music players surround us with auditory
walls; and Airbnb instantly converts
homes into hotels. The entire field of
urban informatics is rife with many
such examples. What separates the
newly emerging efforts, however, is the
explicit intent to inject the physical
built environment—made of glass,
concrete, and steel—with the plasticity/
interactivity of digital bits.
Within such nascent efforts, I have
identified responsive, augmented, and
printable architecture as the three key
technical approaches that I predict will
serve as the main drivers of the gradual
digitization of architectural space.
RESPONSIVE ARCHITECTURE
Responsive architecture refers to a
class of architectural structures that
can dynamically alter their shapes
and/or appearances using kinetic
transformation mechanisms, large-scale
LED arrays, and other technologies. R
properties of digital media.
In recent HCI literature (including
some of my own work), as well as in
cutting-edge architectural practice,
we can see a group of emerging, but
still largely isolated, efforts targeting
precisely that goal. Here, I am not
talking about some far-fetched efforts
to create entire buildings/cities out of
ceaselessly shape-shifting programmable
matter. Rather, what I am pointing to is
a steady pace of innovations occurring
in heterogeneous technical domains
that are collectively chipping away
at the longstanding stability of the
architectural environment—eventually,
it seems, leading to the experience that
we are living within a world of habitable
bits (or, to use a term from my earlier
publication, living in synthetic space [ 2]).
To be fair, there already exist a
number of technologies that manipulate
space. Calling someone on the phone
instantly compresses space; portable
The label does not apply to input-
only systems (wide deployment of
surveillance cameras do not qualify)
and requires some form of digital output
capability, often involving dynamic
adaptation to input (Figure 2).
Among architects, the concept of
responsive architecture is not new
(an early seminal work in this area
can be found in Soft Architecture
Machines by Nicholas Negroponte),
and there already exist numerous built
examples such as revolving restaurants,
retractable stadium roofs, media
facades, and so on. (A rare instance
of responsive architecture built for
domestic use can be found in Maison à
Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas.) Although
fantastical visions such as Archigram’s
Walking City will likely remain fantasies
for the foreseeable future due to the
immense cost, recent advances in digital
design/prototyping tools (e.g., Arduino,
Grasshopper) are rapidly dismantling
many of the traditional hurdles
associated with this domain. This is
leading to increased deployments of
responsive architecture, particularly
in exhibitions and other major events
where its attention-grabbing potential is
highly appreciated; Asif Khan’s kinetic
facade exhibited at the 2014 Sochi
Olympics is one recent example.
On the other hand, while HCI’s
recent fascination with shape-shifting
user interfaces (or radical atoms [ 3],
as Hiroshi Ishii calls them) is making
kinetic architecture/furniture an
increasingly viable topic of research—
the undulating coMotion bench by
Grönvall et al. being one prominent
example—the HCI community so
far has not made many inroads into
responsive architecture per se. (One
of the few exceptions to this may be
works exploring large-scale interactive
surfaces, which have long been a staple
in HCI research.)
Several of my own projects have
dealt with responsive architecture. For
example, in 2013 I teamed up with a
group of architects to build MIMMI
(Figure 3), a large-scale installation
that responds to the current “mood”
of the city (obtained by probing
Twitter feeds of citizens) through
light, mist, and sound. Another
example is Whirlstools (Figure 4), an
unbuilt concept for a kinetic furniture
system that discreetly encourages
communication between strangers
through subtle alterations of physical
Figure 1. A hypothetical “fully-digitized” architectural space.
Change!