Architectural design digital change: interactivity policy

Several researches have been focused on digital architecture historical perspectives of the design throughout the sixties. This paper purposes a different view based on the influence of art, science and computation in architecture that contributed to the use of interactivity in architectural design. The aim is to describe the evolution of interactive CAD from MIT’s Project CAD and Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad to the early digital architectural design pioneers: Steven Coons, Gyorgy Kepes and Nicholas Negroponte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Knowledge is Power: the Internet and the Kenyan Public Sphere.

The Internet will… serve multiple functions as the world’s favourite public library, school classroom and medical database, post office and telephone, marketplace and shopping mall, channel of entertainment, culture and music, daily news resource for headlines, stocks and weather, and heterogeneous global public sphere.(Norris 6

The Technology Trap: Lessons from the One Laptop Per Child Program

This thesis project was submitted to the graduate degree program in Global and International Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.Just as the industrial revolution reshaped society in much of the world during the 19th century, the rapid spread of computer technology has dramatically changed the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, just as the industrial revolution was slow to reach many parts of the world, the spread of computer technology around the globe has been anything but even. Developed countries are advancing at a faster pace than most less-developed countries, despite having started with a relative advantage, and the gap between the “global north” and the “global south” continues to grow. As a result, many efforts have been made to narrow the gap – in terms of education, health care, living standards, and more – with mixed results. In many cases, the assistance comes in the form of “boomerang aid,” which helps the donor country more than the recipient. Other cases are more benign, such as the One Laptop Per Child program explored in this paper, where well-meaning efforts fail to properly anticipate real-world challenges, leading to limited successes at best

Seeking empathy in conscious cities

The vision of the conscious city has entered the radar. It takes as its heartland, the idea of a ‘conversation’ between inhabitants, digitally imbued objects and responsive architectural fabrics at the city scale. Can advances in the internet of everything, neuroscience, AI and big data enable social opportunities in a more sentient city? This chapter considers the ethics of an architectural dialogic — bringing questions of computational neutrality and democratic participation to the fore in the design and curation of ‘intelligent architecture’

Print and Screen, Muriel Cooper at MIT

Muriel Cooper (1925–94) worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than four decades as a graphic designer, an educator, and a researcher. Beginning in the early 1950s, she was the first designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, where she visualized the latest scientific research in print. In the late 1960s, she became the first Design and Media Director for the MIT Press, rationalizing its publishing protocols and giving form to some of the period’s most significant texts in the histories of art, design, and architecture, among other fields. In the mid-1970s, Cooper co-founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture. There she taught experimental printing and explored new imaging technologies in photography and video. And from the 1980s until her death, Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, where she turned her attention to the human-computer interface. Cooper helped cultivate a design culture at MIT. And before her premature death, she established some of the metaphors and mentored some of the designers that have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Few 20th century designers have made significant contributions in both print and digital media, or helped to navigate the epochal transition between the two. Yet Cooper, in designing and redesigning roles for herself within new fields at MIT, did just that. Over her career and across multiple media, Cooper’s concerns remained quite consistent: She focused on developing both design tools and user experiences that would provide greater control and quicker feedback, eventually to be aided by machine intelligence. She sought to create experiences that were dynamic rather than static and simultaneous rather than linear, ones that engaged multiple media and a range of human senses. Cooper applied her knowledge of print design to software, and considered print and the process of its production as a prototype for the experiences that she would seek on screen. She also borrowed freely from media such as photography and film to inspire some of the effects she would later explore in new media. Cooper’s career traced an arc, in her practice and her pedagogy, from a focus on objects to one on systems. And her relationship to the digital evolved from a set of effects to be emulated in other media to seeing the computer at first as a tool, then as an assistant, and finally, as the medium itself. At the same time, she participated in a broader shift during this period from the paradigm of the humanist subject to the digitally augmented, “posthuman” condition of the present. In her interests and her achievements, Cooper exceeded any traditional definition of a graphic designer. At the same time, her work has defined the present state of the field. This dissertation, the first dedicated to Cooper, charts her pathbreaking career at MIT while also shedding new light on vital moments in the history of art, design, architecture, and media in postwar America

Computer science and technology : historiography IX (9)

Internet 1996 World Exposition ..

The roots of 4IR in architecture: a military drawing machine used for space perception in architecture

This paper analyses how architecture became a pioneer discipline in digital interactivity research. It describes how that pioneer research derives from a lineage of researchers whose work spans more than two decades beginning in the early fifties. Military funds enabled the creation of the first computer graphic interfaces that evolved into a - drawing machine", the first interactive CAD, that made possible the role of architecture as a pioneering discipline in interactivity research. It is expected to demonstrate that the same architecture that nowadays uses mainly interactive digital design was one of first disciplines to research interactivity addressing a gap in the study of the link between architecture and interactivity.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio