<Focus>
Most environments are passive - deaf, dumb and blind, unaware of their inhabitants and unable to assist them in a meaningful way. However, with the advent of ubiquitous computing - ever smaller, cheaper and faster computational devices embedded in a growing variety of "smart" objects - it is becoming increasingly possible to create active environments: physical spaces that can sense and respond appropriately to the people and activities taking place within them.The goal of this project is to produce designs that pose new possibilities of interactive environments with tangible interfaces, breaking from the menu driven screen-based preconceptions of computational interfaces.
This involves research into the areas of sensor input; information display; and physical phenomena, which in turn will develop elements of tangible, participatory and responsive spaces.
We explore designs of computational environments at the interface between digital media and the physical environment - particularly as applied to new built environments. we believe that in the realm of built environments, tangible interfaces are critically important and an increasingly promising design strategy for effective interfacing to the complex functionality available as computational elements hybridize and become smaller and more ubiquitous.
<questions and topics>
- What is the flow of information in a building? Can it be improved?- What kinds of information can we collect & display?
- How is control managed in public/private and corporate spaces?
- Can the locus of control be transferred to and managed by the user/crowd?
