Sentience and systems boundaries in architecture - SAGE Journals

625515 editorial2016

JAC0010.1177/1478077115625515International Journal of Architectural ComputingEditorial

Editorial

Sentience and systems boundaries in architecture

International Journal of Architectural Computing 2016, Vol. 14(1) 3­–5 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1478077115625515 jac.sagepub.com

Intelligent architectures, such as computationally integrated structures that have the ability to sense, compute, make decisions, and respond based on those computations, have been operational for decades. Many of these systems have also been imbued with the capability to learn over time. Yet, since the 1960s, when pioneers in this field such as Nicholas Negroponte and Gordon Pask were first developing machine intelligence for architectural applications, the notion of sentience, the ability to feel, respond, and perhaps even emote, has been regarded as an apotheosis within this territory. The contemporary capabilities of miniaturized, distributed, and embedded sensing and computation; the ability to process massive volumes of data; the ability to program, manufacture, or simply print new synthetic materials; the kinetic responsiveness; and increased research in psychological and emotional responses are increasingly allowing a wide range of interdisciplinary design practices. A remarkable convergence of discourses about intelligence and the production of intelligence can be observed in emerging work from across a range of fields including design, engineering, computer, and information science. We are now witnessing an exponential expansion of disciplinary boundaries—more specifically, the rise of sentient architectures and the collaborative sharing of activity between human and machine. From this vantage, we look forward expectantly to the possible vistas enabled by architecture’s recent and disruptive past, and yet much remains under-theorized and perhaps still unexplored. This issue of the International Journal of Automation and Computing (IJAC) has been assembled in response to a call to engage the themes of sentience in architecture. The probing of a range of questions aimed to uncover new ground at the edge of computational design’s current frontiers. The content ranges widely from work that aims to theorize the implications of non-human, sentient agents shaping new architectures to reflections on interdisciplinary underpinnings of information theory relative to the predilections of contemporary digital design through the lens of the cybernetic. Projects included in this publication explore a gradient of concerns and potentials emerging across material systems, responsive computation, and human–computer interactions. In “Accepting the robotic other: Why real dolls and spambots suggest a near-future shift in architecture’s architecture,” Alexander Webb engages readers in a reverie outlining a near-future scenario of an expanded field of robotic actors enabled simultaneously by the ever-refined production of machines in response to human desire for empathy. Simultaneously, the Internet of Things is described as a kind of genetic soup from which distributed rather than isolated sentience might emerge. Reflecting on the centrality of the human body in structuring the architectural discipline’s boundaries of form, material, and space, Webb challenges us to imagine how architecture might respond to a multiplicity of sentience bodies demanding accommodation. Camilo Andrés Cifuentes Quin, in his article “The cybernetic imagination of computational architecture,” reflects upon the architectural inheritance of cybernetic theory, specifically describing a strain of circular causality between the theorization of communication and information theory and the ambitions and trajectories we have witnessed in computational design. In prioritizing this informational ontology

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International Journal of Architectural Computing 14(1)

and epistemology, he resurrects the assertions of Bill Mitchell and Malcolm McCullough for a conscious and critical reflection upon the intellectual underpinnings that have structured architecture’s computational turn. In their article “Sensitive Assembly: Gamifying the design and assembly of façade wall prototypes,” authors Anton Savov, Oliver Tessmann, and Stig Anton Nielsen describe a recent project that aims to develop a co-evolutionary learning platform. By leveraging formats of gaming “play,” the work couples a modular system of assembly with both legible sensory feedback in the form of light and shadow patterns cast by the wall and real-time feedback regarding the wall’s structural integrity based upon structural simulations running in parallel with participants’ actions of disassembly. A range of rule-based variations enable various forms of collaborative interaction with the. Relative to discussions of collective intelligence and design as cooperative framework, this project points to a provocative model of design praxis as game-playing, where the objectives of the game shape ambitions, but are informed by multiple parallel forms of feedback shaping participant’s satisfaction. While the literal translations of the project to design workflows might remain nascent, the implications point to multiple ways in which interdisciplinary teams might work through cyber-physical methods toward complex design ends in parallel. Material computation—4D timber construction: Towards building-scale hygroscopic actuated, selfconstructing timber surfaces,” by Dylan Wood, David Correa, Oliver Krieg, and Achim Menges, speculates on the utilization of material computation to produce possible modes of self-forming and self-assembling construction systems through the leveraging of hygroscopic behaviors in composite wood systems. The paper engages the domains of sentience by proposing that “material intelligence,” or the inherent properties of a material system, might be utilized to produce dynamic behaviors to deliver responsive function, replacing the recognition, control, and actuation regimes that comprise traditional approaches to electrical and mechanical component combinations. The early demonstration of these principles, such as those applied to wood-based bi-layered lamination panel prototypes utilizing a range of species and composites, is discussed in terms of their development through computational spring-based processes and verification with physical prototypes based on variables of relative humidity and duration. While limited to the presentation of early findings in what is an ongoing research effort, the text outlines ambitions for how the observed material behaviors might be harnessed to produce physical self-erecting and self-assembling structures or climatically responsive envelopes. In his article “Sensory material architectures: Concepts and methodologies for spatial tectonics and tactile responsivity in knitted textile hybrid structures,” Sean Ahlquist presents new research at the intersection of material computation, textile structures, design methodologies, and emerging applications. This paper expands upon the concepts of material computation as a domain in which design can exploit inherent material intelligence to embrace a model of learning that produces a feedback loop between the inherent material characteristics of bending active textiles, surficial deformation as a sensorial interface, and digital auditory and visual feedback engaging human subjects with challenges to filtering multiple sensory inputs. Along with a sophisticated application of textile fabrication, the human–computer relationships that are proposed and explored in early stages of this work suggest new models of sensory interaction, leveraging the material capacities of the system toward models of co-learning and collaboration; yielding even more compelling outcomes than the formal innovations for which this work has been recognized to date. As an editorial board, reflecting on the charge of the call and examining the response it received from the community of scholars that engage IJAC, it is clear that much remains to be explored within the specific domains of computational design implicated through a term such as sentience. We anticipate that in the coming years, the patterns of cultural transformation enabled through increasingly ubiquitous computation, the maturation and expansion of the Internet of Things, and evolving conceptions of the nature of human– computer interaction will continue to make this vista a fruitful and promising frontier of inquiry.

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Editorial Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Michael Fox, current president of ACADIA, for his contributions to our initial discussions regarding the shape of this issue of the journal; the authors who contributed work in response to the call; and the community of scholars, researchers, and designers who continue to make fertile the field of architectural computing.

Danelle Briscoe, Mahesh Daas, Wassim Jabi, Gregory Luhan and Geoffrey Thün Guest Editors