#ucla aud

A Sensible Environment for Professional Co-Habitation, 2016

exploring space as an interactive medium : Fall Option Studio with Guvenc Ozel 

THE AETHER PROJECT

The course is a collaborative effort between A.UD and DMA, aiming to explore the hybrid boundaries between architecture, media arts and technology. It is an experimental advanced design studio that aspires to contextualize contemporary debates regarding computation, robotics, interactivity and artificial intelligence as spatial paradigms. 

Half way through the quarter and looking forward to excellent results as a collaborate with the very talented members of UCLA Design Media Arts Refik Anadol and Julieta Gil with Farzad Mirshafiei from UCLA A.UD.  

The main objective of the course is to challenge the boundaries of the human body and the physical environment through an exploration of architecture as an interactive technology. The historic evolution of technology reveals an aspiration to place mind into matter in order to create tools that are subservient yet autonomous from humans. Architecture as a form of technology does not exist outside of this cultural aspiration. Our scientific exploration of nature through physics, mathematics and material sciences lead to the formation of intelligent abstract systems in the realm of simulation and computation. These scientific paradigms have had a tremendous influence on contemporary design methodology, theory and critique. Current experiments in sensing technology expresses this desire to transform architecture into an intelligent form of technology that can autonomously negotiate between the human body, human psyche, the environment and other parameters.

These contemporary influences of technological thinking affect both the “software” (as in design intent) and the “hardware” (as in formal, organizational and structural logic) of design. The course is a hands-on exploration of contemporary digital, computational and material design tools while taking interactivity and responsiveness as the main goal. The ideas are tested through the design and fabrication of a fully functional prototype followed up with an environmental application scenario that has an “interactive software” and a “responsive hardware”. 

Sense Based Transformations: Synthesized Software and Hardware

Interactive Software

We selected Leap Motion as our sensory input to program as an interactive interface that will trigger an actuator for spatial transformation--in our case the actuators are two KUKA KR150-2. We are using  Bot&Dolly's IRIS platform to previs and simulate robot motion, which is then controlled via custom TouchOSC layout that's hacked to receive LM user data.

Responsive Hardware

We will develop a 1:1 scale large prototype that is designed to go through a formal transformation, but for now we are designing the system 1:10 scale while keeping material properties in mind. The transformation is triggered by the user data/gestures from the Leap Motion, triggering and moving the KUKA bots. This prototype serve as a “proof of concept” in order to develop a spatial scenario or an environmental application.

Kengo Kuma

Principal, Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tokyo

Packed full house at DeCafe as Kengu Kuma lectured today at AUD about the discourse of his recent work. With offices in Tokyo and Paris, Kuma aspires to recover the tradition of Japanese buildings and to reinterpret these traditions for the 21st century. Kuma states “creating architecture is like a cloud, from natural materials disassembled into particles.”