At home in the adaptive

At home in the Adaptive - architecture-as-it-could-be

Table of contents Abstract Introduction Research questions Aim of research Research approach

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Adaptive architecture Dwelling Incubation phase Embodied space Nursery phase Artificial evolution Adoption phase

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Concluding analysis References

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Abstract Present thesis is situated within the interdisciplinary research field of Adaptive Architecture and seeks to explore the future of built space as something that will not be inherited by current developments, but unfolded through the research and potential of how the human finds itself at home. Through exploring the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus, present thesis investigates human experiences of engagements with interactive and evolving technology. Knowledge and experiments are generated by means of a process that will evolve through the Growth Plan, which consists of three cyclical phases of exploration appropriated specifically to meet the needs of present thesis. In order to analyse the growth through these phases, a framework and vocabulary that enables an interpretation of human experiences is attained through phenomenology. Situated in a context of architecture, phenomenology, artificial life and human-technology relations, present thesis contributes to an interdisciplinary field of adaptive environments by providing insights through said evolutionary process and culminates in a proposal of a blueprint for ways in which future development of adaptive architecture can be conducted with a humanistic focus.

Keywords: Adaptive architecture, human-technology relations, embodiment, adaption, interdisciplinary research, phenomenology, design, performance, evolutionary algorithms, dwelling, home environment, futurology, artificial life, virtual reality, experientiality, co-evolution.

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“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” – HAL (2001: a Space Odyssey)

Introduction Present thesis seeks to explore the future of built space as something that will not be inherited by current developments, but unfolded through the research and potential of how the human finds itself at home.

Contemporary human life entails an increasing incorporation of technology. New developments within fields of advanced technology constantly push the boundaries for ways in which it becomes interwoven into the everyday experience of the world. The existential frame of our lives, the house, is a setting in which many of these rapid changes come to be expressed. An emergent research area that deals with future transformations of built space is Adaptive Architecture. According to Holger Schnädelbach (2010) from the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham, the field of Adaptive Architecture is a relatively young and interdisciplinary field that aims to design built environments, which “truly adapts” to their environmental surroundings and inhabitants. So far the technologization and development of built space has mostly followed the popular path of ‘smart’ appliances with a functional focus on areas such as automatic light and heating. It marks a general development that points towards a relationship with technology that is becoming increasingly interdependent. As tendencies point towards a continued exponential growth within technology (1975, Moore’s law), the future of homes and the experience of inhabiting them will change profoundly. While the new fields of responsive and adaptive buildings has 7

mostly been focused on the exterior, present thesis seek to forecast ways in which future technological developments of the interior can be steered towards an integration of qualities that embody the experience of an evolving and appealing home environment. This stems from an interest in future developments of technology to be part of an active relation to the human and part of a greater ecological context, which negates the pitfalls in present societal discourses of the alienating effects of technology that leaves the human in a dormant and disembodied state. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford motor company, is at times used as an example to show anticipation of future technology, as he is believed to have said: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse�.

The technologies of an adaptive home might come to exist in the future, but the responsibility to research and understand how they come to be shaped exists in the present. To explore a future where the potential of human and building adapt in a mutually beneficial relationship, present thesis adheres to development of Adaptive Architecture as a socio-technical challenge, which implicates inhabitants and built space equally.

Research questions

Is it feasible for the inhabitant to share autonomy of their home with a non-human intelligent technological system?

Can the experience of living with systems of adaptive architecture come to be perceived as an integrated part of daily life?

What are the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind?

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Aim of research The aim of present thesis is to explore the above stated research questions through an evolutionary process in order make a qualified contribution to the interdisciplinary field of adaptive environments by way of focusing on the experience of inhabiting adaptive built spaces of the future. The goal of such a process is ultimately to enable the proposal of a blueprint for ways in which future development of adaptive architecture can be conducted with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind.

In the following chapter we will account for the approach that will account for the advancement of our research process.

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“In a complex system we do not plan the future, but orient it in a flexible way, always reacting to the actual behavior of the whole.”

Wolf D. Prix, Design Principal/CEO of Coop Himmelb(l)au

Research approach The explorative process unfolded here started with an interest in the relationship between humans and technology embedded in architecture. This interest grew into an ambition to explore how enabling co-evolution between humans and technology could develop the homes of the future. In order to answer the research questions shaped by such an ambition, an evolving method was needed, which we found in the three phases of the Growth Plan: Incubation, Nursery, Adoption. It is three phases that allows for experimentation, exploration and key insights that can help evolve the next phase. The use of experiential performance methods will accompany the process with staging of experiments. The methods are employed in order to further enable qualified human interaction, which will be coupled with environments and systems that we will create with relevant techniques and technologies found in interactive art. In order to analyse the growth through these phases, a framework and vocabulary that allowed for an interpretation of human experiences was needed. Such an approach was found in phenomenology. The phenomenological approach allowed us various methods of describing and interpreting the intimate and interpersonal relations that occur between humans, technology and built space. In order to orient this evolutionary method of various disciplines in a way that allows for flexibility in insights, key concepts from theories of dwelling, embodiment and artificial evolution is employed to provide a framework for our navigation and analysis between disciplines.

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The explorative process Present thesis forecasts ways in which future architecture will evolve and adapt from a perspective of the home and subsequently, how humans can come to dwell in these homes. It is a study of human experience, embodiment, space, adaptivity, co-evolution and various other themes. Â The research conducted here will thus not come from an initial hypothesis, but rather seek to evolve from an initial research question:

What are the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind?

DWELLING

ENABLING CO-EVOLUTION BETWEEN HUMANS AND TECHNOLOGY IN ARCHITECTURE

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

INCUBATION

EMBODIMENT

ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION

FUTURES IN ADAPTIVE ARCHITECTURE

EXPLORATIVE PROCESS

NURSERY

ADOPTION

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As mentioned by Tomasz Jáskiewicz (2013) in his PhD conducted at the Hyperbody institute: Towards a Methodology for Complex Adaptive Interactive Architecture, there are still very few interdisciplinary methods and frameworks for conducting research on adaptive architecture. Even in said dissertation, the focus is very much on the engineering aspects of developing prototypes and less the pre-reflective relationships that can occur between humans and built environment of such characteristics. Furthermore, no attempts at conducting research in a home environment were made. Present thesis does of course have a far greater limitation than a research such as the one mentioned, yet our method will seek a combination of various fields in order to understand the qualities and potential of such future homes when the humans are to make it their nesting place.

