlation among data in order to predict elements of future situation as already stated by Matteo Pasquinelli. In Benjamin H. Bratton, The Terraforming, p. 31 For instance, Marshall McLuhan asserts that: ‘Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end the world of learning. The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure.

Whereas In the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artist in all ages.’ In Understanding Media, p. 346 See their company website: https://secondhome.io/ This has also been analyzed before by artist and writer Warren Neidich: ‘Our lives have becomes sites of exchange twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, 365 days a year in the distributed network conditions of this new economy.’ In the Introduction to The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three, p. 12 In office jargon, this is called third places. See The Office on The Grass, p. 142

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66

67 68

19th century

20th century

21st century

INFORMATION

Knowledge generating factory

KNOWLEDGE

Figure 8(*) The transductive affects of the workplace.

(*)

Original image of the upper two diagrams is by the consulting company Quickborner Team GmbH that developed the concept of BĂźrolandshaft, office landscape, in the 1960s.

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disorder society, we have discovered that we work better in short bursts punctuated by rest. Many companies provide sleeping pods in the office to maximize productivity. Bed and office are never far apart in the 24/7 world.’70 Due to the nature of contemporary automation, an automation that is always switched on, one can always engage in their working life. Throughout a day, one is able to seamlessly switch between work and leisure activities. This switching becomes so seamless that work and leisure could understood as one and the same thing.

In the old opposition of labor and leisure, labor used to refer to making a living, like earning money or growing crops to survive, whereas leisure used to coincide with free time. Simondon developed his own conception of work letting go of the labor-capital opposition, putting in its place the concept of technical activities.71 His concept did not aim directly at the labor-leisure dichotomy but could be applied in that context. Furthermore, this concept could be used as an expansion of Deacon’s concept of work and an attempt to add precision to it in relation to the Interface. Humans do not directly engage with technical objects anymore. The position of the mover of technical objects has been taken over by automated machines. Through automation, machines themselves handle technical objects and this has lead to alienation among craftsman already in the nineteenth century, but is now leading the office laborer into alienation. The role of humans moved to organizing and assisting the operation of machines, and most importantly developing new ways of operation, see figure 8. Because of this development the term labor has become obsolete. Therefore, according to Simondon, humans need to take part in technical activities. Technical activities should not be understood as work in terms of productivity and practicality. Rather, it is more creative and at its core lies the capacity to perceive and invent new relationships between heterogeneous entities, objects and humans.72 As automation is taking over repetitive actions as well as simples cognitive actions, working become less repetitive. Inventing these new relationships could be seen as a form of knowledge production and could be within the framework of lifelong learning. Work persists contemporary automation, but jobs do not. The world becomes post-labor, not post-work.

70 71 72

Beatriz Colomina, The 24/7 Bed in Work, Body, Leisure, p. 203 Both Yuk Hui in On Automation and Free Time and Jaehee Kim in Posthuman Labor examine the contemporary labor context using Simondon’s concept of technical activities.

Jaehee Kim, Posthuman Labor

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Work

35

COMFORT Two of the first few examples of the Internet of Things were a vending machine at the Carnegie Mellon University73 and a livestream of a coffee pot at the University of Cambridge.74 In both cases, the technology available was utilized to automate the process of leaving your desk, walking through the large university buildings toward the specific place, standing in line, and ordering, to ultimately consume the respective drink. At Carnegie Mellon the vending machine had a programmable interface, API, that researchers built a piece of software on top of. This piece of software shared whether there are any cans of Coca Cola in the vending machine at all, and if so, when it was the last time the vending machine was refilled. Because these facts were shared, from any room that had a computer connected to the, a that time still, intranet of the university, everyone was able to know at any time

Figure 9 The Coca Cola vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University

if there was any cold can of Coca Cola in the machine. Therefore one did not risk the chance of walking all the way to the machine and finding out that the machine was empty or the cans were not properly cooled yet. The same can be applied to the Trojan Room Coffee Pot that live streamed only a coffee pot.

This stream was broadcast on the world wide web and therefore available to everyone on the globe, but it was only useful for employees of the University of Cambridge. Before actually leaving that workplace and head to the Trojan Room, one could already figure out whether there was hot coffee ready.

What these two examples indicate is that the objective behind the creation of 73 74

Reinier de Graaf, pp. 109-10, or see IBM’s story https://www.ibm.com/blogs/ industries/little-known-story-first-iot-device/ For the original website, see https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

