Furnishing the Fun Palace – with new digital design materials

An on-going interdisciplinary research project relating to the future of connected media creates a web-based system for highly interactive, personalised, shared media experiences.[1] The new technologies will improve the feeling of being together in a shared mediated space and support interaction and collaboration between people who are separated in time or space. This area of research is called presence design and specifically addresses the fusion of architecture and interactive media that enables mediated presence, i.e dialogic interaction across time and space (Gullström 2010, 2012). While architects conventionally design physical spaces and material artefacts to support human interaction, we are increasingly drawn into the realms of digital, immaterial and hybrid design contexts. New building materials have become available, borrowed from the fields of media and communications. What emerges from our recent design-led research is a digital toolbox of new design materials to furnish interiors and create architectural space. Real-time video and audio streams are combined with embedded smart devices and building components that respond to users’ presence by local action or remote interaction. The new materials are e.g. augmented textile surfaces (such as Softwalls) that transform and react in response to (local or remote) movement or touch; or virtual shared spaces and ambient wall furnishings that can prompt reactions from far away (such as SharedSpace or PixelPresence); or instant acoustic dividers that suddenly appear from thin air, and partition your space, created from a combination of projected video streams and sound design. These are new architectural interfaces which, it is argued, will contribute new materiality to architectural design and inform its practitioners, and that can be distinguished from mobile interfaces or tangible interface design. [1] COMPEIT (EU FP7 project 2013-2016) is the acronym of “Connected Media and Presence from European Institute of Technology”, see http://www.compeit.eu. QC 20150522