The human experience of ‘dwelling’ or feeling ‘at home’ is at its’ core a very subjective phenomenon.

Understanding and analyzing our relation to our home-environment therefore requires an approach that investigates our directly embodied and personal experiences.

As such, exploring the future of human and architectural interaction will be conducted by way of an interdisciplinary approach.

As such, in aiming towards a process ofARTIFICIAL openness and flexibility, we employ DWELLING EMBODIMENT an explorative process that allows for evolvement through the threeEVOLUTION stages of P.R. Ross’s (2009) The Growth Plan: An approach for considering social implications in Ambient Intelligent system design.

Evolutionary process: The adaptive Growth Plan The plan has been used in texts such as A Design Approach to Socially Adaptive Lighting Environments (2011) FUTURES IN and Inspirational test-bed of smart textile services (2014) and revolves as mentioned around three phases, RESEARCH EXPLORATIVE namely Incubation, Nursery, and Adoption. Seeing as the Growth Plan is meant to take place over a ADAPTIVE QUESTIONS PROCESS longer period of time (p.5), our thesis will be structured around an adaption of these three phases with ARCHITECTURE the limited time we have for each phase. The phases will furthermore be adapted to fit our particular subject area with regards to conceptual insights from particular research fields and experimental approaches.

INCUBATION

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NURSERY

ADOPTION

INCUBATION

NURSERY

Incubation phase

ADOPTION

The first phase, called Incubation, involves exploring concepts with high creativity and as our thesis research differs in that it revolves architecture not yet existing, we will combine this part of the experiments with Susan Kozel’s (2007) article Embodied imagination: a hybrid method of designing for intimacy, in an attempt to gain insight in “the future of social and affective computing where technology can contribute, not just to the functional, but to the expressive and emotional texture of people’s lives.” (p.209). This is done in an attempt to open a dialogue with our participants and maintain a continued openness to match our phenomenological analysis, which will be addressed later.

Narrative structure In the Incubation phase we will use fictitious narratives as a way of preparing our participants for experiencing the future house in which we claim they reside. In the nursery phase we use narratives again to both prepare for the experience in the lab and further qualify the participants, as well as during the experiment as reference point and to amplify the notion of being in a future environment.

In A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction (2009), Julian Bleecker, said to be the inventor of the concept design fiction, writes “science fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences” (p. 7). With the comparison between fiction and prototypes he says that not only do stories of the future inspire new ideas, they also make things imaginable and therefore possible. Bleecker advocates for skipping the long and hard way of producing facts, and initially start out by exploring only speculations: “Why not employ science fiction to stretch the imagination? Throw out the disciplinary constraints one assumes under the regime of fact and explore possible fictional logics and assumptions in order to reconsider the present” (p. 6).

In this thesis narratives will used in various phases of the research; both as general inspiration and understanding, as preparation for experiment activities and as data that we analyse and relate to. Susanna Tosca (2008) uses narratives in her article concerning the future of books and e-reading, referring to Donna Haraway to claim that no story of the future is without an effect on the present: “Telling stories of the future is always a social, material, and political practice. It always has effects; it is always noninnocent” (Haraway, in Tosca, p. 4).

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Nursery phase

INCUBATION

NURSERY

In the second phase, Nursery, concepts are tested in a controlled lab environment. “These experiments allow initial testing on how the system transforms people’s behaviours and experiences.” (2009) and as such, a ‘nursery’ is an environment that allows controlled testing with participants. As Ross writes “An example of a Nursery space is the /d.search-labs context lab, which features spaces that resemble DWELLING EMBODIMENT different quarters of a home. The advantage of such contexts is that they enable controlled experiments. ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION This control applies both to the way the system functions in its context, and to what kind of people participate in the experiments.” (2009, p.3). Besides control and participation we need to stage the experiments in the second phase in a certain manner to be able gain knowledge about insights gained from the first phase. In order to do this, we will apply a performance-based approach as it appears in Kjell Yngve Petersen and Karin Søndergaard’s (2013) Light as experiential material. In order to unpack ENABLING variousCO-EVOLUTION qualities this approach relies on a ‘staged experientiality’ in which participants and directors (us) are challenged in a variety of different ways.RESEARCH The performance-based approach isEXPLORATIVE something we will adopt BETWEEN preliminary to ourAND main experiment, in orderQUESTIONS to gain a deeper insight as to how the experiment itself HUMANS PROCESS must beTECHNOLOGY designed and how the discussions must be staged.

As this stage is to resemble a home setting, yet IN still be ARCHITECTURE in a controlled lab environment, we will use various rituals and artifacts from home to encourage a feeling of reality. On the technological end, the interactive prototypes that will be coded and setup of the experiment will draw inspiration from insights gained in the Incubation phase, yet also seek inspiration from fields as biology and cybernetics (artificial evolution). As artificial intelligence and ecology will increase its intersection in the future, we attempt to createINCUBATION some prototypes that will NURSERY exhibit various traits ADOPTION of biological/artificial evolution and of course artificial intelligence.

Adoption phase The final phase is the Adoption phase, in which the ideas and prototypes move from a lab setting and simulated ‘real life’ to an actual real life context. As Ross writes “the true influence of a transformational agent can best be evaluated in-situ, in real life.” (p.4). Here we will not simulate intelligent systems to such a degree as was done in the nursery phase and we will furthermore create a real system with an evolutionary algorithm we will develop according to our findings in previous phases, which is to be installed in a home. As our process will be to constantly be qualitatively interacting with participants and also attempt our own first-person phenomenological studies, the transformation of a home will happen in our own home, in which we will schedule activities much in the same way as in the nursery phase, here the participants will just be invited and the primary experiences will be through the eyes of one of us. The experiment will take place over a week, and involve various technological and personal requirements to 14

ADOPTION

FUTURES IN ADAPTIVE ARCHITECTURE

align it as closely as possible to a real adaptive house of the future. A continuity between our three phases will be established by using our findings from Incubation and Nursery coupled with our theoretical basis from artificial life, architecture and philosophy to create the environment, while at the same time inviting the participants from earlier phases and reiterate our performance-based approach to gain a deeper understanding of our research subject in a real life environment: the Adoption. We will now move on to explicate the role of phenomenology throughout the paper and how we see the relevancy of our chosen subjects in a thesis regarding adaptive architecture.

