Mediated Windows: The Use of Framing and Transparency in Designing for Presence

This paper explores the fusion of architecture and media technology that facilitates collaborative practices across spatial extensions: video-mediated spaces. The example presented is a mediated extension of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm to a neighbouring park area and archaeological excavation site in 2008, referred to as a mediated window, or a glass-door. The concepts framing and transparency are used to outline the significance of windows and glazing in architecture and art. The author then considers the potential contribution of architecture in representing the passage from indoors to outdoors and designing for presence. Presence design assumes a contribution from architects to presence research, a currently diversified field, spanning media-space research, cognitive science, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work, but in which architecture and artistic practices are less represented. The paper thereby addresses the potential of an extended architectural practice, which incorporates the design of mediated spaces, and outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary practice in which presence research meets architectural design, and spatial and aesthetic conceptual tools, derived from related visual practices, may be productively applied

„Вогнехреще” або неологізми як відображення військового протистояння

(uk) У статті здійснено дослідження неологізмів та оказіоналізмів, утворених на фоні суспільно-політичної ситуації в Україні кінця 2013 –початку 2015 року. Увага зосереджена на їхніх семантичних та словотвірних особливостях. Розглянуто вплив екстра- та інтралінгвальних чинників на творення таких лексичних одиниць.(en) The paper studies neologisms and occasionalisms formed on the background of socio-political situation in Ukraine in late 2013 – early 2015. The focus is on their semantic and word-building peculiarities. The influence of extra-and intralinguistic factors on the formation of lexical units is considered

До 150-річчя з дня народження Івана Пулюя

The work presented here seeks an integration of spatial and social features supporting shared activities, and engages users in multiple locations to manipulate realtime video-streams. Standard and easily available equipment is used together with the communication standard WebRTC. It adds a spatial quality of experience by representing the users anywhere on the screen, with easily changed diverse backdrops, inviting users to co-design a shared mediated space. User studies show that a seamless integration of space, social dynamics and shared activity benefits the experience of presence, naturalness, immersion/ engagement and social connectedness. The results inform a discussion about spatial and social connectedness, stressing the importance of design to integrate architectural/spatial features and support complex social dynamics in mediated interaction.QC 20160503</p

Бронхиты у детей

БРОНХИТЫДЕТСКИЕ БОЛЕЗНИИМММУНОЛОГИЯВ книге представлены этиология, патогенез, клиника и диагностика, лечение бронхитов у детей. Приводятся данные по нарушению иммунного статуса, прогнозированию течения бронхитов. Даны схемы иммунокоррекции и иммунореабилитации

Assessing the environmental potential of collaborative consumption : Peer-to-peer product sharing in Hammarby Sjöstad, Sweden

Collaborative consumption—through sharing services—has been promoted as an important step in transforming current consumption patterns toward more sustainable practices. Whilst there are high expectations for sharing services, there are few studies on the potential environmental benefits and impacts of sharing services. This study aims to analyze the potential environmental impacts of a peer-to-peer (P2P) product sharing platform and potential integration with a package drop-off/pick-up service in the urban district of Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, Sweden. A life cycle approach is adopted, taking into account product lifetime and use, the potential replacement of conventional products and services, impacts from digital infrastructure and their impacts on the environment. The results indicate that there is significant potential for these sharing services to reduce environmental impacts associated with production and consumption; primarily through avoiding production and reducing the production impacts of new product purchases. The results also illustrate potential synergies to integrate with the package drop-off/pick up service; where the impacts from shared products are further reduced by reducing transportation impacts through improved logistics. However, the results are dependent upon, and sensitive to, a number of methodological choices and assumptions; highlighting the need for greater knowledge on the use environmental assessments of sharing services

Diploma Days, KTH School of Architecture: Exhibition of Diploma Degree Projects (January 2013, June 2013) : Curated impact event

