December 3, 2007

Research Paper

0.proto-manifesto

The basic assupmtion is that if you continue to read this paper you will remain in the same environment (quite likely shifting your position just a little bit). The paper, together with the abstract has ...... words, which means that average reader (with english as a second language) is going to read it in .......h...........m. If you are in the metro carriage or waiting for a plane, you will most likely have to leave before finishing, but if you are at home, for .......h ........m you are likely to enjoy the calmness of your living room or your studio.
The Wikipedia gets reedited ....... times an hour and there are approximately ....... active contributors. It means that it will get reedited ..... times while you are reading. With time your house, which we will from now call the tangible environment, will gain the ability of re-edition. The re-edition will take place basing on similar ethics as Wikiedia re-edition does. Your current house will be a momentous outcome of the constant process of re-edition executed by collective inteligence.
Let us see if it could really happen.

1. Vitrual and possible
Virtual is the condition with no predefined solutions. It is what one might do but no neccesseary will given any cicrumstances. …
2.1 tangible environment

The idea is to use a physical objects (sometimes even tools we use every day) in order to interact with computers. This concept means that using technologies like computer vision, tracking devices, touch screens etc. the system is able to know how the user is manipulating a collection of physical objects, and then it is able to translate these actions into events in the computer interface. There's a basic paper you should read in order to understand this concept. The author is one of the TUI parents (Hiroshi Ishii).

We see the physical space as the tangible environment. Architecture that is entireliy physical is the tangible environemnt, but for architecture that is partially physical, the tangible environment is just one side of it. Maybe even one atom (the rest are the bits). The tangible environement augmented with technology is now called the performative architecture.

2.2 performative

(ONL) Performative architecture it is performance what moves the attention away from the static object and towards a complex and dynamic plane of relations. It is a effects that transforming culture, architecture is becoming a cultural production. In the Performative Architecture technology and culture aren’t separate elements, becoming integrated and reacting on each others.


2.3 platform

The platform is the communication space between real and possible or virtual. The interface is the mean of communication with a device capable of computing.
The final platform of communication is always the pre-designed software that processes the inputs. Different proposals vary depending on the source of the input.
When exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Muscle NSA reacted to people waling by it. The exhibition visitors could also reprogram it’s configuration on the screen, literally connected to it. Two of the input gathering methods were applied, the tracing one (physical) and the on-the-site interface (software interface based, but not enabled by the web).
In Decoi’s wall the singer that performs in front of it is an actuator at the same time. The platform recieves the tracing input only.
“Negotiate my Boundary!” has different levels to which the idea of the performative is applied. One of them is the skin. The performance of the skin is pre-set for every user, depending on two factors. One of them is the visibility from the other side, the other is the ability to go through the skin. The skin opens and closes in real-time depending on user’s position. It is another example of the tracing input.
The other performative system in RAMTV’ proposal is “the genotype”. “what is refered to as one household is treated as something other than a single genotype, or even a combination of several other genotypes”. The momentous state of the genotype is an outcome of two factors: the pre-designed location (that depends on the site access, sun exposure etc.) and the “stock-exchange” negotiation process. The actual form of the genotype (and therefore a household) is an outcome of a carefully researched web-based community interface that enables the mass-customization by fulfilling indyvidual needs. The input comes from the web interface, but the actual negotiation takes place only within the limits of the pre-set matrix of 1 meter cubes.

conclusion:
The negotiation process in RAMTV design is a try to enable the bottom-up reconfiguration of the tangible environement. The negotiation borders are however pre-designed to fit in the 1 meter grid. They remain pre-designed. It turns out that for contemporary performative architecture platforms, no matter wheather the input comes from on-the-site interface, web interface or tracing, connects the real with the possible only.

3. How we became cyborgs

While reading “Me++” you have the feeling that every part of our everyday life (or rather every kind of the network) is transforming from static, “bulky” form towards the portable form attached to the body or at least being very close to it. Both blocks of ice in a drink and communication became personal. Mitchell claims that by this process we witness the dawn of dematerialization era, where information will be fully relifed from the place.
While wraping our body with both tangible and virtual networks, we become cyborgs. It is an interation of the post-human idea, but, at this point we already understand that there is no need to “literally take carbon to zero”.
Architecture might be one of the disciplines that still remain in the realm of bulky, improgrammable devices. Architecture, as we understand it today, remains in the realm of the before dematerialization era, therefore being niedostosowana to needs of contemporary cyborgs. Architecture need to understand the cyborg condition and recreate the design process focusing on the enabled-by-the-cyborg possibilities. Architecture needs an update.