Analysis

Situated between what academia typically refers to as the two major research paradigms, present thesis can be characterized as conducting qualitative research. With our method, the goal is to link various assumptions of epistemological and phenomenological character to various practical inquiries and experiments. The futuristic aspects of our process require a fundamentally interpretative approach, which aligns well with qualitative research (Cresswell, 2007). As this process is embedded in the everyday life of humans, the way in which knowledge is generated must be sought to remain within the boundaries of ‘life’ and not removed from the boundaries of everyday-ness, as research fields are at times believed to be. As with qualitative research of this kind, we strongly affirm that our inquiry, findings and process will be seen through certain cultural, personal and historical prejudices. Yet our reflective level highly hinges on our own openness and willingness to meet the research topic on its own terms. Our process is therefore not predetermined, yet seeks to allow for flexibility and generation of knowledge. As Cresswell notes, a qualitative study increases its quality, the more complex, interactive, and encompassing the narrative is (2007). Van Manen (1990) in his book Researching the lived experience moreover point to the fact of how important a flexible phenomenological approach is with regards to research and outcome (p.13).

In order to build the foundations of a theoretical framework for identifying and analyzing experiences between humans and a intelligent home-environments, our research seeks to combine theory and practice by utilizing explorative interactive technology and draw inspiration through poetical first-person thought-experiments, performance and other artistic approaches. As Susan Kozel (2007) writes in Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology: “Effective phenomenologies open paths between hitherto unprecedented combination of practice and theory … they are therefore useful, or even essential, when groundbreaking work is undertaken and has not yet generated its own associated discourse and languages” (p.55).

The following chapter will explicate the role of phenomenology in our thesis.

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Phenomenology: Analytical role in the Growth Plan Our analysis takes its outset in Merleau-Ponty’s hermeneutical and existential phenomenology. Dan Zahavi (2008) writes in Phenomenology, Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy how Merleau-Ponty: “Introduced the topics of intersubjectivity, sociality, embodiment, historicity, language, and interpretation into phenomenology” (p.662). Hermeneutical phenomenology interprets “how we understand and engage things around us in our human world, including ourselves and others.“ (Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013, online). Alongside hermeneutic and existential phenomenology, present thesis employs first-person phenomenology to address the qualitative discourse of adaptive architecture. This approach is used when a precise or particular meaning isn’t given prior to the research, thus giving the researcher an opportunity for flexible interpretation. Following David Seamon’s (2000) article Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture, the three approaches can shortly introduced as: Existential: Analysis of specific experiences of specific individuals and groups involved in actual situations.

Hermeneutical: Theory and practice of interpretation, particularly the interpretation of texts, material object or tangible expression imbued in some way with human meaning.

First-Person: The researcher uses their own first-hand experience of the phenomenon as a basis for examining its specific characteristics and qualities.

Encountering all three phenomenological variations in one examination process is not unusual, as noted by Seamon (2000). The Incubation phase will be approached in a hermeneutical way of textinterpretation, the Nursery phase will involve experiments and experiences with test-participants and will thus be approached in an existential and observational manner and finally the Adoption phase will combine our own immersion in the experiments where a first-person approach will be used alongside involvement of test-participants. As Francisco Varela (1999) writes in First-person Methodologies: What, Why, How?: “In brief our stance in regards to first-person methodologies is this: don’t leave home without it, but do not forget to bring along third-person accounts as well.” (p.3). In order to structure our analysis and interpretation, we considered Van Manen’s work (1990) and phenomenological approach in Researching Lived Experience. Van Manen does not engage with a specific set of fixed methods, as it would be counterproductive to the exploration, yet he defines six activities for researching lived-experience as (pp.30-33): 16

1. turning to a phenomenon that seriously interests us and commits us to the world.

2. investigating experience as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it.

3. reflecting on the essential themes that characterize the phenomenon.

4. describing the phenomenon through the act of writing and rewriting.

5. maintaining a strong and oriented pedagogical relation to the phenomenon.

6. balancing the research context by considering parts and whole.

As such, our role as researchers will be to create interplay and mediate between these different meanings in order to qualify the experiences we investigate (p. 26). We will now explicate how phenomenology ties in to the research of architecture of the future.

Phenomenology in Adaptive Architecture research As the interpretive study of human experience, phenomenology will be employed as the premiere mode of inquiry in this thesis. As mentioned, phenomenology can be viewed more as a style of analysis than a strict method and according to Merleau-Ponty (1945), in the preface to The phenomenology of perception, it is a “manner or style of thinking.” (p.Viii). To attain the highest level of openness towards the phenomenon, we will not only seek to make said phenomenon ‘show itself ’ through analysis and interpretation, but through our own direct involvement and first person experiences. The intent in combining a phenomenological analysis along with our own experiences is a way of ensuring a fuller result and understanding. This is an ‘artistic’ approach we allow ourselves, as opposed to more acknowledged scientific approaches. This is with the intention of gaining as much quality as possible and, as Roland Barthes (1986) in The rustle of language comments on the rigidity of some methods: “… no surer way to kill a piece of research and send it to join the great scrap heap of abandoned projects than Method.” (p.318).

