Digital Technologies’ implementation on urban design

ABSTRACT

Investigation of the changes of urban design taking place as a result of pervasive digital technology. Specifically, how digital technologies can change the way of designing and maintaining the urban space, the placement and reception of information about the city, the process of buying and selling , the way people meet in the city and finally the movements.

The approach of the research will be the analysis of example projects , analysis of prospects and analysis of developed technological systems (such as Wireless Communication, Location Awareness, Displays and Location Specific Information.)

Based on the analysis of the examples, we will try to respond to the following questions.
Will our use of the city change as media and communication technologies enters everyday life?
Are these new technologies going to change the city image and how?
Will the use of digital technologies in urban design improve the liveability of the city?
Who will benefit from this process and how?

PRESENTATION

You can download the final 8 slide presentation of our paper here

history UNWIRED

Developed in 2005, this project was a first-ever mix of mobile video, animation, audio, and Bluetooth locative technologies in the tourism sector. The tour takes visitors around the neighbourhood of Castello, guided by the voices of Venetian citizens who depict a particularly local experience of art and craft, history and folklore, public and private spaces.

Their philosophy is to develop "content-driven technology". That is, instead of creating filler for new technology, they are developing innovative stories and adapting the technology to those stories. Thus they have formed a relationship with Dell, Motorola and MIT Media Lab that allows them to develop software and features in Smartphones that arise from storytelling needs and human interaction with mobile media.

●Bluetooth: they are using this location sensing ability of bluetooth beacons to trigger interactive art along the course and to reward prudent exploration of private spaces. The plot, path, and tone of the content evolves according to individual’s footsteps.

●AGPS (Assisted Global Positioning System): they have developed several location-specific "media clouds" along the bustling, Via Garibaldi, a key point in the tale of Castello's evolution after World War II. AGPS available on 3G phone networks can sense the general location of the walker and load a sound-video collage as they move down the street. (this feature was only modelled for the 2005 experiment)

●Flash-Video: They are using the sophisticated web browsers on these phones to display Flash content and seemlessly link to video content.

●Thermachromics: They have installed two interactive art pieces along the course that activate in the presence of bluetooth. Panels in the facade of an abandoned greenhouse have been covered with black, thermachromic ink. When walkers pass by the greenhouse a circuit is tripped by bluetooth in the devices and the panels are heated to reveal a growing plant form in the facade. Also they coated hanging laundry with thermachromic ink, and wires in the laundry heat up to reveal the outline of the landscape you are viewing

Venice has a lot of “surface tension.” The place looks like a movie set and many tourists marvel at the rich history and intimate details of its monuments. However overcrowding has taken some of the magic from Venice’s main monuments (500.000 tourist in 1960 and approximately 14 million tourist in 2003.) History Unwired will use mapping and multimedia as a Trojan Horse to give some depth to these wonders and lead tourists to encounter with unexplored monuments, historical figures, and neighbourhoods.

Bibliography

1. Feuer, Alan. "To Venetians' Sorrow, the Sightseers Come in Battalions" New York Times. June 10, 2004, p D1.

2. Venice Card website. Venice Card is a service of the Comune di Venezia designed to consolidate cultural and practical offerings. http://www.venicecard.it/itinerari/itinerari_ita.jsp

3. La Biennale website. http://www.labiennale.org/it/news/arte

4. Jason Spingarn-Koff. Museum Tour: Walk This Way http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42152,00.htm
http://mit.edu/frontiers/english/tour.html demo

User manufacturing: apoc, ponoko, fab@home

The relatively new and fascinating prospects of using mass customization in architectural practice seem to find their forerunner to the “user manufacturing” processes. New infrastructure is enabling consumers to become instant designers and manufacturers. User manufacturing is enabled by three basic technologies: (a) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design format. (b) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. (c) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies ("fabbing") realize the process of translating any 3-D data files into physical products - in a desktop scale. Combining this technology with recent web technologies we arrive at a radical new way to provide customized products skipping the entire line of product development, central manufacturing and transporting. To define better this process of mass customization, three examples will be briefly examined.

1. 'a-poc'
'a-poc' is based upon miyake's design concept, a piece of cloth, is a unique suggestion for everyday life, which goes far beyond the boundaries of fashion.It is made using an industrial knitting or weaving machine programed by a computer. This process creates continuous tubes of fabric within which lie both shape and pattern.The customer cuts sleeves and skirts exactly to the length he wants. 'a-poc' is made in a sequence in which thread literally goes into a machine and re-emerges as a piece of clothing, an accessory, or even a chair. This interactive new method not only reduces leftover fabric, but also permits the wearers to participate in the final step of the design of their clothing: they determine the final shape of the product.
Mass production and custom-made clothing, seemingly opposing ideas, become compatible with each other through the wizardry of technology and the fire of imagination.

2. ponoko
For most companies, product design and development is a long process of trial and error, involving, among other things, in-house designers, committees, timed product releases, and, ultimately, customer feedback. Until a product sells, or if it doesn't sell, it takes up costly shelf space in either stores or warehouses.
But by letting individuals dream up, make, and then sell unique products on demand, Ponoko
is attempting to eliminate the product-development wing. Ultimately, it hopes to eliminate the need for a centralized manufacturing plant as well, by recruiting a large enough community of digital manufacturers--people scattered around the world who have 3-D printers, CNC routers, and laser cutters. Moving the site of production as close as possible to the point of purchase will reduce the need for long-distance shipping.

