Interactive living: 12 preliminary notes

Marcelo Tramontano Nomads.usp, Brazil

In: Nietto, I., Tello, I., Vega, R. Installing: art and digital culture. Santiago: Troyano 0.3, 2007. p. 49-53.

"The meaning of the objetcs depends on the quality of the subjective experience that they produce. The subjective experience develops on the consciousness and consists in cognition, emotion, and feelings in such a way of producing transformations at the knowledge state. [Csikszentmihalyi, 1997]

Time. At the contemporaneous age, Architecture and Design have been

confronted by the necessity of reformulating their classical categories. Traditionally structured towards the intention of conceiving spaces for daily life, those disciplines have to consider nowadays some dynamical processes before ignored by them. Time, which is usually seen as linked to the materiality of both buildings and objects, gets relevance by becoming the thread which the mediated processes of information transmission have been woven with.

Hybridization. Architectural space moves away from the definitions that

use to condemn it to the limitations of physical sphere, since its concrete nature is densified by composing with virtual instances. This endows it with a hybrid character and gets it closer to the very notion of communication medium, which is ruled by particular and recent dynamics that constitute the present raw material for Architecture and Design.

Habitation. The habitation, as the theme pour excellence of architectural

reflection, becomes the object of combinatory readings that try to relate it to different disciplinary fields. As this place is basically composed by processes, the building is no longer the main product of its study. If the building no longer contains nor qualifies all the actions for living, the architectural and the design focus move away towards the interaction between users and space.

Interaction. It is close the relation between concrete spaces where daily life

and the several communication processes that support it occur: the living process

depends on and is only defined if both instances are considered. Interaction processes complete the living dynamics from different perspectives, by digital media or not, putting in relation people, objects, buildings, communities and urban fragments.

Diversity. The result of this effort is an extended vision on the theme,

understanding the process of living as the territory where multiple aspects of the urban inhabitant daily life happen. Also it is where actions and spatialities are combined and interact, and communication processes of different natures are accomplished. Such an understanding reveals a large diversity of possible configurations of the places and processes of living, adding to it an undoubtedly plural character.

Scales. Five scales can be selected for the comprehension of hybrid

spatialities concerning processes of living: the virtual scale of environments only existing within digital media, the scale of the extended body with computerized devices, the scale of everyday use objects and pieces furniture with integrated media, the scale of a building treated as an electronic interface, and the urban scale related to informatization of urban fragments.

Virtual. Uniquely digital worlds are, however, a part of hybrid spatialities

because they can only exist by the physical presence of a human user. More and more people have had increased aspects of their daily life at those communication places, web-based specially.

Body. By exploring computer mediated relationships between the human

body and the space that houses it, one dives in the universe of both ubiquitous and wearable computing. Mobility and flexibility are important concepts to architecture and design from the beginning of mechanization of daily life, in the 18th century. They are associated to the idea of an autonomous human being, and of better equipping the individual than his space.

Object. Western intra-families communication processes seem to present

some standards of reception of external information, and also of its understanding and processing by the household members, of its storage or discarding, besides the production of new information. Normally those actions are each supported by objects and pieces furniture of the domestic universe. Inserting media on them allows us to foresee living interiors with today completely unknown pieces. Their

conception is guided less by technical possibilities of digital systems than by their capacity of making denser daily acts.

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Building. Beyond residential automation systems, the informatization of

architectural space makes it able to constitute a communication interface. The house as an electronic interface, as a communication medium acting as an extension of the house's user, co-laborates in the construction of individual senses of living.

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Urban. Including entire communities in mediated communication processes

can help them to get organized in order to resolve problems in common. Also they can discover new levels of sociability maybe hidden in the physical world. Between the electronic agora and the urban art media work, collaborative interfaces propose nuances and levels of complexity to the city concreteness.

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Experience. Interactive living also means territories where various parts of

daily life occur. Designing them presupposes first of all to consider them communication systems in different levels: user-user, user-system, user-space, system-space, If the space experience provided by Architecture and Design and enriched by new media is able to transform either the user or his context, as Pine and Gilmore expect, then it is correct to design it. As a recognizable process with both a beginning and an end, or as a series of interconnected events, it can produce a final impression of satisfaction or insatisfaction as suggested by John Dewey. The space experience can therefore compose new narratives.

Nomads.usp, summer of 2007

Csikszentmihalyi, M. Finding Flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York: Basic Books, 1997 Dewey, J. Art as experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 1934. McLuhan, M. Os meios de comunicao como extenso do homem. So Paulo: Cultrix, 1971. Pine II, J., Gilmore, J. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.