separation, and discreteness, but it is as much about network effects and affects, software infrastructures, and experiences, as it is about glass and concrete.

The blending of architectural thinking and media-information technology design is by no means new. Quite the opposite. But its story tends to be told from the perspective of architecture, the more discursively mature discipline. Interaction design as a discipline does not have a coherent, historical discourse. It does not, as of yet, have all that much to say about how “interaction” was designed in ancient Rome, in the midst of the Paris Commune, or among the Iroquois confederacy. While today interaction design is more practical than epistemological, this will likely not be the case by the middle of this century. As computer science and philosophy annex each other, interaction design may do something similar with sociology and architecture. If so, this may prove less the end, vanishing, or eclipse of architecture (as some have suggested) than the disclosure (finally!) of its first truly post-Industrial assignment. As we look forward to a design practice with holistic concern for all kinds of human-related interfaces, the lessons learned about the problem of “program” by architecture are of direct value to interaction designers who are now asked to solve similar organizational design briefs with different tools.

interactions

Architectural Program
in Transition
How has the notion of program
changed as architecture’s own

image of itself has changed? How has it driven and been driven by cycles of modernity and media technologies?

First, program needs to be understood in relation to a reflexively generative relationship between bodies and the physical spaces they inhabit. French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre employed the notion of “habitus” to analyze this very reflexivity. Habitus is the root from which both habit (as in bodily habit) and habitat are derived. It can be used to discuss how one informs the other, how bodily habits, especially of large populations, wear grooves into space, producing habitats in their image. For one, this is how archaeologists are able to divine social practices from reconstructed architectural debris: The forms imply what made them. Conversely, space frames and constrains the action that it houses, training bodies and thereby program in its image. To be sure, habit and habitat emerge at once, a conjoined machine, not in some never-ending representational reciprocity. In essence, the patterns that program seeks to specify can be understood as the prescriptive or analytical images of this emergence.

In the early years of modernity, architectural programs may be seen as explicitly diagrammatic of a larger ethos of moral order. Usually drawn as plans (two-dimensional line-based images of a site, as if seen from above with the roof removed), schemes relied heavily on graphical symmetry to imply and ensure the clear-mindedness of their implications. (Examples of this include Charles Fourier’s

plans for a utopian community, or Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison.) In these a recommended moral order is drawn into an unfolding embodiment of adjacency, hierarchy, discipline, and procession. The architecture that would be constructed is almost directly translated and extruded from these idealized, floating arrangements. This configuration was well-suited to a society in which large, immobile institutions were constructed to transfer scientific and moral authority onto a relatively local, immobile population. Though to this day, the plan remains the preferred device with which to draw program; for it the “floor” is the tablet to be partitioned by lines, and program is modeled as a compartmentalization of habitat type into clear zones of activity.

But modernity’s accelerations brought radical forms of urbanization, technological speed, and rationality, as well as new mobilities of people, labor, and capital. Traditional social forms were uprooted, populations were moved to city centers, and sidewalks filled with strangers, unskilled and hyperskilled segmented into increasingly narrow specialties. Places of work, factories or high-rise offices, where those modern interfaces converged and synthesized, became machines of functionalism. Reciprocity developed: Architecture and industrial design sought to train an organization into the rational image of its new equipment and simultaneously to model that equipment in the image of an ideal organizational form. The social agenda was not only to accommodate, but continu-