064 // AS receives Special Mention in d3 Natural Systems

Allotropic Systems research project on flexible soft molds was awarded a Special Mention for the Sustainable Product category in d3's Natural Systems competition.

The project is invited to partake in a d3 gallery exhibit tentatively scheduled for Fall 2009.
Thanks very much to d3 and the jury for their support and interest in the work.

for more info on the competition and on d3, see http://www.d3space.org/competitions/

063 // AS awarded runner up in AA | FAB 2009 Designing Fabrication

Allotropic Systems was awarded a runner up of the interior section within the Architectural Association's AA | FAB 2009 Designing Fabrication competition.
The project is invited to London to be presented and exhibited at a forthcoming conference as part of the city's Design Festival week from 19-27 September.
Thanks to AA and to the jury for supporting the research.

please see this post for more a brief description of the project ...

from AA | FAB:

http://67.15.245.8/~aafab/

The FAB Research Cluster at the Architectural Association in London announces the results of the 2009 AA|FAB Awards. The Award theme was ‘Designing Fabrication’ and the jury was interested in recently built projects that exemplify the innovative integration of design and fabrication processes through digitally driven design systems and protocols, and whose completion contributes to an international discourse on the use of emerging design and fabrication technologies.

Entries were received from all over the world including the UK, Spain, Austria, US, Canada, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Australia. Due to the uneven distribution of entries across the categories suggested in the brief, the jury decided to reorganise all submissions into either INTERIOR or EXTERIOR groups. Accordingly, it was agreed to reallocate the prize money into six awards, with a first prize of £1500 and two runners-up of £750 for each group.

The jury met on Thursday 11 June and was impressed by the extremely high standard and diversity of the submitted work. After four hours of deliberation they unanimously selected the following schemes for awards:

EXTERIOR SECTION

FIRST PRIZE: RE-PURPOSE POLITICAL PLY Jason Griffiths

RUNNER UP: THE MORNING LINE Matthew Ritchie with Aranda/Lasch and Daniel Bosia

RUNNER UP: MUSCULAR SYNERGY Josiah Barnes and Pablo Rica

INTERIOR SECTION

FIRST PRIZE: CEILING CLOUD Andrew Vrana, Joe Meppelink and Scott Marble

RUNNER UP: GREEN VOID Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck, LAVA

RUNNER UP: ALLOTROPIC SYSTEM Nicholas Bruscia

The six award recipients will present their work at an AA|FAB conference during London Design Festival week from 19-27 September. More details on the winning projects will be posted in the couple of days. A further eighteen entries have been selected for exhibition in September as follows:

SELECTED FOR EXHIBITION

QUASI CABINET MINERAL FURNITURE	Ben Aranda / Aranda Lasch
TOY FURNITURE	Greg Lynn FORM
FORMED CORIAN	Greg Lynn FORM
FLUX	Andrew Kudless
GENDESIGN	Marcel Bilurbina Camps
DIGITAL ORIGAMI	Chris Bosse / LAVA
ARRAYED WALL	Ali Seghatoleslami
PARAMETRIC WOOD	Martin Tamke / CITA
BLADE	Tim Lucas / Price & Myers Geometrics
RED+HOUSING	Pablo Castro / OBRA Architects
GINGER V.0.6SS	Denis Vlieghe
COMPLEX CORRUGATION	Chad Carpenter
GLASS FABRIC	Alex Terzich / Front Inc.
ALUMINUM PROJECT	Yasuhiro Yamashita / Atelier Tekuto
FRAMELESS PAVILION	Andrea Marini
OPEN COLUMNS	Omar Khan
CALIFORNIA BAY HOUSE	Joshua Zabel / Kreysler & Assoc
AIRFRAME EXHIBITION STAND	Tim Lucas / Price & Myers Geometrics

062 // come up to my room 2009

Collaboration with Patricia Schraven. (programming assistance: J.T. Rinker)
February 2009. Gladphones - public space interactive installation Come Up To My Room alternative design event.
Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, Ontario

Marshall McLuhan suggested that we cannot visualize while telephoning, as the act demands complete participation of our senses and facilities. This may explain why many people have a strong urge to doodle while engaging with the telephone, either during conversation or on hold. This installation is an attempt to bring the other senses into play in a new relation by creating real time physical visualizations derived from speaking into a telephone.



This project attempts to address McLuhan’s ideas on the telephone, and investigate human-machine interaction when a completely ubiquitous device is used as the interface. The participant simply speaks into the telephone handset as they normally would, unknowingly providing the machine with their voice frequency. This frequency is sampled and sent through a custom piece of software (PD), where it is converted into a pure tone. This digital snapshot of one’s voice is amplified through a deconstructed speaker core whose purpose is to transmit the frequency’s vibrations through what is known as a Chladni plate. A thin sheet of aluminum vibrates to a specific wavelength forcing a fine grain sand into complex geometric configurations that are specific to the voice frequency of the participant. The expectation of the telephone shifts from that of a personal auditory response, to that of a public visual response. As the voice of participant changes in reaction to the machine, so does the visualization that the machine provides.

