Towards a Digitised Era

We have entered a new époque, transforming our societies from the mechanical to the digital. This unlocks a lot of new opportunities and abilities, but also results into big societal and behavioural changes, which need to be addressed in our built environment. Architecture seems to have disappeared on the background, while technological advancements appear to dominate the field. As a result, a representation of the human dimension lacks in our cities and buildings, risking alienation of our settings. Meanwhile, the digitised city drives our mental capacity to an extreme by firing an abundance of stimuli upon us in a velocity that keeps accelerating and intensifying. There is a need to retrieve answers to the emerging design themes in order to meet the demand of human centred architecture in a digitised era. This quest pictures different other dimensions that should be considered, but simultaneously can reinforce the character of an architecture appropriate to a digitised era, resulting in an embodiment of a new zeitgeist. Main discussion points within the debate are: creating human awareness, offering solutions for cyber criminality, allowing technological development to be more democratic, avoid an excess of overexposure from our environments, fusing globalisation with our different local settings and finding the right design tools and methods to approach architectural representation interlaced with digital systems. It is important to keep in mind that the human should stay at the focal point of design at all times and not the machine. Technique should be seen as nothing more than a prosthesis of the human body, it should be restricted - by all means - to take over human functioning. We need to provide open systems and not define everything by algorithms. In this way we can make way for the plurality of human development through creativity and have a stronger interaction between human and machine. In the end the networked systems can behave, together with the city, as an organism that is open to evolve in any direction, based upon the gathering of data. By realising our potential human influence we can have impact upon the network, through manipulating or hacking it towards our own benefits.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Explorela