ramifications for organizational management and governmental theory and practice.

In the concentration of architecture and interaction design, this interface design will have less to do with the formal correspondence of software that uses architectural metaphors (such as Second Life) or architecture that uses software metaphors (such as airport signage), or even “interactive architecture” (think Jacques Tati at Ars Electronica) than pragmatic convergences and divergences of the social and cultural operations and expressions they all share: the primacy of the idea and ideal of “program.”

 

Program Per Se/ Propositional Infrastructures Where do programs come from and why? Program is the image (prescriptive, diagnostic, analytic) of how a field of interfaces comes together into a specific active system. When architects are engaged in conceiving the integration of structure, space, layout, partition, void, pathway, of how people course through them and push against them, and of how those structures and pathways will push against the people, they call this thinking and planning “programming.” The design of architectural pro-

grams, like interaction design for software, is based in the creative analysis of organizational needs and possibilities and crafting an infrastructure to best stage desired conditions of connection and interaction. In the most specific sense, the architectural discourses around “program” (and there are many, both enthusiastic and dismissive) are where the question of spatial interaction design comes into play, even if it is seldom referred to as such.

In architecture, program is the framing script for how inhabitants will engage with a spatial system over time, or over a day, or simply from one place to the next. It is the prescriptive imaginary for how the architectural space will coper-form its functions with those people and things that it will house. Hospitals are planned in a certain way because medical programs demand it. Prisons have regimented partitions and interfaces because the penal discipline uses these as its physical methods of punishment, control, and surveillance. Warehouses are planned and coded as they are to support the efficient movement and display of transient inventory, a program of logistics. A border between two countries is put together the way it is in response to the discourses of the

nation and its designed contiguity, as well as security interfaces. Even more dynamic, culturally specific environments utilize program: Successful carnivals (and protests) opportunistically take advantage of the urban environment to upset everyday work and function. Program is not just about function. It is more about setting up the terms (designing) by which the built environment (including hardware and software) can actively participate well in social and economic intercourse and then letting life assume the territory.

In the conventional sense of architecture, interfaces converge in a fixed site bound by a building envelope, creating in their arrangement a bound interior. Today our own hypermodernity can make some stable systems (such as libraries and nations) more fluid and liquid, and the volatility and divergences of interfaces make the joint agenda of architects and interaction designers that much more critical.

 

Hard and Soft Interaction in Historical Context For this expanded landscape, in which soft and hard systems intermingle on the go, the concern of architectural program is still to stage desired conditions of connection and interaction,

May + June 2008