Welcome everyone, to the final stage of the examination process for the Diploma Degree project at KTH School of Architecture. Throughout this week, 69 students from the Degree Programme in Architecture, including our 2-year Master’s Programme in Architecture, will present their projects. We are very proud that so many students have reached this last stage of the architectural education at KTH – and soon ready to meet the challenges of professional life.  The Diploma Degree Project at KTH comprises 30 credits and is a final assignment that the student develops independently to demonstrate that s/he masters academic and professional skills of the architect. The project should address an architectural design problem and must be carried out within the specified time frame of one term. During the term that precedes the degree project, however, the student formulates a programme and a workplan, a so-called  Thesis Booklet, in close dialogue with an appointed supervisor from one of our design studios.  As part of the examination, an external jury is appointed to ensure a fruitful and critical discussion; and to contextualise each project in relation to contemporary practice and discourse. The external jury also contributes a most valuable quality assessment of our programme as a whole, twice a year.  On this occasion we have invited experienced architects from universities and architectural firms across Europe, who will work in three parallel jury groups. We welcome you all to our school! Qc 20150511</p

En stjärna har gått ur tiden : Till minne av arkitekt Léonie Geisendorf

Arkitekten Léonie Geisendorf har avlidit vid en ålder av 102 år. Charlie Gullström minns ett livsverk som går till historien.QC 20160427</p

Furnishing the Fun Palace – with new digital design materials

An on-going interdisciplinary research project relating to the future of connected media creates a web-based system for highly interactive, personalised, shared media experiences.[1] The new technologies will improve the feeling of being together in a shared mediated space and support interaction and collaboration between people who are separated in time or space. This area of research is called presence design and specifically addresses the fusion of architecture and interactive media that enables mediated presence, i.e dialogic interaction across time and space (Gullström 2010, 2012). While architects conventionally design physical spaces and material artefacts to support human interaction, we are increasingly drawn into the realms of digital, immaterial and hybrid design contexts. New building materials have become available, borrowed from the fields of media and communications. What emerges from our recent design-led research is a digital toolbox of new design materials to furnish interiors and create architectural space. Real-time video and audio streams are combined with embedded smart devices and building components that respond to users’ presence by local action or remote interaction. The new materials are e.g. augmented textile surfaces (such as Softwalls) that transform and react in response to (local or remote) movement or touch; or virtual shared spaces and ambient wall furnishings that can prompt reactions from far away (such as SharedSpace or PixelPresence); or instant acoustic dividers that suddenly appear from thin air, and partition your space, created from a combination of projected video streams and sound design. These are new architectural interfaces which, it is argued, will contribute new materiality to architectural design and inform its practitioners, and that can be distinguished from mobile interfaces or tangible interface design. [1] COMPEIT (EU FP7 project 2013-2016) is the acronym of “Connected Media and Presence from European Institute of Technology”, see http://www.compeit.eu.  QC 20150522</p

Upwind. Léonie Geisendorf Architecture. In Swedish: Upp i Vind. Léonie Geisendorf Arkitektur : Curated impact event. Exhibition at Swedish Architecture &amp; Design Centre, Stockholm, 140410-140831

“Upwind!” was the motto of Léonie Geisendorf’s competition entry for the new parliament building overlooking Stockholms Ström in 1971. It also aptly describes her career as an architect and entrepreneur – for over half a century she has guided her practice with a firm hand on the tiller, steering, against the odds, upwind. She calls herself uncompromising, but, of course, seeing a vision through from idea to finished building takes courage, strength and awareness, qualities which have accompanied Léonie Geisendorf from childhood: “I want to design buildings! Great, powerful, proud, beautiful buildings.” When Léonie Geis endorf turned a hundred this year (2014), she became one of the world’s oldest architects and an inspiration to several generations of architects in Sweden. Together, she and her Swiss husband, Charles-Édouard Geisendorf, started an architectural practice in Stockholm in 1950. It caught the public eye in the late 1950s with its expressive, meticulous treatment of raw concrete. The entrance hall of St Göran Gymnasium, a former domestic science and needlework college in Stockholm (p. 28), is one good example of this, and Villa Delin in Djursholm (p. 50) is another. Both provide a vigorous, three-dimensional spatial experience and a distinctive treatment of daylight, which, quite simply, creates warm, sunny interiors – from raw concrete. Sadly, the Catholic Church in Kungsträdgården (p. 18), a masterpiece that the practice designed for over thirteen years, never materialised. The carefully sculpted concrete façade addresses the street with an open portico of varying height. The portico elegantly filters the light coming from the west, imparting lustre to the majestic columns supporting the office floors overhead. One may ask why the city of Stockholm has not been blessed with more landmark buildings. Was Léonie Geisendorf too stubborn, too uncompromising? Did she do herself no favours? Or could it be that Sweden at that time was not ready for her particular brand of expressive architecture?QC 20150428</p