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology serves great purpose as its dealing with experience of space comes by way of accounting for subjective or first-person experiences, where the body is at the center. MerleauPonty’s insisting on combining subjective experience with methods more focused on the objective strikes a balance, in which we will seek a fluctuation between our own experiences and research done by way of experiments and participant inclusion. As mentioned, writing, interpreting and describing is at the core of the research. We will incorporate this into our approach by a continuous use of journaling and development of narratives in various contexts: In experiments we expose our participants to stories of future built space and in our own first-person experiences we seek to explore the same space we have constructed from the fabric of imagination. This is a way of opening ourselves to the possibilities of future technology and as Van Manen writes in Phenomenology of the novel: “What is revealed 17

in the experience of fictional literature is not fact or incidence, news or controversy, but the reality of possibility: the reality of imaginable human experience.” (p.178). Just as we will write and re-write various texts ourselves, we will also interpret and re-describe texts from participants of our experiments. This aligns well with how phenomenology tries to encompass several perspectives, as he further writes it: “ … tries to be attentive to both terms of its methodology: it is a descriptive (phenomenological) methodology because it wants to be attentive to how things appear … it is an interpretive (hermeneutical) methodology because it claims there are no such things as uninterpreted phenomena .. the “facts” of lived experience need to be captured in language (the human science text) and this is inevitable an interpretive process.” (p.181).

The chapter, Embodied space, will include a first-person account of our own experience and embodiment within an imagined future built environment. This will be one of the ways in which we will attempt at unveiling and ‘let us see that which shines through, that which tends to hide itself ” (p.130) with regards to our current understanding of the relation between humans and adaptive architecture.

First-person phenomenology “Writing involves a textual reflection in the sense of separating and confronting ourselves with what we know, distancing ourselves from the lifeworld, de-contextualizing and thoughtful preoccupations from immediate action, abstracting and objectifying our lived understandings from our concrete involvements” (1990, p.129).

For Van Manen, phenomenology operates in the space between who we are and who we may become.

A first-person research takes advantage of the researcher’s experience. Applying this approach to a firstperson perspective, David Seamon (2000) In Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research writes that he used his own firsthand experience of certain phenomenons to examine specific characteristics and qualities of painter Frederic Church’s home in the 19th century. As our gaze is set on an examination of the future, not the past, a coupling of our developed concepts alongside our imaginative will serve as our aid and thus, as Seamon writes: “Through being on the site and walking, looking, writing, sketching, and so forth, I attempted to empathize with and identify the architectural, environmental, and human qualities.” (p.8). This approach is a dialectic between various phenomenological notions and concepts. When coupled with the concreteness of our own experiences throughout experiments it aims at allowing for an immersion in the experience of a future home. A first-person research can offer clarity and insight, but as Seamon writes “This understanding is derived from a world of one, however, 18

and the researcher must find ways to involve the worlds of others.” (p.9). We are aware of the balance in this sort of method, and the process of interpreting and understanding will be a constant turning to theoretical concepts and analysis of our participants (or “co-researchers” as they are at times called in phenomenological research) experiences in order to continually consult our own understanding of the subject. Such a method requires a holistic approach to become insightful, with aid from several disciplines. One such discipline comes in the shape of artificial life.

Concepts of Artificial life

As we seek to explore our assumption of buildings in the future as a synthetic kind of life form, with some level of intelligence or ability to have impact on its surroundings, insight into artificial life (Alife) is unavoidable. Alife will serve as both a conceptual and practical counterpart, taking into account both the discussions of how synthetic and virtual life can expand our imaginative scope, as well as provide material for our experiments. On a methodological note, one might add that the field of ALife indeed overlaps with Artificial intelligence (AI), yet the discussion of how the definition of “life” should include “intelligence” and in what ways human intelligence can be replicated is not regarded as a pressing issue in the present thesis. An intelligent and adaptive building will exhibit traits of both AI and Alife, but the approach of life-like algorithms and organic environments of Alife serves a better purpose, when understanding built space and its capabilities to evolve and adapt over time. As humans dwell and nest in their homes, a phenomenological embodied methodology is crucial to understand this relation between humans and their future nesting places, therefore, we will look to supplement our method with Alife’s algorithms and natural living systems ‘as-they-could-be’, rather than the field of AI. As Chris Langton (1993) writes in Artificial Life: “AI has focused primarily on the production of intelligent solutions rather than on the production of intelligent behavior. There is a world of difference between these two possible foci.” (p.2) Besides being a challenge to conventional science at their respective time, phenomenology and Alife do share some interesting similarities, which can be of mutual benefit as explicated by researcher Tom Froese (2010) in Phenomenology and Artificial Life: Toward a Technological Supplementation of Phenomenological Methodology.

Just as phenomenology, Alife attempts to capture and understand various phenomenons by way of hypothetical examples and situations (p.19). Having the aid of computational simulation and evolutionary computation is in ways closely aligned to the imaginative approach of phenomenology. One study takes root in subjective experience while the other seeks the aid of computational power, yet when entering areas of future studies wherein various empirical data and first-person accounts are not available, 19

concepts from artificial life, such as the central expression of researching “life-as-it-could-be” (Keeley, 1998, p. 253) is a useful tool for phenomenology as a technological extension of subjectivity, making use of its simulational power to go beyond what is possible.

Present thesis aims at reaching its full potential with concepts and simulations from Alife. In Alife, Artificial evolution is a key process that mimics the most fundamental process of nature. In nature as well as in computer environments, variation is a key factor as the necessity for a successful process.

Without enough variation, the building blocks of new lifeforms are limited and thus the output can reach no higher than the sum of all the variations of the original building blocks. Human imagination seems to be of almost infinite variation. Though there are things that humans are not capable of, but which computers do with ease. And vice versa. Combining the abilities of both seems only obvious when taking our research subject in regard.

We are aware that simulations and artificial environments are not empirical in a traditional sense, yet their ability to create unexpected situations and as such be rooted in biological, life-like occurrences is a key ingredient in our artistic and phenomenological research. With this approach, we choose to focus on how these areas of research can aid each other in an interdisciplinary approach, rather than look at their potential shortcomings. As Chris Langton (1993) writes in Artificial life: “By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of artificial life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it-could-be, and it is within this vastly larger domain that we must ground general theories of biology and in which we will discover practical and useful applications” (p.1) As such, present thesis applies research of the future in a way much akin to artificial life: the investigation of desired phenomena happens by an (artificial) staging of various opportunities of said phenomena. In our case, that certain phenomenon is humans living in an adaptive built space. Our analysis of human experience looks to phenomenology, while the staging and expressive possibilities will be done with inspiration in performance-based research and installation art of technological kind. Simply put, the phenomena we seek to understand are not readily available to our experience. Human experience can be amplified by way of technical installations, which enable us to stage certain embodiments of the human.

