Thinkbig Lab

Most of these videos are from the Bartlett School of Architecture students. All of them are selected from Keiichi Matsuda’s tumblr. Amazing experience.  Enjoy it.

Paul Nicholls

Factory Fifteen

Chris Lee

tsuyoshi hirooka

Westernized

I want to introduce one of the most interesting design consultancies working on the mixture between physical and virtual realities. “BERG is a design consultancy, working hands-on with companies to research and develop their technologies and strategy, primarily by finding opportunities in networks and physical things”. The most interesting thing is their physical or objectual approach to the technology. They use physical design processes to design, for example, a new software. Some of their projects:

+ Mag+ is an approach for bringing paper magazines to digital media, with a special focus on touchscreen tablets.

process.

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“…and it’s funny, because I was once asked about the year 2000, what you think about the next millennium? And I told them: architecture will disappear.” Yona Friedman.

This is a text I wrote on July of 2009. I introduce it here to link with the previous post, a reflection of Mark Shepard and Adam Greenfield about the disappearance of the physical part of the city.

I decided to write this post to clear up certain ideas which have been around me for a while about the future of architecture. To understand my doubts, because currently they are just that, firstly I should make clear what I mean by physical architecture and virtual or non-physical architecture. Physical architecture is the tangible, what is constructed. And the virtual would be everything that we can not touch but affects  from different disciplines to the architecture. The recent explosion in digital technologies allows us to not only understand but also use them in new ways to generate architectural processes. Communication, education, sociology, participation, politics, ecology, exhibitions…

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Sao Paulo No Logo. Tony de Marco.

MS: “…, I was interested in thinking through the derivate impact on urban space of an alternative, extreme informatics regime, a future-fiction where literally all information loses its body and is off-loades from the material substrate of the physical city to the personal, portable, or ambient displays of tomorrow’s urban information systems. What happens when mobile and pervasive technologies are used to substract this kind of information from the physical world, reducing rather than adding to the visual field of the street?

AG: ” You know, I am not sure that the visual load ever does get reduced. Just because there will be this additional, personal informational channel made available doesn’t necessarily imply to me that the mass or builfing-scale channel goes away. Although I must say that the image I get of your take on things is a striking one – I imagine a rather starkly monochromatic city blosoming into “augmented” chaos when you blink the contact lenses on or whatever…

One  of the things I think does happen, though, is that the ability to find one’s way around independently of the embedded environmental cues begins to atrophy. This is just that favorite McLuhan quote of mine being worked out in detail: “Every extension is also an amputation.”…”

[1] Urban Computing and its Discontents. (Buy here, or download the free PDF. Be sure to check out the other pamphlets in the series, too.)