Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [25]
Consider dECOi's 2003 Aegis Hyposurface, a continuously-transformable membrane that allows digital input—whether from microphone, keyboard, or motion sensor—to be physically rendered on the surface itself, showing up as symbols, shapes, and other deformations. Its creators call Aegis "a giant sketchpad for a new age," and while its complexity has kept it from being produced as anything beyond a prototype, it at least was explicitly designed to respond to the kind of inputs Arch-OS produces.
Meanwhile, similar systems, which have actually been deployed commercially, fail to quite close the loop. UNStudio's recent digital facade for Seoul's high-end Galleria department store, developed in association with Arup Engineering and lighting designer Rogier van der Heide, is one such project. The architects wrapped a matrix of LED-illuminated disks around what used to be a drab concrete box, turning the whole surface into a field of ever-renewing data and color. It's a success—it currently bathes the Apgujeong district with gorgeous washes of light nightly—and yet the images flowing across the surface seem to cry out for some generative connection to the inner life of the building.
But already a vanguard few are wrestling with challenges beyond the mere display of information, exploring the new architectural morphologies that become possible when computation is everywhere in the structure itself. Los Angeles–based architect Peter Testa has designed a prototype building called the Carbon Tower: an all-composite, forty-story high-rise knit, braided and woven from carbon fiber.
Unlike conventional architecture, the Carbon Tower dispenses with all internal bracing, able to do so not merely because of the mechanical properties of its textile exoskeleton, but due to the way that exoskeleton is managed digitally. As Testa envisions it, the Carbon Tower exhibits "active lateral bracing": sensors and actuators embedded in its structural fiber cinch the building's outer skin in response to wind load and other dynamic forces.
And if building morphology can be tuned in response to environmental inputs, who's to say that those inputs should be limited to the weather? Arch-OS-style polling of foot traffic and social interactions, coupled to output in the form of structural changes can take us in some genuinely novel directions. Something resembling fondly remembered and much-beloved Archigram projects of the 1960s such as Instant City, Tuned Suburb, and the Control and Choice Dwelling may finally be realized—or so fans of the visionary collective can hope. When compared to the inert structures we now inhabit, everyware-age architecture—for better or worse—will be almost certainly be weirder.
Thesis 15
Everyware acts at the scale of the street and of public space in general.
At present, the most often-pursued applications of everyware at scales beyond the individual building concern wayfinding: knowing where in the world you are and how to get where you're going.
We've become familiar with the idea that dashboard navigation displays using the Global Positioning System (GPS) will help us figure these things out. But GPS is a line-of-sight system—you need to be visible to at least three satellites currently above the horizon in order for it to triangulate your position—so it doesn't work indoors, in tunnels, or in places where there's lots of built-up density. This makes GPS a fairly poor way of finding your way around places like Manhattan, although it seems to work satisfactorily in lower-density conurbations like Tokyo.
Other systems that might help us find our way around the city have their own problems. Schemes that depend on tracking your various personal devices by using the local cellular network can't offer sufficient precision to really be useful as a stand-alone guide. And while the kinds