061 // R.A.M accepted into CHI 2009 Workshop

Reflexive Architecture Machines, a series of projects by Omar Khan, Matt Hume, James Brucz, and myself, was accepted into the Programming Reality Workshop at CHI 2009 - held in Boston from April 4-9.

http://www.chi2009.org/
http://cva.ap.buffalo.edu/ReflexiveArchitectureMachines/

From the call for participation ...
Programming Reality:
From Transitive Materials to Organic User Interfaces

Over the past few years, a quiet revolution has been redefining our fundamental computing technologies. Flexible E-Ink and OLEDs displays, shape-changing and light-emitting materials, parametric design, e-textiles, sensor networks, and intelligent interfaces promise to spawn entirely new user experiences that will redefine our relation with technology. In one example, future flexible displays will allow us to design devices that are completely flexible, and that can curve around everyday objects or our bodies. These and other developments are opening up unprecedented opportunities for innovation and require us to re-examine and re-evaluate some of the most basic user interface design principles.

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners to imagine and debate this future, as well as prototype nextgeneration interfaces. We will explore two converging themes. Transitive Materials will focus on how emerging materials and computationally-driven behaviors can operate in unison blurring the boundaries between form and function, human body and environment, structures and membranes, while supporting the design of computational systems that are intrinsically capable of interactivity and personalization. Organic User Interfaces (OUI) will explore future interactive designs and applications as these materials become commonplace. The OUI vision is based on an understanding that in the future the physical shape of display devices will become non-flat, potentially arbitrary and even fluid or computationally controlled. This allows display devices and entire environments to take on shapes that are 3D, flexible, dynamic, modifiable by users or self-actuated.

In the future we will observe increasing integration of computation and physical environment, to the point where basic material properties will be computationally controlled. In this brave new world, we will be programming not only computers or devices, but the fabric of reality itself. We invite interested participants to join us in discussing, inventing and prototyping this exciting future.

060 // ACADIA exhibit

A few pics from the most up to date machine prototype as shown within the Silicon + Skin exhibition at this years ACADIA conference ....

059 // allotropic CA

... long time since posting ...
an update (dates back to early August) on the CA algorithm (Processing) that runs in real time taking in temperature values from each of the molds for use in reconfiguring the molds, as well as determining the assembly of the resultant structure made of the casted units.

058 // ACADIA 2008: Silicon + Skin

The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture together with the Digital Design Consortium in the School of Architecture and Computer Science at the University of Minnesota will hold the ACADIA 2008 conference in Minneapolis. The upcoming conference entitled Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation fosters design work and research from the worlds of practice and academia which lie at the intersection between design, biology, and computation. More specifically, this conference seeks to identify and examine current trends in digital design technologies developed and applied in the framework of biologically inspired processes and digitally assisted sustainable design.

http://www.acadia.org/acadia2008/

Thanks to the chairs of the conference for the invite and exhibition of Allotropic Systems.

057 // Situated Technologies Pamphlets 2

This one by Mathew Fuller and Usman Haque....
Urban Versioning System 1.0

LINK: Lulu

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies?

The second volume in the series asks the question: what lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.

056 // Reflexive Architecture Machines

Recent publication introducing the recent research conducted at the CVA at SUNY Buffalo School of Architecture. The works of Professor Omar Khan, and thesis candidates James Brucz, Matt Hume, and Nick Bruscia are featured.

Link: LULU

Omar Khan:
Reflexive Architecture Machines presents a series of architecture machines that reflexively address material and information agency in the forming of space. They re-imagine ways of shaping conventional materials such as rubber, concrete, plastic and wood, using computational strategies to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of these industrialized materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of the environments in which they are fabricated and eventually deployed. The projects rethink the forms and, more importantly, the tools that will bring them about. The work is the outcome of design research conducted in the Situated Technology Research Group at the University at Buffalo Department of Architecture.


Text from Allotropic Systems research:
Allotropic Systems- Thermo-sensitive Reconfigurable Molds
Nicholas Bruscia
A thermo-sensitive reconfigurable mold (RCM-T) proposes a way to utilize the generative possibilities of algorithmic scripting within physical computing. The heat sensitive mold, in the process of fabrication, feeds the chemical heat gain from the poured material as it cures, directly into a generative algorithm. This contextual data drives the behavior of the algorithm which in turn alters the morphology of the mold and hence the casted unit. One mold can produce several unique casts, each specific to the event of their making. The part-to-whole relationship of the resulting structures is allotropic: the same elements that form the network are individually shaped by the event of their making such that the same network can take on a variety of shapes. Such a system proposes a means to make moldable materials, like plastics, more responsive to the contingencies of their making. As a network structure parts can not be conceived in isolation but must be dynamically constructed with direct feedback from the entire assembly.
This work reconsiders computation in architecture through embedded circuitry and robotic technology which provides an opportunity to move away from screen based virtual reality and into augmented physical environments. Embedded computation has the ability to act directly on full scale prototypes creating a dialogue between digital algorithms and analog constructions. Current rapid prototyping technologies provide a limited material palette that results in models unable to address full-scale material performance, capability, and options. While they offer a level of precision that is important in realizing complex forms at any scale, they are often times built from the same digital model used to produce representational images. In contrast, algorithmic parametric modeling offers greater control on form generation facilitating the possibility to capture fascinating scientific and mathematical concepts coupled with input from actual material properties to produce architectural form and structure.