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technology that automates is to achieve a higher status of comfort. Historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion defines comfort by opposing the Latin origin of the word comfort with was understood after the eighteenth century: ‘The word ‘comfort’ in its Latin origin meant ‘to strengthen’. The West, after the eighteenth century, identified comfort with ‘convenience’: Man shall order and control his intimate surroundings so that they may yield him the utmost ease.’75 The implications of automation regarding to comfort can be considered using what Magnani calls docility. Again departing from the concept of affordances, docility could be understood as ‘the tendency to lean on various ecological resources, which are released through cognitive niches.’76 This assertion could be explained in the sense that humans take the technological inventions and interventions of their ancestors before starting to manipulate the environment themselves. In terms of contemporary automation this could mean two things: relying on the affordances of the actual automated technical object as well as relying on the output of these automated technical objects. Contemporary automation does not only automate physical activities, although it does that too, but it automates decision-making as well. For instance Google Maps decides how one is going to move from A to B or a calendar application finds the right time slot for multiple attendees to have a meeting. This goes well beyond the bodily implications of contemporary automation. One could assert that the role of these technologies is to ‘analyze our behaviors over time to build up an automated pattern that regulates the world around us until eventually this world, continuously doctored and perfected, fits us like a glove.’77 Again, comfort seems to be the sole aim. Comfort to make sure as little steps have to be taken in order to achieve a goal. Comfort to make sure as little effort the body has to do.

The focus on comfort when creating new technology, could be seen as a problematic development. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas warned that “the digital city” would lead to total conformity.78 He is one of many contemporary thinkers commenting on the “smartification” of the world. The problem is that automation reduces the plurality of affordances of an environment, meaning that apart from the creation of new affordances, previous affordances might be lost. This, subsequently, decreases the productivity of an affective relation with the environment and therefore no new problems and potentials appear. When increasingly things are given to one without effort, without work in Deacon’s sense of the word, incentives to abduct and manipulate the environment and create new information disappear. Artist duo Metahaven comment on this situation by claiming the importance of accidents: ‘I agree on design 75 76 77 78

Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 260 Magnani, p. 323 Reinier de Graaf, p. 111 Nathan Gardels interviewed Rem Koolhaas for the Washington Post, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/09/remkoolhaas/

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as something that must not only be comfortable with ambiguity but with accidents. There are certain ways in which particular notions of design telescope down to eliminate ambiguity, to make things that are so intuitive and obvious that it “has to” be that way. While I’m thankful for door knobs that work the way I imagine they will, I think taking this as a universal principle has in the long run also brought its own accidents and own problems.’79 The idea of accidents will not be maintained in the sense of crashes and collisions, in the negative sense of the word. Rather, the idea of accidents will be used in terms of the unexpectedness of accidentality.

Accidents are part of what DeLanda calls economies of agglomeration.80 This is a type of economy, in terms of human association not merely monetarily, contrary to an economy of scale, which is part of the Taylorist and Fordist tradition of work. In an economy of agglomeration new knowledge and innovation is produced, instead of mass produced goods. This type of economy flourishes by the grace of human interaction, preferably random, unplanned and among heterogeneous people to allow for boundaries being pushed. These accidents are unexpected problems that occur through technology as De Graaf has stated above, but are also more generally rhythms that unexpectedly create new milieus. Again, these problems should not be looked at solely in a negative sense. The same applies to accidents.

When referring back to automation making certain actions obsolete and therefore erasing these related action-potentials, see figure 6 in the chapter Automation, it could be argued that between and throughout these actions accidents might occur due to the flow of many rhythms. There is room for indeterminacy.81 Like DeLanda asserts, this indeterminacy is paramount in the contemporary context of work when jobs are no longer. When these actions are superseded by a form of automation, a specific technical object, rhythms related to these actions stop appearing. An efficacious way of working, taking part in Simondon's technical activities, is to allow the most rhythms to cross one another and that leads a larger rhizome of knowledge developed by individuals or groups of people. As comfort is already the aim of the Interface and its development, accidents, or indeterminacy, should be the aim of the built environment. According to philosopher Marshall McLuhan: 'we only see technologies for what they are in the moment they are superseded.'82 It would be much too simplified to assert that a building is a single technology, it is an assemblage of technical objects but also of actions taking place in it and its cultural importance and narrative. Though, it is important to see what the automation of the Interface has superseded from the constituent parts of 79 80 81

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Metahaven, Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, Psyop: An Anthology Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, pp. 85-98 The term indeterminacy is reference to Cedric Price's use of this word in his architectural designs. See for instance Pier Vittorio Aureli's text on the work of Cedric Price: Labor and Architecture (p. 102-3) and Stanley Mathews in The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture.

Mark Wigley is paraphrasing Marhsall McLuhan here in The Architecture of the Mouse, p. 53.

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the assemblage of a building and that is most importantly accidents. These accidents that are increasingly being automated could have always, and actually were always part of, at least some, buildings. Nowadays, in order to enhance the efficacy of technical activities in the context of automation by the Interface, a building should provoke accidents.