As we seek to understand experiences mediated by life and technology not yet existing, this approach alters experience by way of challenging embodiments in various environments. With inspiration in artificial ‘life as-it-could-be’ present thesis will seek a synthesis that transfers the research into the domain of human dwelling in architecture ‘as-it-could-be’.

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Together, the areas approached in these sections complete our methodological positioning. As the future indicates an exponential (1975, Moore’s law) technological development, so do the complexities in researching our own relationship with such technologies. Our methodological proposition is one of artistic exploration, with help and inspiration from areas that ensure a qualified look at our proposed areas of research. We will now shortly sum up an overview how this will come to pass throughout the thesis.

Ontological context: architecture and body-technology relations The context, in which we seek to investigate our research questions, progress through explorative phases, and conduct phenomenological analysis, has its broad foundation between humans, technology and architecture. These areas provide useful concepts and frameworks for our investigation. Within the architectural approach, phenomenology has been utilised to move beyond visual prejudice and conduct examinations of embodiment and dwelling within built space as early as Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing architecture (1959), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958), Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Existence, Space and Architecture (1971) and Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1979) to newer applications by way of Peter Zumthor’s Thinking architecture (2006). Alongside architectural concepts of dwelling and human nesting, the broad field of posthumanist theory make out our context for examination of relations between humans and technology; the hybridity of modern man. Theorists such as Don Ihde (Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth 1990, Bodies in technology 2003), Susan Kozel (Closer, 2007) and Mark Hansen (Embodying technesis 2000, New philosophy for new media 2004, Bodies in code 2006) employ Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment and sensorimotor capabilities to explore the qualities of this relationship and how the human subject coexists with its technologically textured lifeworld.

Hybrid methodology In sum, the qualitative research of this thesis is established within our specific approach to adaptive architecture with all its complexities. Set within the context of architecture and human-technology relations, our analysis, interpretations and descriptions will be approached phenomenologically and, more specifically, by way of Merleau-Ponty in conjunction with more modern interpretations of his work on embodiment, subjectivity and the lived experience. In grasping how technology can change the embodied experience of dwelling at home, the analysis will be a phenomenology of human-environment evolution interpreted through adaptive technologies. As mentioned, we will have a considerable personal engagement in terms of journaling, authoring narratives and describing our own first-person experiences.

As part of the experiment designs, we will experience the experiments ourselves in order to further 21

develop them and to attain a clearer image of the phenomena we seek to explore. Our experiences and findings will furthermore be used in context with our conceptual frameworks for further exploration.

Equipped with such an approach, present thesis will analyse co-evolution, relation and embodiment between humans and built space. Our conceptual supplementation in this regard will come by artificial life, dwelling and embodiment: areas that each give unique insights into the reciprocal experience of inhabiting an adaptive home. The conduction of the experiments is inspired by arts and performance: techniques from technology and creative coding used in interactive arts will enable a heightened intertwinement and immersion for our participants. Performance-based methods will be utilized in staging the desired experiences and enable a greater degree of control and experiential flexibility. By this artistic combination we allow for a rich observational structure and a continued explorative process.

Moreover, we will be able to investigate various degrees of control and co-dependency between human and adaptive space, when analyzing how our participants interact with the artificial environments in terms of their embodied lived experience.

The adaptive and flexible nature of such an approach is ultimately aimed at providing insights that can help construct a blueprint for ways in which development of adaptive architecture can be conducted with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind.

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Adaptive architecture Adaptive architecture is an area interested in buildings that are designed to adapt to input from the world they are situated in. Input could come from inhabitants, environmental data or other areas of concern.

Examples of adaptive architecture can include art installations or zero energy houses. In the following we will attempt to position our research in the context of projects that define this emerging field. Common to all projects we take into account is the notion of buildings and spaces being flexible, interactive, dynamic or reactive rather than static. It is necessary to mention that architecture that is defined by adaptive parameters in their design phase, but remains static once they are built, will not be a concern of this thesis. Adaptability of houses has existed in more simple and analogue ways, however computer supported adaptation will be our main field of interest, since the relationship between technology and humans in buildings is our key focus.

Adaptive architecture incorporates diverse disciplines ranging from art and design, cybernetics and robotics, to biology and environmental studies. In giving examples on existing projects we do not attempt to be exhaustive, rather the aim is to list examples that illustrate a particular category to which we will 24

position our own research field. The area of interest within adaptive architecture is one that empathizes the relation to humans and their role in future architectural environments.

Thomaz Jáskiewicz from the Hyperbody team at Delft University of Technology accounts extensively for the concept of adaptive architecture in his PhD: Towards a Methodology for Complex Adaptive Interactive Architecture (2013). As defined by Jaskiewicz, the idea of adaptive architecture stems from the fundamental needs of humans to improve and transform our habitats (p.1). To Jaskiewicz, the problem of the field of adaptive architecture is that the existing projects of reconfigurable buildings do not exhibit the autonomy that he deems required for interaction (p.5), and the existing experimental projects dealing with interactive spaces are still far from mainstream architectural practise and general awareness. His hope lies with the emerging idea of seeing architecture as a dynamic system rather than static structures or pre-configured machines (p. 42). To define this type of dynamic system, he puts up a set of definitions that understands adaptation as an interaction between different entities that can be either active or passive. Active entities have a direct impact on the adaptation whereas passive agents acts as an environmental background, a facilitator between active agents or as predefined conditions within which the adaptation can take place.

