Investigating the adaptability and implementation of computational design methods in concept design taking plasterboard opportunities for dimensional coordination and waste reduction as a case study

Construction material offcuts is a data problem that can largely be avoided by dimensional coordination during concept design. Besides the environmental benefits, early phase coordination is beneficial to the overall design process as it integrates information not typically considered until later in the design process. However, taking reality-changing actions is often challenged by uncertainty, time constraints, and lack of integration of available tools. Acknowledging the potential of computational design in enabling architects to manage design and coordination complexities and taking plasterboard opportunities for dimensional coordination, the paper presents a review and assessment of the existing methods to interrogate what, when, and how are these adaptable to the task. The study shows that ML-based methods outperform other methods and concludes that leveraging computational design powers to reduce offcuts is not a question of a tool, but one of a strategy. Eventually, the future steps to achieving such a strategy are discussed

The role of digital screens in urban life: New opportunities for placemaking

Large digital screens are becoming prevalent across today’s cities dispersing into everyday urban spaces such as public squares and cultural precincts. Examples, such as Federation Square, demonstrate the opportunities for using digital screens to create a sense of place and to add long-term social, cultural and economic value for citizens, who live and work in those precincts. However, the challenge of implementing digital screens in new urban developments is to ensure they respond appropriately to the physical and sociocultural environment in which they are placed. Considering the increasing rate at which digital screens are being embedded into public spaces, it is surprising that the programs running on these screens still seem to be stuck in the cinematic model. The availability of advanced networking and interaction technologies offers opportunities for information access that goes beyond free-to-air television and advertising. This chapter revisits the history and current state of digital screens in urban life and discusses a series of research studies that involve digital screens as interface between citizens and the city. Instead of focusing on technological concerns, the chapter presents a holistic analysis of these studies, with the aim to move towards a more comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural potential of this new media platform, and how the digital content is linked with the spatial quality of the physical space, as well as the place and role of digital screens within the smart city movement

From users to citizens: Some thoughts on designing for polity and civics

This paper presents an essay aimed at prompting broad discussion crucial in keeping the interaction design discourse fresh, critical, and in motion. We trace the changing role of people who have advanced from consumers to producers, from stationary office workers to mobile urban nomads, from passive members of the plebs to active instigators of change. Yet, interaction designers often still refer to them only as ‘users.’ We follow some of the historic developments from the information superhighway to the smart city in order to provide the backdrop in front of which we critically analyse three core areas. First, the issue of echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media results in a political polarisation that jeopardises the formation of a functioning public sphere. Second, pretty lights and colourful façades in media architecture are increasingly making way for situated installations and interventions fostering community engagement. And third, civic activism is often reduced to forms of slacktivism. We synthesise our discussion to propose ‘citizen-ability’ as an alternative goal for interaction designers to aspire to in order to create new polities and civics for a better quality of life

Enabling audience participation and collective content generation through urban media as a diagnostic method in urban planning

Interaction design is something perhaps few people think about. Yet it is one of our most important areas of research. The world is now changed every few years by information and communication technologies, and it is interaction design that has to make these changes work for people. In 2015, such changes involve computing’s return to the world at large— back “into the wild”. There are little slivers of computing everywhere these days, not only in mobiles and laptops, but also throughout buildings, in the urban environment, attached to natural objects, or even to us. A complex web of data networks links up all these slivers of computing. This is called the “internet of things” or “ambient intelligence”. The fullness of this ambient intelligence at work is hidden from us, yet it is also increasingly in close proximity to what we do. Executive Summary This 1-year Blue Sky project allowed us to establish a relationship with the Willoughby City Council (WCC), who have come on board as partner for an ARC Linkage Project proposal (currently under review). Based on the fruitful collaboration, WCC have further agreed to fund the upcoming Media Architecture Biennale as venue partner (valued at up to $40,000). The Blue Sky studies funded from the Henry Halloran Trust led to 1 book chapter, 4 conference publications, 2 workshop papers, and a digital handbook. The project set out to study the use of so-called ‘urban screens’ for enabling audience participation in discussions around civic topics. For this purpose we partnered with Urban Screen Productions and the Willoughby City Council, who provided us with access to their urban screen at the Concourse in Chatswood. This screen posed a particularly interesting media platform for our research, since it is placed in a less than ideal position and in an unaccommodating environment. The project involved the iterative deployment of a total of three audience participation platforms: A platform consisting of a) a small audio device with a gesture sensor to record votes and b) an iPad polling app for recording responses to polar questions. A platform consisting of a) the iPad polling app from (1) in Chatswood, b) the iPad polling app with a polar visualisation on the urban screen at the Concourse, and c) a full-body voting application, in which people could answer polar questions by waving their arms at the screen. A platform/setup consisting of an open response visualisation and iPad app at the Concourse in Chatswood in conjunction with a pop-up concept for engaging the local community into a civic discourse. These platforms were deployed for a total of 9 days distributed throughout the second half of the project duration (3 days at the University of Sydney campus in July 2014, 3 days at the Concourse in July 2014, 1 day at the Concourse in September 2014 during the Chatswood StreetFair, 1 day in December 2014 at the Concourse, and 1 day in February 2015 during the Chinese New Year Festival in Chatswood). The project outcomes include: A project website (http://cityconcepts.org/) that serves as online repository for the research and findings developed through the project. The website includes an online blog that aggregates the state of the field, and which we will continue to populate with our findings and future projects in this area. Two documentary videos of the platforms, their deployment, and the studies conducted. Public lecture by CI Foth as part of the Urban Research Festival in March 2014, and presentations by CIs Tomitsch, Foth, Haeusler, and McArthur as part of the Digital Arts Symposium hosted by Urban Screen Productions in collaboration with UNSW Art+Design, in June 2015. 
 A handbook developed for urban planners and local councils about the use of urban media for community engagement and published as a free resource online

CoBuilt : towards a novel methodology for workflow capture and analysis of carpentry tasks for human-robot collaboration

Advanced manufacturing and robotic fabrication for the housing construction industry is mainly focused on the use of industrial robots in the pre-fabrication stage. Yet to be fully developed is the use on-site of collaborative robots, able to work cooperatively with humans in a range of construction trades. Our study focuses on the trade of carpentry in small-to-medium size enterprises in the Australian construction industry, seeking to understand and identify opportunities in the current workflows of carpenters for the role of collaborative robots. Prior to presenting solutions for this problem, we first developed a novel methodology for the capture and analysis of the body movements of carpenters, resulting in a suite of visual resources to aid us in thinking through where, what, and how a collaborative robot could participate in the carpentry task. We report on the challenges involved, and outline how the results of applying this methodology will inform the next stage of our research

Media Architecture Compendium Volume 2: Concepts, Methods, Practice

The second volume of the Media Architecture Compendium comprises a selection of chapters on concepts, methods and practice