Yesterday, Jan.19th, the New York Times; the next article in a long row about our homes becoming ‘smart’. What usually is forgotten in all of these wishful-thinking business-oriented thoughts is that a home is more than the sum of bricks, mortar and technology. Our house is not a home because we can automate the lights and the refrigerator, but because we live in a sphere we call our own. Technology in our homes should focus less on practicalities and more on adaptability, experience, imagination.
Auteur archieven: martinpot
a sense of awareness
a sense of awareness.
“If the wind starts to blow, swarms of leaves turn out to be subtle bioengineered robots that harness that very wind to propel themselves into an emergent shelter that surrounds you”.
Jaron Lanier, ‘Who owns the Future’. (2013, p.9)
The recent announcement of a 2014 IoT-conference states that “the Internet of Things (IoT) has been considered an innovative and imminent information infrastructure enabling to ubiquitously network various machines, physical devices, and objects, denoted as things, for environment sensing, information sharing and collaboration in intelligent and autonomous manner.” (italics MP)
Our homes are, next to the place to which we keep returning, also the environment where we are surrounded by memories of – past – experiences, dreams and images. Many of these are closely related to objects: many of us occupy houses that have a history of sometimes ages. These houses have witnessed generations of inhabitants, each of which has left their personal signs, marks and traces. Since decades our housing is simply ‘functioning’ , meaning that it does not ‘communicate’; a house remains a passive structure which was not ‘responsive’, let alone communicative. Lees verder
tiny appartment
Yesterday, Thursday 28th. in Rotterdam; the presentation of a series of studies/projects called Tiny Appartments by TU-Delft’s Hyperbodylab, run by Prof. Kas Oosterhuis, in collaboration with real estate company Blauwhoed. Working prototypes on a 1:1 scale show a variety of options and solutions to deal with functionalities in a limited space.
Technology and/or senses?
Technology and/or senses?.
My first two blogs may have created the impression that I am something of a Luddite , i.e. someone who has an overall negative attitude towards technology in general. So, before proceeding, let me be clear on this: I am not. What I do think is that technology primarily should have a serving role which we can manage and control; where this concerns architecture this raises the question whether our speed and ways of implementing innovative technologies does keep up with our ability to relate these developments to our senses. After all, as humans living in a hybrid world we perceive – and act – to a large extend as individual beings who are also in part depending on innovative technologies. Architecture and man ‘depend’ on each other; we experience space – and therefore architecture – by moving through it and technology becomes an increasingly important part of that space. In his book architect Kas Oosterhuis states: “we must see all objects, including the ‘I’ and individual building components, as actors, as active players in parametric world”. (Oosterhuis, Towards a New Kind of Building, p.24) (http://www.naipublishers.nl/architecture/towards_new_building_e.html) Lees verder
KIKK
Last Nov. 7, 8 and 9th. in Namur /Belgium, the KIKK-festival was held, subtitled the Next Utopia. On the 7th. lectures/presentations by e.g. Paolo Cirio, Evan Roth, Usman Haque. Some others to my taste a bit off course regarding the theme; nevertheless again fine examples of ‘what will be the dreams of tomorrow?’
the New interior
On Sunday, Nov. 24th,, Matthew Stadler gives the Benno Premsela-lecture in Amsterdam’s Portugese Synagoge on ‘What is the interior’. Technological and political change – particularly the reach of digital technologies and state and market involvement in them – has made conventional notions of “the interior” obsolete. Stadler proposes a broader concept – the interior as the space of composition – and argues for the urgency of design work and research into this broader concept.
See: the New Institute, Rotterdam.
hand and ear
Friday 25th.October, the New Institute Rotterdam; a 3-hour seminar by artist Stelarc and philosopher Henk Oosterling as part of the exhibition Biodesign. Despite several attemps by Oosterling to try to get past the issues of art as such the whole afternoon remained somewhat one-sided. Connecting technological developments to art while some of them have possibilities in society is declaring art as individual statement – no problem there – while disregarding its enhancive options in society. But fascinating it was: growing an ear on one’s arm.
Should a home be smart?
Should a home be smart?
An issue that keeps coming back when the development and implementation of IoT is discussed is that of the ‘Smart Home’; recently accompanied by a – sometimes semantic – discussion about the difference between a smart home and an intelligent home. Since this is, next to food for thought, also something of a contradiction I will contemplate on this a little further. One of my favourite poetic lines is one written in 1944 by the French surrealistic poet Paul Eluard: “When the peaks of our sky come together, my house will have a roof”. This, to me, reflects the ontology of our home: our current house has an address, our home can be abstract, maybe even somewhere else. It is our way of building houses that creates the dichotomy of public and private space: we build a house and – intend to – create a home there, without realising ourselves why and how we ‘dwell’ where we do. Lees verder
IoT, all the rage?