Holger Schnädelback from the Mixed Reality Lab of University of Nottingham also deals with adaptive architecture. In his conference paper Adaptive Architecture – A Conceptual Framework (2010), he defines a structure where properties of existing projects of adaptive architecture can be organized to define something common about the field. His aim is thus to come to a better understanding across disciplines, rather than to set the different examples apart. He collects “flexible, interactive, responsive, smart, intelligent, cooperative, media, hybrid and mixed reality architecture” (p. 2) under one roof and outlines essential categories that define important aspects of motivation for making architecture adaptive, concrete aspects of implementation as well as the value it brings to the built environment. Schnädelbach divides between the input that the architecture can perceive, the output, defined by the actions that the architecture can exercise (p. 8-9), as well as what effect those actions have on the context and inhabitants of the building (p. 12). In his final chapter he states that it is the area of “effects on inhabitants” that is of most interest in terms of future research (p. 14).

Fig. 1: ExoBuilding by Schnädelbach et al.

In ExoBuilding - Breathing Life into Architecture, Schnädelbach et al (2010) explores the effect of an intimate bodily relation to architecture by mapping physiological data of humans to a person-sized tentlike structure that resembles a building (Fig. 1). The person experiencing the “building” is thus exposed to the interpretation of their own data by means of sounds and movement. This creates an intimate relationship where the person is not only attentive to their own bodily data, but also the fact that the building posses these data as well as the way in which it interprets it.

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The canadian architect Philip Beesley’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, Hylozoic Ground is a glass-like forest of laser-cut acrylic leaves and tentacles equipped with motors and sensors (Fig. 2) that respond to the presence of visitors by stroking, touching and moving. It explores how humans experience an environment that is able to respond in a somewhat intelligent or ‘insect-like way’, as Beesley puts (2010a). According to Beesley, the environment is a crossover between art and architecture, exploring the possibilities of how architecture can “live and breathe and care” (2010b). The word hylozoic is a reference to the philosophical belief that all matter is in some sense alive. In Hylozoic Ground this is done by simulating the way living organisms are structured: It has a skeleton, muscles, a brain and associated sensory inputs and finally an active circulation system that consists of wet chemistry with the task to maintain the rest of the system.

The Adaptive House by Michael Mozer from the University of Colorado (Fig. 3) is able to take in data from multiple inhabitants and allow the house to adapt a variety of parameters to their individual as well as collective preferences. Mozer uses advanced algorithms to calculate the optimal combination of, on one side, inhabitants preferences of light and temperature, and on the other, the conservation of energy, to arrive at the optimal solution for a given situation (2005). The Adaptive House learns over time the preferences of each inhabitant by observing their actions and the idea is that it will eventually be able to predict them to a certain extend, freeing the inhabitant of the task of engaging in the control of the house as well as using the most optimal settings for energy preservation, accommodating both the inclinations of the inhabitants and the requirements of being energy efficient. The house essentially programs itself over time by monitoring the environment and sensing actions performed by the inhabitants.

Fig. 2: Hylozoic Ground by Philip Beesley

Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen from the danish Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) is inspired by artificial intelligence in her work with textile structures and physical computing as she investigates how form can be a “fluid construct, continually morphing with the changes that occur in its situated environment” (2006, p. 2). The project Vivisection in Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Fig. 4) is made of a silk-steel blend of fabric that can sense the presence of visitors. A network of microcomputers controls fans that can inflate the structure and make it react to the presence of visitors. Thus the installation takes shape as a result of the presence of people.

Schnädelbach is concerned with the experience that arises when connecting intimate bodily data with the space that surrounds us. Beesley investigates how architecture can be caring and react in sensitive ways to the presence of humans. The relationship between buildings and humans can in both cases be said to be the focal point of their investigations, and something we will seek to pursue as a guideline for our 26

Fig. 3: Adaptive House by Mozer et al.

own explorations. Beesley’s installation also inspires the notion of being an organic living system by using computational powers combined with chemistry. In the same, but perhaps less advanced, way, Thomsen uses computational powers in a sensory feedback system to bring her installation to respond to visitors in the art gallery. Both inspire to use artificial life in a simple form to explore what happens when humans are confronted with architectural structures that is responding to them and reacting with their own inherent logic. Finally the Adaptive House project uses not only sensory inputs to gather information about inhabitants, it also incorporates complex algorithmic systems to learn over time how to gain the most optimal state in changing situations. The ideas expressed in these projects about the ability for architecture to possess such adaptive and cognitive abilities aligns best with our own point of departure with regards to the research conducted in present thesis.

In the next chapter, we will begin this approach by looking at how humans relate to their architectural surroundings through the concept of dwelling, focusing on the home environment and how it takes part in the lives of humans.

Fig. 4: Vivisection by Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen 27

Dwelling Dwelling is not an easily translatable word. The most simple explanations are offered by way of relating the word to to different types of resting, either lingering or unwinding. It can also mean settling in for the night or setting camp. Dwelling is when we lean against a warm stone wall and contemplate the view, it is when the natives of a great continent once settled in a perfect place for upholding life, it is when we set camp around the fire on the yearly canoe trip to Sweden, it is when we build cities and villages and it is the feeling we get from our homes and familiar neighborhoods.

In his book The concept of dwelling (1985), Christian Norberg-Schulz provides a useful structure for understanding what constitutes the notion of dwelling, which we will account for in the first section.

Then we will employ this understanding to Carsten Thau’s idea of what significance a home has to man and the many different aspects in which it fulfills his needs. We will argue that architecture is in fact not just an innocent backdrop to human life, and that it plays a great role in the everyday life of humans.

Further on we will account for the notion that architecture and buildings can take part in an evolving process together where humans shape the buildings they inhabit in a co-evolving manner.

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Fig 1: Earth seen from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Fig 2-3: Elmegade seen from Nørrebrogade year 1910 and 2015.

A relationship with time and space Anyone who have stared out into the night sky knows how impossible it is to grasp the vastness of our surroundings. Human beings are infinitely small compared to the size of the earth (Fig. 1), and the earth is just a dot in the ever expanding universe. Just as space is difficult to comprehend, so is time. We need only to look at photographs of our own well known neighbourhood from a hundred years ago, to realize this (Fig. 2). The people in the picture might seem more like actors in a movie, inhabiting our well known streets, rather than the real and everyday crowd that they in fact were, just like we are now when walking the same streets (Fig 3). The feeling that hits us when looking out into the stars in space, or back in time at old photographs, is a vertiginous sensation that reveals the limitlessness of our world.

“Architecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure. It domesticates limitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.17).

To be able to live with the absurdities of time and space, humans must gather their world and seek to understand it by relating themselves to it. They must seek to identify themselves with the things that surrounds them and orientate themselves among these things. These concepts are all concepts used by the norwegian architect and architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz to account for what constitutes the notion of dwelling. In its most simple form, Norberg-Schulz formulates: “To dwell implies the establishment of a meaningful relationship between man and a given environment” (1985, p. 13).

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Norberg-Schulz structures his account for what constitutes dwelling around the idea that dwelling is composed by the two factors identification and orientation. Identification means to relate to things, to interpret the meaning they gather. It could also be explained as how we understand the quality of a thing.

Orientation describes the spatial organization of things: Where things are in relation to each other, in their shared context. In understanding his world, man must not only identify himself with the things, that surrounds him, but also seek to orientate himself within the space they constitute, as things always exists in a context. When this understanding is attained, it can be used to establish a meaningful relationship with the surroundings.

No matter if the purpose is resting our legs for a few moments, or settling for a whole generation, the relationship we establish with our environment will have great importance on the success of any of these purposes. We will not find the sufficient rest if the wind is blowing too hard by a chosen bench. On the other hand, when we have found just the right spot, around the corner where the sun hits an open window and is reflected down between the buildings and the wood of the bench is still smooth and warm from the rays of the morning, then we will most likely forget everything else for a brief moment. We will have established a meaningful relationship with our immediate surroundings, in the simplest way possible.

Fig. 4: Shoes on landing in front of appartment door. Fig 5: Items on shelf in a living room. Fig 6: Gardening tools on a balcony.

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Inhabiting time and space Dwelling can occur in a number of situations, from the most simple of just leaning up against a tree for shade, to the most advanced ways of cultivating land and building villages and cities. Our area of concern will be the homes where people live, and with the definition of dwelling and its different components from Norberg-Schulz, we will seek to better understand how dwelling can be appropriated to the domain of the home by taking into account the functions that a home has in the lives of humans.

As we have argued, one of the ways in which humans can establish a relationship to their surroundings is by building structures. One of the most fundamental structures might be the houses in which we reside and that provides the necessary means to our life. Houses are what keeps us warm, safe and stores our food. It is where we gather the objects that are essential to our upholding of life. But the home is also a place for satisfying other needs, apart from climate regulation and food storage. Carsten Thau (2010) refers to the home as a shell, one that functions as an expansion of the body, both physically and mentally (p. 41). He argues that the act of building a shelter is significant by its ability to divide between the exterior and the interior. The external world and the interior world becomes two different aspects of life, physically and mentally. The external environment is the situation in which the human has placed its home, and thus where it is establishing a relation. The interior thus become a personal refuge that reflects the values and preferences of the inhabitant. Thau writes that it ‘sounds his ideas of a successful life’ (“genlyder af hans kropslige, fysiske tilstedeværelse og af hans ideer om det vellykkede liv”, p. 30).

In our northern part of the world, where the amount of hours spent outside is fewer than the ones spent inside, it is possible to assume that many of us take great pride in shaping our homes to best fit our needs and desires, since we spend so much time there, alone or with friends or family. In these fulfillments of the home lies also the task of expressing ourselves by way of letting our habitat communicate things about us. An example is how we organize different functions in our home (Fig. 4), arange items on shelves (Fig. 5) and display means to our favorite activities (Fig. 6). All these things that constitute our home environment take part in piecing together our idea of how we want our lives to be - letting us identify and orient among them, and thus we structure our own ability to dwell at home. Regarding the home as a mental and physical refuge, Norberg-Schulz writes the following: “The stage where private dwelling takes place, is the house or home, which may be characterized as a “refuge” where man gathers and expresses those memories which make up his personal world.” (Norberg-Schulz, 1985, p. 13) 31

The idea of the house as a refuge of memories is shared by the danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen.

He argues that not only does architecture create a framework around our lives, no other art is so intimately connected with man’s daily life from the cradle to the grave. He thereby stresses the influence that the built environment has on our lives, especially the home environment. Rasmussen also talks of the cave-game that children use to enclose space for their own use. This game, he argues, continues into the adult age where man seeks to shape his entire surroundings (1959, p. 34). This should not be understood as if all humans possess an urge to be architects, but this notion is important to empathize how rooted the building of caves as a means to dwelling is, to the human spirit.

Playing the cave game with a child exemplifies this notion very well. The game usually consists of three equally important parts: The first part where they crawl under a blanket and close it tightly, so that it gets dark inside. The second part where they open a peek hole from which they can observe the rest of the room from the newly conquered space. Then, the final feature is introduced, the raison de-être for the cave: “Look, a dangerous lion!”. Thus a place is established, a necessary functionality is given: the ability to look out onto the world, and it has a reason for being: to protect its inhabitants from the dangers of the outside, making the inside a personal refuge, where they can dwell without disturbances from lions.

Carsten Thau mentions that for Martin Heidegger, the german word for living in a place ‘Wohnen’ is connected with the notion of ‘being’ (2010, p.38). Furthermore, dwelling is for Heidegger the means to which human beings inhabit space and time. We dwell in accordance with the existential meaning of space - making it a place. Put more simply, we interpret dwelling as a place for our habitation. Human dwelling is at the core of our well-being and regarded as something that should be the goal for the construction of built space, which Heidegger accuses modern society of forgetting (1971, p.145).

Norberg-Schulz is inspired by Heidegger as a proponent for phenomenological architecture. In Norberg-Shulz’ (1991) major work Genius Loci he writes about having made a shift in method from earlier work, where he analyzed architecture “scientifically” by using natural science methods, but now he has reached the contention that other methods can give insights that these methods can not. He writes, “When we treat architecture analytically, we miss the concrete environmental character, that is, the very quality which is the object of man’s identification, and which may give him a sense of existential foothold” (p. 5).