Presence Design : Mediated Spaces Extending Architecture

This thesis is a contribution to design-led research and addresses a readership in the fields of architecture as well as in media and communications. In juxtaposing the tools of the designer (e.g. drafting, prototyping, visual/textual/spatial forms of montage) with those of architectural theory, this thesis seeks to extend the disciplinary boundaries of architecture by observing its assimilation of other media practices. Its primary contribution is to architectural design and theory, and its aims are twofold: Firstly, this thesis applies the concepts of virtual and mediated space to architecture, proposing an extended architectural practice that assimilates the concept of remote presence. Through realized design examples as well as through the history and theory of related concepts, the thesis explores what designing mediated spaces and designing for presence entails for the practicing architect. As a fusion of architecture and media technology, video-mediated spaces facilitate collaborative practices across spatial extensions while simultaneously fostering novel and environmentally sustainable modes of communication. The impact of presence design on workplace design is examined. As an extended practice also calls for an extended discourse, a preliminary conceptual toolbox is proposed. Concepts are adapted from related visual practices and tested on design prototypes, which arise from the author’s extensive experience in designing work and learning spaces. Secondly, this thesis outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary aesthetic practice and discusses the potential contribution of architects to a currently heterogeneous research field, which spans media space research, cognitive science, (tele)presence research, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work. In spite of such diversity, design and artistic practices are insufficiently represented in the field. This thesis argues that presence research and its discourse is characterised by sharp disciplinary boundaries and thereby identifies a conceptual gap: presence research typically fails to integrate aesthetic concepts that can be drawn from architecture and related visual practices. It is an important purpose of this thesis to synthesize such concepts into a coherent discourse. Finally, the thesis argues that remote presence through the proposed synthesis of architectural and technical design creates a significantly expanded potential for knowledge sharing across time and space, with potential to expand the practice and theory of architecture itself. The author’s design-led research shows that mediated spaces can provide sufficient audiovisual information about the remote space(s) and other person(s), allowing the subtleties of nonverbal communication to inform the interaction. Further, in designing for presence, certain spatial features have an effect on the user’s ability to experience a mediated spatial extension, which in turn, facilitates mediated presence. These spatial features play an important role in the process through which trust is negotiated, and hence has an impact on knowledge sharing. Mediated presence cannot be ensured by design, but by acknowledging the role of spatial design in mediated spaces, the presence designer can monitor and, in effect, seek to reduce the ‘friction’ that otherwise may inhibit the experience of mediated presence. The notion of ‘friction’ is borrowed from a context of knowledge sharing in collaborative work practices. My expanded use of the term ‘design friction’ is used to identify spatial design features which, unaddressed, may be said to impose friction and thus inhibit and impact negatively on the experience of presence. A conceptual tool-box for presence design is proposed, consisting of the following design concepts: mediated gaze, spatial montage, active spectatorship, mutual gaze, shared mediated space, offscreen space, lateral and peripheral awareness, framing and transparency. With their origins in related visual practices these emerge from the evolution of the concept of presence across a range of visual cultures, illuminating the centrality of presence design in design practice, be it in the construction of virtual pictorial space in Renaissance art or the generative design experiments of prototypical presence designers, such as Cedric Price, Gordon Pask and numerous researchers at MIT Media Lab, Stanford Institute and Xerox PARC.QC 2010090