There’s nothing worse than bland inorganic spaces. They feel so slick that you can’t help but slide out of them leaving nothing but your shadow behind. They’re most commonly found in shopping centres and office blocks, but you also see these traits in new housing developments too. A lack of life. There might be design but it belongs to someone else. The best places are those that have been curated and cultivated, grown into something personal.
We can develop these kinds of places using responsive architecture. Responsive architecture is a built environment that automatically responds to our current needs and changes to reflect our activity. This can be achieved with technologies including data analysis, generative design and rapid fabrication.
It won’t be long before computing leaps out of terminals to become part of our surroundings. We’ll laugh at the bulkiness of laptops, their unintuitive interfaces. Computing relies on inputs and outputs. At the moment those channels are artificial — keyboards and monitors. Soon the input could be based on physical movement. If you want to send a message to someone you fling it through the air.
Rapid fabrication and connected devices means that the environment can represent data. A person receiving that message could see it literally written on the wall or the text hanging in the air as if it were done by a skywriter.
It could be so fast to print in 3D that rather than firing light at your eyes from a screen, the computer builds a moving physical 3D representation of the thing in front of you. In a way websites could become physical. When you want to interact with it, you do so as you would with a physical mechanical object, because the physical effect is simulated and sent over the internet as digital instructions equivalent to text or mouse clicks to be processed and modulate the output.
This physical representation of output data can be used to automatically represent us. Imagine lighting that is capable of detecting where you spend time in a room over a long period and moving spotlights to cover those areas in light. Gradually it starts to move to show the patterns of where you sit and read, where you cook and eat in your home. The environment starts to reflect you just like the grass in a park shows desire lines from where people walk frequently. More than that it becomes an aid to your life, adapting in ways that help you live more easily.
Video panels on the side of a building can be used to display algorithmically designed images that represent its occupants through data that is automatically collected like movement, times people leave and enter, volume etc. Each day an artwork is generated that is based on the way that people live in that locale and then shown to the world and to remind them of who they are and the intangible things they’ve left in a place.
Lighting is a useful starting point because it’s cheap and rapidly adjustable, but in the future we’ll have many more elements that can be adapted in the same way. Sculpture in public places could be 3D printed and rebuilt each day based on similar parameters to the video screens. Now you know that by simply being in this place, by living your life there you have an impact on how it is constructed. This can be extended from discrete elements to entire buildings that are grown organically to suit the collective mood of a city with spatial dimensions that suit usage patterns.
Building in this fashion eventually the whole world becomes alive. There will no longer be a separation between the physical and the digital because the way we interact with it will be the same, whether the reaction happens because of inviolable physical forces or because a computer recognises our conscious and unconscious input and mediates the environment on that basis.
