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Image: juhansonin | Flickr
We are currently in the midst of an information revolution which I often hear overwhelms people, particularly as they strive to solve complex problems where they need to rely on specific information to know how and when to act upon their choices in order to find a clear path toward their goal.
Often, there is so much information that those same people even have trouble trying to decipher what their best choices are in the first place. So, how is architectural design being affected by this informational influence which brings with it such overwhelm?
I think that there is information that architecture conveys through its building design elements, that if thought of differently and if presented differently, could drastically improve lifestyle for its occupants — not only to solve problems which they currently have, but to also help predict future problems that may arise, by thus, engaging with them to make healthy changes earlier-on so as to prevent those problems from ever surfacing in the first place.
It is most clearly evident that such an adaptive architectural design would have most immediate and beneficial use when engaging with an occupant’s daily habits, physiological biorhythms and other occupant-specific personalized traits.
For, it is within architecture that a sort of melting pot occurs where we have different emerging and advancing technologies that can carry out different, yet interrelated tasks — like augmented reality and ubiquitous computing which, when teamed up with other advances in areas like industrial design, can fuse not just within a building, but throughout it, to create a dynamic environment where that occupant can flourish.
For example, if an occupant is having trouble concentrating when trying to finish a task in their workspace, perhaps the sensory architecture can be designed in such a way as to promote creative thinking during certain times of day. Even more specifically, perhaps a workspace could sensorially morph dependent upon the type of work that an occupant needs to do within it, dynamically — from moment to moment. Even the most subtle of sensory building element changes can make a huge difference — and it is upon these types of details that occupant lifestyle is built.
Pulling from “Unused” Information to Improve Occupant Environments
You can see in the following video lecture, entitled It’s Time to Redesign Medical Data (presented by Thomas Goetz), that already there is thought being given to simplifying informational complication to help alleviate people’s lives. In the case of this lecture, Goetz proposes a re-design of medical blood test data which is usually given to doctors to translate back to their patients.
Instead, he argues that such information should be Read more
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Individual atoms in a 90 nanometer scoop of Nitinol.
Image: jurvetson | Flickr
Why does inspiration strike when thinking about building design in terms of a convergent assembly of elements? Well, here is an explanation about just what a “convergent assembly” means for manufacturing at the molecular level.
Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. [...] One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.
The Future of Scalability in Architecture
As if to build upward from some sort of DNA structure, building an assembly of parts at smaller scales then fitting that assembly within a larger assembly give should give you “food for thought”.
What if, as an architect, you could design a sort of “DNA seed” from which your buildings would grow, not only as they are built, but also as they age over time? Could your initial design “seed” create a better Read more
