The Fashion Robot

Behavoiural aspects play a very important role in design ecology. Generative tools give the great opportunities to breed families of different morphologies (phenotypes) coming from the same genotype. But these opportunities will lay silently unless we explore the performances and possible behaviours of our generations.
Framing those results into specific content categories (i.e. assigning a "meaning", or trying to classify them for what they "are") leads to a single possibility of reading and user interaction (the one envisioned by the designer) excluding all other possibilities, while focusing on behavioural aspects (i.e. identifying what they "do") leaves an open interface to multiple interaction and content-generation processes from different users.

Have you thought about what your architectural systems can do?

02 + [another kind of] human augmentation

2011-05-15T12:45:00.000+02:00

image linked from Nextnature website

Nextnature is a very interesting website featuring a contemporary perspective on the concept of nature far from a pictoresque view. Recent posts regarding developments on nanotechnology, cognition and technology interaction are worth a look.

This one in particular deals with something that will most probably redefine the idea itself of a threshold between human and technology.

What might be the morphogenetic consequences of this intensified connections? How will our metabolic enhancers become in this future perspective?

01 + human augmentation

2011-04-27T12:20:00.002+02:00

SARIF industries promises much in terms of human augmentation:

Prosthetics are a very interesting synthesis of a lot of issues related to our project milieu (the aesthetic verge of performance, articulation & differentiation of parts in a heterogeneally coherent system and cultural pressures):

Here's a video ad:

[The site is a viral campaign for Deus Ex videogame by Eidos Montréal]

00 + intro

2011-04-09T12:31:00.005+02:00

Since we began to outsource our metabolic functions we started to build mediators. When these mediators exceeded their primary performance (the one they were purposed for) they began to destratify and tamper with a level of higher sophistication in the field of information exchange, where aesthetics is deeply involved and feedbacks on the system from which it emerged. In this studio we will look at it as a field where environmental negotiation, cultural pressures and body-space relations find their developmental landscapes.

In a recent article on his blog, John Bailey synthesized a contemporary view of body-machine-environment relations:

So with our understanding of the cyborg moving away from bodily appendages of industrial technologies to a new perception of what a cyborg is, one that sees technologies evolution with humanity, where the way we interact with technologies isn’t only through their depth within the body, but rather the ubiquitous connections between tools and neural functions, where offloading processes onto these non-biological props becomes essential to our being human. This concept of cyborg sees us not as separate entities, man or machine, but rather the interconnectedness between these entities—the relationship between systems becomes important. Posthumanity becomes interconnected, as brain and body begin to be viewed as an interconnected system (conversely to humanism which sees our body as a shell for the mind; i.e. two separate systems, polarities of mind and body); an assemblage of multiple parts. The human is no longer a unique being (a totality), but rather part of the interconnected network of living species and of the geological cycle of matter (an assemblage theory).
So why is this important for architecture? Like our image of the body moving away from the body as a shell for the mind and into an interconnected relationship, our architecture is becoming less viewed as a shell which encapsulates a body toward one that is part of a system interconnected with the body and ecology.

[from: http://archimorph.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/posthumanism-cyborgs-interconnected-bodies/]

The course will investigate on specific cases where the interconnected environmental conditions and cultural pressures are the culture medium for systems to thrive and grow onto.

This is the vault for ar.Ca 3 LaB, a fifth-year course of architetcural design at the Faculty of Engineering. The developments of each group project will be monitored here.

Not sure where to start? Try the synopsis.

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