Integrated design for urban mobility

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 402-412).This thesis demonstrates a rethinking of urban mobility through ecological design. Human mobility and ecological accountability are inextricably linked in city design; our current world ecological crisis underscores this fundamental connection. Through original design exploration ranging in scale from automobiles to tall building clusters, this work proffers a critical vision towards green urbanism. These conceptions challenge the everyday practices of city planning and design by offering an interdisciplinary framework for design production. The work concludes with the necessity for a new design field entitled "Ecotransology". Ecotransology is still in the nascent stages. It has the potential to become a far-reaching awareness that bonds the disciplines of road ecology, urban design, transportation planning, automotive engineering, and energy consultation. This work establishes the theoretical foundations for Ecotransology in four parts. Part one, Ideation, is a survey of visions on cities illustrating original concepts such as "Gentle Congestion", "Transport User Interface (TUI) Valley Section" and "Netwheels". Part two, Eco, illustrates the principles of ecological design in projects such as "MATscape" and "Fab Tree Hab".(cont.) Part three, Trans, conveys the principles of smart mobility in "Soft Cars" and "Omni-Flocking" vehicles. Part four, Ecotrans, synthesizes these approaches in a series of designs for circulation in bridged tall building clusters such as "PeristalCity". The work describes a burgeoning field, Ecotransology, which promotes ecological transitions within urban contexts. By linking tall building clusters and cars, unique green design proposals for urbanization were produced, which promote a new role in defining the ciphers of future design thought.by Mitchell Whitney Joachim.Ph.D

Rendezvous: a collaboration between art, research and communities

The Remediating the social book includes full proceedings of the conference in Edinburgh, 2012, including full texts of essays and full colour artist's pages with documentation of works commissioned for the Remediating the social exhibitio

\u27What\u27s in a List?\u27 Cultural Techniques, Logistics, Poeisis

This research explores the list as a cultural and communicative form. Inspired by the ubiquity of rankings, bullet points and registries in contemporary ‘list culture,’ and by Jack Goody’s famous question ‘What’s in a list?’ (1977), I ask: how can this seemingly innocuous form be studied? What does its analysis tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? What can studying this unconventional object bring to media studies? I offer four intersecting arguments. The first proposes that media studies benefits from the incorporation of approaches and concepts that I group together as ‘media materialism.’ Approaches such as media archaeology, associated theories of cultural techniques, actor-network theory and logistical media studies give a more accurate account of media environments because they address more than the institutions, texts and audiences that are the traditional foci of North American media studies. The second argument presents the list as an example of what media materialism makes available. I position listing as a cultural technique that processes distinctions foundational to concepts and categories of social and imaginative life. The third argument proposes that lists cannot be easily dismissed or endorsed. Their complicated and often contradictory operations demand a precise tracing of how they function. The fourth argues that lists endure in our thoughts, texts, and programs because they negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have beguiled humans for centuries, e.g. between entropy and order or wonder and horror. These arguments are developed in four chapters. The first traces the list as a format that structures knowledge in popular music. The second maps listing as a cultural technique of administration in Nazi Germany. I show the Nazi census to be a limit case of a way of seeing and doing, what I term a ‘logistical worldview,’ that can be traced to fifteenth century double-entry bookkeeping. The third explores algorithmic lists of code and protocol in digital culture. These function not only administratively but also in ways that reveal a poetic capacity. The latter is the focus of the final chapter, which uses the words of Jorge Luis Borges and the images of Chris Marker to show the list as an imaginative form that clears a space for Heideggerian poeisis

Aluminium: Flexible and Light, Towards Sustainable Cities

Aluminium: Flexible and Light is book four in the Towards Sustainable Cities series. It demonstrates the flexibility of aluminium in the many production and fabrication processes that can be used to transform and deploy this light and durable metal, from casting, roll forming, extruding, spinning and direct digital printing. Fabrication processes include: laser and water jet cutting, welding, friction stir welding. The role of aluminium in creating thermally efficient yet highly transparent glazing systems is discussed. Key case studies demonstrating and quantifying the carbon savings arising from the specification of aluminium based architecture include: Kielder Probes by sixteen*(makers), Guy’s Hospital Tower by Penoyre & Prasad, dlr Lexicon by Carr Cotter & Naessens, i360 by Marks Barfield Architects and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Included in this book is the first complete history of the use of aluminium in bridge construction from 1933 to the second decade of the twenty-first century

