Interactive Architecture - History

History

Until recently, aside from the more visionary theorists mentioned above, the notion of intelligence in the context of interactive environments revolved around a central control system for everything; these systems were called “smart environments.” In the 1980s and 1990s, an explosion of development began to take place within the field of computer science. Out of this, fields such as “intelligent environments” (IE) were formed to study spaces with embedded computation and communication technologies, creating spaces that bring computation into the physical world. Intelligent environments are defined as spaces in which computation is seamlessly used to enhance ordinary activity. Michael Mozer, who led the development of the pioneering Adaptive House in the late 1990s speaks of the “intelligence” of the home as that which arises from the home’s ability to predict the behavior and needs of the inhabitants by having observed them over a period of time. Instead of being programmed to perform certain actions, the house essentially programmed itself by monitoring the environment and sensing actions performed by the inhabitants, observing the occupancy and behavior patterns of the inhabitants, and learning to predict future states of the house. Another approach was that of MIT’s Intelligent Room project directed by Michael Coen which was created to experiment with different forms of natural, multimodal human-computer interaction (HCI) by embedding computational smarts into everything with which the users come in contact. The goal was to allow computers to participate in activities that have never previously involved computation and to allow people to interact with computational systems the way they would with other people. The developments in IE were essentially fueled by the concept of “ubiquitous computing” (a term coined in 1988 by Mark Weiser as a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction).

Ubiquitous computing can be defined as computation thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities, and is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, and design. In ubiquitous computing, a user engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. Weiser described this as “the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.”

From the intersection between this computer science and architecture grew the seminal work of the MIT Architecture Machine Group which developed a number of seminal projects during the 1970s and 80’s in media and interface design and even computationally enhanced environments.