IOT, all the rage?
“We should seek a future where more people will do well, without losing liberty,even as technology gets better, much better.”
Jaron Lanier, Who owns the Future? 2013:4
At the recent CES-2013 in Las Vegas the Internet of Things was declared ‘all the rage’; Gartner’s Hype-Cycle 2013 report stated that IoT is some ten years from ‘the plateau of productivity’.[1] Should we look for a single connotation on the term ‘architecture’ we end up with references to digital infrastructure instead of one on the build environment. Since this is a new platform dedicated to the IoT – and this blog is about architecture – it might be wise to get the semantics straight before continuing with any further discussion on IoT’s framework and applications concerning our build environment, i.e. architecture.
In 1996 Mark Weiser and John Seeley Brown paved the way in their ‘Coming Age of Calm Technology’, in 1999 it was Kevin Ashton who coined the term ‘internet of things’ : the connection between objects (things) and subjects ( people) to the internet. The years after a wide variety of definitions[2] appeared which may vary in articulation according to approach and/or stakeholder.
This ontological discussion gets interesting when, due to a more thorough rethinking of its origins, the term itself becomes subject of doubt and/or rejection. In 2011 it was K. Swaminathan[3] who declared the IoT a concept instead of a technology, in which “the IoT has materially nothing to do with the internet.” This move, away from pragmatics to theory gets interesting when we contemplate the additional abstract values of linking objects and subjects to the internet. After all, without going into semantics as well: adding a technology is not similar to adding a concept. Being interior-architect I intend to focus on these issues concerning the internet of things and our (build) environment since I consider the latter of utmost importance to man’s life.
In 2015 the number of connected devices worldwide will be three times the amount of people and by 2020 this will have increased to seven times. (see e.g. Santucci, IoT-book 2012[4]) This makes our world a complex, more hybrid world; a mix of real and virtual, of analogue and digital in which human values need attention. It was reason enough in 2011 for the European Commission to launch the rethinking of ‘what it means to be human in hyperconnected world’ , which resulted in a presentation in Brussels last February of a 255 page extensive background document and a concise ‘Manifesto’[5]. Both were more in-depth discussed last July since its content serves as guideline for the new European Parliament to be elected in 2014. Based largely on the work of Hannah Arendt the emphasis is on contemporary human values; one of which is the distinction between public and private space which tends to be understood in spatial terms. Since our way of determining a spatial distinction is to a large extend a way of creating architecture it is obvious that ‘building’ becomes an essential issue in this discussion. After all; we create architecture from a mental image, out of nothing, “we extract architectonical space as an emptiness out of natural space[6]”. (van der Laan, 1992) From there we determine the still current dichotomy of public and private space which both have become part of the same complex, hybrid environment which is increasingly designed, built and maintained by means of various digital processes. However; should we define architecture “as adaptation of space to human needs[7]” (Jaskiewicz, 2013:13) we cannot escape the consequence that we, as users/inhabitants with ever-changing needs and behaviour, must achieve a fundamental and continuing influence on its design and use.
Over the last 50 years a wide variety of architects/artists have created sometimes utopian projects on our build environment; since however most of these projects were thinking projects in the first place most of them were also never realised. (see e.g. Price’s Fun Palace 1964, Constant’s New Babylon, approx. 1950-1960). The question today is whether the preconditions and – social – circumstances have changed significantly; i.e., can we, through the concept of an IoT realise a paradigm-shift by focusing on – sometimes neglected – human values instead of technological achievements only? Can we build the environment while living?
[1] http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/hype-cycles/
[2] See e.g. Council, EPOSS, IERC, Casagras.
[3] Swaminathan, B. K. S. (2012). Toasters , refrigerators and Internet of Things, (1).
[4] http://www.alexandra.dk/uk/services/publications/documents/iot_comic_book.pdf
[5] http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-manifesto
[6] Laan, D. H. van der. (1983). Architectonic Space (p. 204). Brill Leiden.
[7]Jaskiewicz, T. (2013). Towards a methodology for complex adaptive interactive architecture. Technical University Delft.
this article was published on Sept.1st.2013 on the website of IoT-World.
imagination
To me, one of the most impressive works on the Biennale Venice 2013 is/was the short film by Neil Beloufa; Kempinski. A 14-minute film shot in Mali in which the imagination plays an important role. “the buildings are in light form, there are no settled doors in it. So, we enter where we want. we go out when we want and how we want“. (As far as I know this film is not distributed yet.)