067 // AA | FAB Designing Fabrication exhibition opens

Village Underground
54 Hollywell Lane
Shoreditch

Tuesday 22 September - Friday 25 September: 12:00 - 8:00 pm
Saturday 26 September: 12:00 - 5:00 pm

066 // 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

065 // 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/

064 // Toward the Sentient City exhibition

from Situated Technologies:
In September 2009, the Architectural League will present Toward the Sentient City, a major exhibition that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it.

The exhibition is part of the Situated Technologies research initiated in 2006 by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard. The symposium ignited a dialogue between researchers and practitioners from various fields that began to address the emerging role of 'situated' technologies in the design of the contemporary city. Since then, the discussion has continued within four (from a series of nine) pamphlets that examine various topics including pervasive media, mobile communication, ubiquitous computing, ambient informatics, and responsive environments.

see: http://sentientcity.net/

063 // Situated Technologies Pamphlet 4

Situated Technologies Pamphlet 4:
Responsive Architecture /
Performing Instruments
Spring 2009

Philip Beesley and Omar Khan

A new generation of architecture that responds to building occupants and environmental factors has embraced distributed technical systems as a means and end for developing more mutually enriching relationships between people, the space they inhabit, and the environment. This pamphlet discusses key qualities of “responsive” architecture as a performing instrument that is both mutable and contestable.

http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/
http://www.lulu.com/content/7394439

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.