4.2 Prosumerism and customer centricity

In customer centricity approach companies decide on the basis and customers get to choose more detailed settings of the product they are planning to purchase. This kind of approach was introduced my many companies already. The customization available on Dell’s or Apple’s websites, famous Nike trainers that can change colors, M&M platform for inscribing your girlfriend nickname on the candy and ONL’s Variomatic all bare the same quality of the possible only. Customers get to decide between the already fully pre-designed products. The promise of mass customization in therefore limited only to the pre-designed solution, which makes the array of available products more diverse than in a traditional producer-consumer relation, but still far away from truly personally suited product.
In 2003 Don Tapscott coined the term prosumerism in order to describe how “the gap between producers and consumers is blurring. Tapscott and Williams give the Second Life as an example of the community where prosumerism is leading marketing force. The participants create goods of any kind, using only their creativity in order to sell them for Linded dollars, which are worth real money. Interesting issue is, that the regulations which need to rise when any kind of commerce enters the scene, are created mostly in a bottom-up manner, pretty much in a way like Wikipedia society erases the spoilers of it’s content form their rows. Second Life not only enables, but demands the creativity of it’s users in order to maintain and grow, but it is a fully virtual environment.
Prosumerism is possible also in regard of the tangibles. Customers not only answer to the limited set of questions regarding the future product. The self-organize to create their own products. One of the examples is how prosumers hacked into the I-pods. The I-pod hack is available on the net, and while you install it, the I-pod functions are much wider – the Podzilla can be installed also and I-pod becomes the pocket Linux environment. Companies, as usual in regard of the new collective intelligence in action, can try to fight with those attempts, or can use it for their purposes.
If we can think about performative architecture as the code of behavior, then we can hack the code. If we would hack the ONL Muscle tower and reprogram it, we would act like prosumers. The question is if Muscle would then bare the quality of negotiation between real and virtual, not only possible?


here are some other thoughts on the subject:

Analysis of the existing mode of collective intelligence in action of production intangibles:
The information technologies revolution have radically introduced many new context, like social, economical or political one. A question to be answered is wheather it has introduced the new spatial context. “To find something out, or to get something done in the city, you now have a choice. You can navigate the brick-and-mortar half in a time-honoured way, or increasingly, you can switch to its electronic twin.” (Mitchel) But the electonic twin is not merely a mirrored condition of the physical. It provides new possibilities of communication, interaction and production. The swarm egzisting in the electronic twin is now beeing referd to as collective intelligence. The inteligence that is capable of introducing it’s own paradigmatic shift on a scale of the industrial age or a information technologies revolution. It already delivered new means of production, among which peer production and prosumerizm are of our particular interest.

peer producing:
Several examples prove that peer producing works outside of the realm of software design, but Paul Diguid[1] points out that there has to be certain rules fulfilled in order for it to work in a specific environment. First rule indicated by Diguid is “peer production projects constantly change. What is flawed today may be flawless tomorrow”. Wales himself provides an answer to that, claiming that content on Wikipedia goes through “Dariwnian process of evolution”. An article at Wikipedia is changed in average twenty times during it’s editing procedure. The quality does nor rise lineary, but rather evolves in an evolutionary manner, while article reciving inputs form people with different backgorunds. Wales therefore puts the constant flux of information as an positive factor of final input shaping.
It is the purest form of producing goods and services. In many communities, the work is voluntary and nonmonetary. Wikipedia is an example of peer production where people may join to community and create information base. The reason is that people becoming a part of community because they want, they may decied in what part they may share with their knowlage - self-selection . .The big companies might learn how to use the potential of theirs workers – “ People just self-select to do project where they have expertise and intrest”
[1] Paul Diguid, „Limits of Self-organisation: Peer production and laws of quality”

About the Materiality:-

Role Of Computers
It is a commonly held fallacy that a computer is a thing or a tool such as a hammer or a jigsaw. Many thinkers have clarified before that the computer is anenvironment which contains thousands of tools. A computer is a place where one finds all sorts of magical materials and means to play and produce.
Within a short space of time the computer has become a widely accepted feature of architecture, both in the design process and in the everyday operation of buildings, and we are constantly aware that the computer's introductions into architecture will eventually have farreaching
consequences. After all, the current revolution is not just about the computer as a tool but about its role and effect on the form of architecture and thinking

The digital revolution is affecting not only the way we produce drawings, but also the way we think about architecture. Such expressionistic, neo-baroque forms would have been unthinkable without higher technology, which allows for customization at a massive scale.

Following are the three different ways Architects conceive a design work in soft materials:



1. Working with Solids completely bounded by planar surfaces.



Eisenman’s work, well until the last couple of years, has been concerned with solid geometry and transformations of solid geometry. His transformationtechniques included subjecting solids to the logic of surface deformations such as Bezier curves. His Columbus Convention Center is a good examplefor this.

2. Polynomial Surfaces (Splines)


Clues to Gehry’s imagination (Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Bard College, Annandale,USA, 2003) are evident in his recent sketches where one finds a field of flowing and complexlyinterwoven curves with no definiteboundary definition. Compare these to his earlier sketches where the boundary conditions and tectonic are much more Euclidean and physical (for brevity purposes, illustrations could not be included here). Gehry now thinks in splines. For his purposes, Gehry quite extensively uses CATIA’s surface modeling module.


3. Blobs (Isomorphic Polysurfaces)Popularized by Greg Lynn (1998), blobs were originally developed for the study of complex molecules. The parameters that define blobs are such things as mutual gravity (weight), extent ofinfluence (threshold) and form type (ellipsoid etcetera). At the level of imagination, these modalities of definition lead to works that are distinctly different from solids or surfaces.Greg Lynn’s work is imagined in Blobs but defined and constructed using Solids. His first built work, Korean Presbytarian Church, is much more exciting as an idea than as a built reality from this viewpoint. However, it is perhaps the first to use and popularizethe softerial, Blob. In a way, Blobs were his medium.


Imagining, defining and constructing with softerials becomes definitely more exciting, rewarding and lucrative activity. In such a world, softerials play a more major role than does brick-and-mortar architecture. Once the difference between mediumand building vanishes, medium becomes the material out of which buildings are made. Solids, surfaces and blobs are three softerials that have begun to transform the way we imagine, defineand build a world that really matters.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The prosumerism concept is catching on everywhere.. The research is good... Keep the good job up !!