University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 19, 2006

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

Computer scientists and engineers have been conducting research since the late 1980s to find ways to embed or "situate" computational intelligence in the built environment, and they have been very successful.

Now, architectural researchers and those studying the social contexts of technology are questioning the role played by these situated technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary built and social realms.

They focus as well on how situational parameters inform the design of a wide range of mobile, wearable, networked, distributed and context-aware devices that incorporate an awareness of cultural context, accrued social meanings and the temporality of spatial experience.

Among those researchers are several members of the faculties of the School of Architecture and Planning and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Three of them have organized a three-day symposium being held this weekend in New York City to address two primary issues: how and what technologies are now being embedded in the built environment, and what the broad implications of this are for human interaction with their environment and with one another.

The symposium, "Situated Technologies and Architecture," is a production of the Center for Virtual Architecture (CVA) in the School of Architecture and Planning, the Institute for Distributed Creativity and the Architectural League of New York. It is being funded by the School of Architecture and Planning, the Department of Media Study and the J. Clawson Mills fund of the Architectural League.

Omar Kahn, assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the CVA, is one of the three organizers. His research projects explore the impact of digital media on architectural theory, production, representation, and pedagogy.

"Today, personal computing places the computer itself and its permutations—cell phones, iPods, Blackberries, PDAs—in the foreground of our attention, but new ubiquitous computers go beyond that," he says. "They are about mobility. They network a vast array of data to automatically take into account the social dimension of human environments, even as they vanish into the background."

No longer solely "virtual," he says, human interaction with these technologies is becoming socially integrated and spatially contingent as everyday objects and spaces are linked through networked computing.

"In addition, new technologies are being situated in architecture in a way that permits structures themselves to respond to environmental conditions," Kahn says.

"They can sense occupancy, patterns of use and other human behaviors, changing temperature and light, for instance, and then respond to them by altering the environment without further human agency."

This has affected the design of both the architecture and the technology, according to Kahn, so the symposium will address how these changes produce new uses and activities within urban public places and how urbanism and architecture respond to these activities.

The second organizing principle of the symposium is the effect of situated technologies on social interaction and human relationships.

"We will look at the social consequences of the technology produced metapolis, the informational city beyond the networked city; a city in which enormous amounts of information is available immediately, 24-7, with easy access and continual connectivity," says another organizer, Mark Shepard, assistant professor of architecture and media study.

He says that commonly, this is a city in a multinational environment that facilitates immediate direct relationships between say, Buffalo and a camp at the base of an Andean mountain; or between sick children in an African village and a doctor in London.

"It is a city with no geographic location," he says. "It traverses traditional boundaries. Already this metapolis can produce international social groups around something as banal as liking the color pink, and soon, your personal interface will be able to locate and connect you to people passing you on the street who favor pink.

"We all grew up in a world in which a great deal of person-to-person interaction was the rule. New methods communication made our experiences more disembodied. Much of our social interaction took place over computers and Blackberries and cell phones instead of in person. It became disembodied.

"New embedded technologies could actually enhance and promote social interaction by connecting individuals in new and socially functional ways," he says.

"For that to happen, however, we must learn how to influence the design of the technologies and the structures in which they are embedded so as to reclaim the primacy of an embodied experience.

"The symposium will discuss important research issues and lines of inquiry not just from a utopian point of view, however, but from the flip side," Shephard says, "because this new situation raises other concerns raised by the new situation."

Among those he cites is the continuing a digital divide between economic classes, and its important social, economical and political implications.

"There also are questions about who determines who has access to what, about who owns what kinds of information about us, and about the implications of such technologies for continuous tracking or surveillance or identity theft," he says.

In addition, Shepard adds, the symposium will consider the question of who is developing these systems and for what purpose—are they governments that want to keep an eye on us or corporations who just want to know how we shop?

The third organizer of the symposium is Trebor Scholz, assistant professor of media study. He is the founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity, an independent international research network whose work focuses on collaboration in media art, technology and theory, with an emphasis on social contexts. Many of its events are hosted by the Department of Media Study and by collaborating institutions in New York City and abroad.