3. Fab@Home
Creativity is a uniquely human trait, but Lipson is driven by the idea of allowing machines to do design and manufacturing for us. Lipson has now created the fab-home machine for anyone to build for a cost of around 2000 euro. Pushing the boundaries beyond simple shapes, Lipson has made a working battery, an electrically-activated polymer muscle and a touch sensor by printing different layers of material. The possibilities are limited by what you can extrude from interchangeable cartridges - quick-hardening plastic is the favourite, but the machine can also handle and layer plaster, Play-Doh, silicone, wax and metals or mixtures with a low melting point such as solder (made of tin and lead). Some users have found chocolate, cheese and cake icing (which may also be used as a temporary soluble support material for hollow structures) rewarding too.

If you make a conventional part in manufacturing, you either machine away a block of material or form the part in a mould. And as any manufacturer will confirm, 'tooling up' is incredibly expensive. Rapid manufacturing techniques use digital data to make the part additively, laying down layers of material which do not need a mould.If these technologies take off, it may spark a new industrial revolution.
"In 1975, people were soldering together Altair 8800 computers - that's where RepRap and Fab@Home are now. The Apple II came out in 1977, the BBC Micro and IBM PC in 1981, and then the world was never the same," says Bowyer. "I think that within 10 years private individuals will be able to make for themselves virtually any manufactured product that is today sold by industry. I sometimes wonder if politicians realise that the entire basis of the human economy is about to undergo the biggest change since the invention of money."
In that case, fabbing won't just break the mould - it will throw it away entirely.

FOA's material- Material FOA

The architectural education of FOA took place in the 80’s, in a time that the main research aimed to peripheral fields of architecture such as sociology, politics and economy. FOA recognized that this kind of analysis was not effective enough in a context that was gradually becoming more and more complicated and fluxionary. So, they gave more emphasis to the construction, the materiality and organization of their projects. In that way their proposition for the way of analyzing and composing architecture focuses on the geometry, the construction, the organization, the materiality, the technique, the tectonics and the technology.
FOA’s main theoretical aspect aims directly at the reality. Their “design ethics” propose that architecture concerns the need and not the excess. With a dose of irony, they call their way of thinking “theory of excuse”, because they tend to follow a design path only if they find a pragmatical point to start, such as the function, the structure or the circulation. And though their architectural production consists of parametrical and digital procedures materiality and construction are very active from the very beginning of the design.
Very important is the definition that FOA give for the notion of material. Material is considered anything that can be used to the production of architecture. Everything used for that production has the properties of material that is coherence, density, weight. As an example they mention the function of a project. They try to approach it as something that has natural and geometrical properties such as weight, friction, hardness, resistance and texture. In that way function can be considered as just another construction material. Their target is to surpass the social and linguistic meaning of function and to extract its materiality. In this way the notion of material is very widen- as flows, function, natural and artificial materials, functions, even representations compose new complex materials that can perform many different tasks at the same time.
And this is what is considered to be the edge of the architectural evolution in the architecture of FOA. As they say the construction of even more sophisticated and cohesive materials is what they think they should do as architects in the non-standard way of designing.

Complexity in geometry can be discovered in nature, human body, music, as well as in architecture. Though it is assumed that complex architectural structures are a result of last century’s technological evolution , complex manifolds have also been used formerly. Gaudi, was forming complex geometry structures in Sagrada Familia 100 years ago . Another example of non computer aided yet complex design, was Philips Co Pavillion designed by Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier, for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.

In October 1956 Le Corbusier's sketches for the pavillion were entrusted to Iannis Xenakis, who was charged to translate them through mathematics. At the time Xenakis was working in his musical composition “Metastasis” which itself was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier's proportional scale arising out of the Fibonacci series and its association with the golden section.He transformed the graphical musical sketches of Metastasis into architectural schemes for designing the shape of Philips Pavilion .He made this through techniques, often exalted by the use of the computer, that associated the graphic construction (to compose as in writing a score) with the sonorous performance (to compose as in producing a sonorous result).The structure was a series of conjoined hyperbolic parabaloids-curved planes mathematically generated entirely from straight lines. The development of this idea into architectural form passed through a compositional process in which it is difficult to say if the mathematical structure precedes or proceeds from the architectural image.

“With the aid of electronic computers the composer becomes a sort of pilot ... sailing in the space of sound, across sonic constellations and galaxies ..." Iannis Xenakis

We can say that this is a unique compositional event which signifies that at the basis of some architectural events - perhaps those celebrating most the process of transformation of an idea from pure abstraction to factual object - were those concepts whose development is possible through the intervention of the mathematics because:

“... some relationships between music and architecture are very easy to intuit in a confused way, delicate to specify and to define, and it is not impossible to have doubts about them, because what is aesthetic is uncertain. But they seemed to me resounding. It is clear that music and architecture are both arts that don't need to imitate things; they are arts in which matter and form have relate more intimately than anywhere else; one and the other address general sensibility. Both admit repetition, an omnipotent tool; both apply to the physical effects of size and intensity, by means of which they can astonish the senses and the mind, even to annihilation. Finally, their respective nature permits an abundance of combinations and regular developments that connect or compare them with geometry and analysis.”

Xenakis's final statement at the end of his long and detailed discussion of the Philips Pavilion is:

“For the time being only cement lies at the origin of the new architecture. It prepares the bed in which the plastic materials of tomorrow will form a river rich in forms and volumes, figures that are found not only in the biological entities but above all in the most abstract mathematics.”