Interactive Technologies for the Public Sphere Toward a Theory of Critical Creative Technology

Digital media cultural practices continue to address the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the global information economy, perhaps better called ecology, by inventing new methods and genres that encourage interactive engagement, collaboration, exploration and learning. The theoretical framework for creative critical technology evolved from the confluence of the arts, human computer interaction, and critical theories of technology. Molding this nascent theoretical framework from these seemingly disparate disciplines was a reflexive process where the influence of each component on each other spiraled into the theory and practice as illustrated through the Constructed Narratives project. Research that evolves from an arts perspective encourages experimental processes of making as a method for defining research principles. The traditional reductionist approach to research requires that all confounding variables are eliminated or silenced using methods of statistics. However, that noise in the data, those confounding variables provide the rich context, media, and processes by which creative practices thrive. As research in the arts gains recognition for its contributions of new knowledge, the traditional reductive practice in search of general principles will be respectfully joined by methodologies for defining living principles that celebrate and build from the confounding variables, the data noise. The movement to develop research methodologies from the noisy edges of human interaction have been explored in the research and practices of ludic design and ambiguity (Gaver, 2003); affective gap (Sengers et al., 2005b; 2006); embodied interaction (Dourish, 2001); the felt life (McCarthy & Wright, 2004); and reflective HCI (Dourish, et al., 2004). The theory of critical creative technology examines the relationships between critical theories of technology, society and aesthetics, information technologies and contemporary practices in interaction design and creative digital media. The theory of critical creative technology is aligned with theories and practices in social navigation (Dourish, 1999) and community-based interactive systems (Stathis, 1999) in the development of smart appliances and network systems that support people in engaging in social activities, promoting communication and enhancing the potential for learning in a community-based environment. The theory of critical creative technology amends these community-based and collaborative design theories by emphasizing methods to facilitate face-to-face dialogical interaction when the exchange of ideas, observations, dreams, concerns, and celebrations may be silenced by societal norms about how to engage others in public spaces. The Constructed Narratives project is an experiment in the design of a critical creative technology that emphasizes the collaborative construction of new knowledge about one's lived world through computer-supported collaborative play (CSCP). To construct is to creatively invent one's world by engaging in creative decision-making, problem solving and acts of negotiation. The metaphor of construction is used to demonstrate how a simple artefact - a building block - can provide an interactive platform to support discourse between collaborating participants. The technical goal for this project was the development of a software and hardware platform for the design of critical creative technology applications that can process a dynamic flow of logistical and profile data from multiple users to be used in applications that facilitate dialogue between people in a real-time playful interactive experience

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, and Infrastructure in the Age of the Abstraction

Negotiated Access asks how we can exercise our values from within systems and structures over which we have little control. The project, fundamentally, is about autonomy, a specific form of resistance to control, or the ability to act on values or goals despite influence from outside or above. Negotiation, here, is the ongoing encounter with enclosing or encircling systems, entities, or spaces. It is the gap, the small room for maneuver, between ourselves and the physical or social environment. The project begins with local and concrete challenges and radiates outward to analyze and critique broader structures, forces, and institutions that universalize and abstract. Chapter one briefly frames the project in the context of my own experiences as a blind humanist and hacker seeking to research and write in a field dominated by print, proprietary databases, and other inaccessible formats and systems. Chapter Two considers how people, and especially people with disabilities, negotiate the immediate built environment, and introduces haccessibility, or the use of individual workarounds, prosthetics, or approaches to circumvent inaccessible social and physical structures. This chapter considers an alternate model of disability, the negotiated model, that may be of use in specific contexts. Chapter Three will engage with two autobiographies of disability. These readings will provide extended explorations of haccessibility, but more importantly suggest ways autonomy can be exercised in the face of imposed narratives. Chapter Four will consider the humanities as a larger affinity group and explore its negotiation, or failure to negotiate, in the broader context of the academy and an encircling society that does not share its values. In doing so, this chapter examines “lay hermaneutics,” or alternate humanities traditions developed outside the academy that contrast with our own approaches to engagement with the public. Finally, Chapter Five will aim at the largest systems at global scale of which we as individuals and humanity more broadly are components. We’ll term this theorized enclosure “the Abstraction,” and consider its implications on our collective capability for resistance. In so doing, we’ll critically analyze the conceptual space occupied by the term “technology” and attempt to reclaim some small portion for ourselves as “techne,” ways of knowing and doing that enable, rather than erode, autonomy