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PROJECT In this chapter, the study based on the general research question raised in the introduction will be concluded. "What are the spatial requirements for a building that enhances the efficacy of work in the context of automation by the Interface?" A building that engages with the Interface is often called, using the popular term, "smart building". A general definition of a smart building given by scholars Alex Buckman, Martin Mayfield and Stephen Beck is: ‘Smart Buildings are buildings which integrate and account for intelligence, enterprise, control, and materials and construction as an entire building system, with adaptability, not reactivity, at the core, in order to meet the drivers for building progression: energy and efficiency, longevity, and comfort and satisfaction. The increased amount of information available from this wider range of sources will allow these systems to become adaptable, and enable a Smart Building to prepare itself for context and change over all timescales.’’83 The concept of a smart building is used in practice rather than in academia. This definition is scraped and filtered from various definition floating around in practice. The actual manner a smart building is defined in this quote is following an appliance model that largely aims at energy reduction (energy, efficiency, and longevity) and comfort accumulation (comfort 83 84

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and satisfaction). These goals are all quantitative or at least quantifiable, but based on this study not adequate as a response to the contemporary context of automation by the Interface. In a smart building, a similar objective of comfort, making effort obsolete, like the Interface, is pursued. Though, not all of the smart building's objectives are contested, it is for instance clear that buildings need to contribute to sustainability, but being analogical to the Interface is not sufficient.

When attempting to be analogous, a building is solely seen using the framework of an appliance model. An appliance model is a building that is an empty shell, made "smart" with the addition of smart appliances: a refrigerator that knows what it contains all the time or a sensor that can detect when and by how many a room is used during the day. These are examples that relate to the definition of Buckman et al. when they talk about increased information (data, to more precise) available. The space itself is not affected.84 In general, something, a device or appliance, is seen as smart when this object contains interconnected sensors for data harvesting and behavior prediction in order to adapt and respond to ensure more comfort for its users. A smart building is filled with these objects to arrive at the above-mentioned goals of energy reduction and comfort accumulation and subsequently become smart

Alex Buckman, Martin Mayfield, and Stephen Beck, What Is a Smart Building?, pp. 98-9 This is underlined by Reinier de Graaf: ‘With a bravado as calculated as it probably was misplaced, I had confessed on camera that I had no real clue what the smart city was; in my view, the main impact of digital technology on the built environment was that there was none.’ p. 367

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itself.

To be smart and to be intelligent are two different things. According to philosopher Catherine Malabou, to be intelligent means to be aware of one’s environment and to be able to adjust to it.85 In the definition of a smart building above, the term adaptability is used to described a building that has the potentially to adapt to changing contexts over time. But this is a rather fragmented approach that does not seem to suffice in times of continuous change through the Interface. Again, using the Interface one can do whatever, wherever, whenever. Therefore, interoperability seems to be more appropriate.86 Interoperability refers to a continuous capacity to be aware of its environment. It therefore relates to the potentials of the physical environment continuously and not just in some moments the building adapts.

In terms of affordances, to be aware of one's environment means to be able to perceive information and subsequently engage in a process of abduction. The concept of intelligence could be used to apply the study on the Interface to buildings and subsequently conclude this paper. Simondon defines a technical object in terms 85 86

87 88

of the relations to its environment87 and this has been further elaborated and applied to buildings by architecture theorist Georges Teyssot.88 A technical object can only be aesthetic when it is rooted in its environment or even an extension of this environment. Aesthetics can described as the appropriateness or value of the appearance. But here aesthetics is broadened up to what the object, a building, does in a pragmatic sense to its environment. The way Simondon defines aesthetic quality can be further applied to define a building that is complementary to the Interface in affective terms, opposed to analogous. The environment of the building conceptualized here does not pertain to its surroundings or climatic context exclusively. The environment here are humans, or more specifically the actions undertaken by humans inside the building. Though, the conceptual integration of the Interface and a building does not only pertain to the program of the building, meaning that a newly invented or different program mix are not to be the sole objective. In the context of work, this is to be related to new forms of work, its new actions and new objections. Instead, its spatial form, the building's relations to its location and among its interior layout, are of most importance

Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence, pp. 139-44 The concept of interoperability was one of the main drivers for the creation and development of the Internet. The Internet was developed in order to be able accommodate many heterogeneous types of content and software languages and principles. It was already thought that these were also going to change in the future. See Sharon Eisner Gillet and Mitchell Kapor in The Self-Governing Internet.

Gilbert Simondon, The Genesis of Technicity, pp. 13-5 Georges Teyssot, For a Techno-Aesthetic: Infrastructures and Metastable Systems, in Infrastructure Space, p. 376 (I-XVI)

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as the Interface deterritorializes relations between working humans and the building.

The aim for the project would be to develop an office building that provokes collaboration and knowledge exchange indeterminately to increase the efficacy of the technical activities of the freelance users. The project will be a work environment, what used to be an office building in which people would do their job in regular time schedules. Nowadays the time, place, and personal organization are no longer tied to one specific set of actions for one specific company in one specific building. The project will be a further spatial and practical exploration of the Interface. As a conclusion to this research paper, five propositions are put forward based on this study that will inform the architectural project.

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1 The Interface is a deterritorializing force that alters the way people engage with their physical surroundings.

2 The Interface creates information through the filtering and conversion of data and instigates new potentials for pragmatic action.

3 The Interface automates and that substitutes the potentiality of accidents with comfort.

4 Automation leads to technical activities substituting the notion of jobs, and a shift in work towards creation of information.

5 An intelligent building is complementary to the Interface, interoperable and provokes accidents to enhance the efficacy of technical activities.

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