Phenomenology can be used to make us aware of our life with architecture by articulating experiential structures. As mentioned, phenomenology is a descriptive and interpretive method, focusing on the subjective embodied experience. The goal is not to explain a phenomenon, but to explore all the 32

subtleties that constitute an experience. Norberg-Schulz uses the term “existential space” to investigate the relationship between man and his environment, and denotes architecture as the “concretization of existential space” (p. 5), constituted by way of identification and orientation as explained earlier, and where the action of concretization is man “gathering” his world, concretely understood as building something.

So far we have argued that man builds to create a meaningful relation with his environment, so that he can gain an existential foothold. The building provides him with shelter and physical protection as well as serving as a mental refuge in which he is able to concern himself with his ideas of a meaningful life. The buildings we inhabit is thus of great importance to our well-being. We will now argue that humans relate to these buildings in more ways than the psychical and existential that we have just described.

Personification and co-evolution

Fig. 7: “Advertisements for architecture”, Bernard Tschumi 1976

In 1976 Bernard Tschumi created a series of postcards named “Advertisements for Architecture”. The most famous one is probably the one that states “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder”, with the explanation that “murder on the street differs from murder in the cathedral” (Fig. 7). The point here is not homicidal investigations, but that architecture is in no way just a neutral backdrop to the lives of humans. It does in fact have quite a significant influence on the events played out within it and around it. What is equally important about this notion, is the mutual influence that architecture and humans have on each other - the interaction that takes place in human appropriation of buildings.

This notion is particularly evident in designs that has a very specific purpose - like a staircase meant for vertical transport and ceaseless motion who by its mere form lets us know how to use it (Fig. 8). These features about design is something that in a distinct way talks more to our body than our mind. We are not consciously aware of a staircase communicating to us, but we instinctively walk on it the right way.

The absurd and amusing short story Instructions For Climbing A Staircase by Julio Cortázar clearly illustrates this point. It begins ”No one will have failed to observe that frequently the floor bends in such a way that one part rises at a right angle to the plane formed by the floor…” and further down explains “To climb a staircase one begins by lifting that part of the body located below and to the right, usually encased in leather or deerskin, and which, with a few exceptions, fits exactly on the stair. Said part set down on the first step (to abbreviate we shall call it the foot), one draws up the equivalent part on the left side (also called foot but not to be confused with the foot cited above)(...)” (Cortázar, p.1999).

Fig. 8: Brick staircase at ”The Stairs Villa Hotel” in Bali, by Philippe Starck

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One could argue that humans and stairs have evolved together, shaping each other mutually to approach the most optimal way for vertical transport. Maybe stairs evolved out of steep roads that eventually was equipped with wooden beams or large stones depending on what material was at hand. Then over time, as humans got better at imagining and making the stairs, the stairs got better and in turn inspired even more sophisticated structures. Eventually, the act of walking up stairs does not only happen seamlessly and without requiring the effort that was described in the short story by Cortázar, it also inspired to develop more complex structures and made us capable of continuously developing ideas relating to the original concept of stairs.

Mutual negotiation between humans and things in their surroundings is sometimes expressed as a kind of personification in architecture. In the second “Advertisement for Architecture” by Tschumi (Fig 9) it reads “Sensuality has been known to overcome even the most rational of buildings” suggesting that a building is actually capable of behaving in a rational way. The adjective turns into a verb and it is perceived as a personality trait in the building, despite its, to our knowledge, inability to act in any particular way.

Steen Eiler Rasmussen uses nature religions of native people to empathize this idea, claiming that just as primitive people endow objects in nature with spirits, civilized people more or less to their own knowledge treat objects as though they were alive (1959, p. 37).

If we look at how human figures and traits are used in greek and roman architecture, we will see the Cayatid woman, who elegantly carries the weight of the roof instead of a column (Fig 11). This is a very figurative way of assigning human traits like elegance to a building. But modern architecture uses the same method of signifying form by transferring actionable features to built structures. In his article Agency and Personification Philip Plowright uses the ramp of the Carpenter Center at the Harvard University by Le Corbusier (Fig. 12) and accounts for how architectural elements are described using verbs that indicate physical action, even though these elements (ramps, towers, staircases) are in no position to conduct any of these actions: “The ramp isn’t capable of movement or speed, it isn’t separate to the main massing, it can’t apply pressure and it doesn’t physically puncture the mass as a foreign object. These are human interpretations of static objects, actions that are applied to objects incapable of those actions. In other words, the ramp has been given agency by human interpretation – the power to appear to act on its surroundings even though that action is impossible.” (Plowright 2013, p. 157)

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Fig. 9: “Advertisements for architecture”, Bernard Tschumi 1976

Fig 10 and 11: The Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion, Athens, Fig. 12: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harward University, Le Corbusier.

The notion of the human interpretation is important here. Steen Eiler Rasmussen points to the fact that to identify ourselves with objects, we often seek to imagine ourselves in its stead (1959, p. 37). This prolongs the previous idea of identifying to understand things, with the embodied action of putting ourselves in the place of something “not-living”, employing human feelings, sensations and perceptions onto non-living things. We imagine how much weight the Cayatid carries on her head to support the weight of the building, we can almost feel the pressure in our own body when looking at her lofty but stiff neck (Fig 10). Plowright goes on to say that it is a standard design method to give agency to forms and objects. This agency, he argues, includes personification and human characteristics, besides the ability to act on their surroundings (Plowright, 2013, p. 157).

In his PhD dissertation Towards a Methodology of Complex Adaptive Interactive Architecture, Tomasz Jáskiewicz uses the example of a chair to explain what happens in a situation where agency is exchanged between a human and a thing. The chair communicates its use, it is saying ‘sit here’. Only he expands this notion and calls the chair a “system” of agents. This system makes the human sit on itself, but at the same time the human makes his body go and sit on it (2013, p. 79-80). This exchange, Jáskiewicz calls “a slow dance of agency” (p. 80), suggesting that the human and the chair are two mutual systems of exchanging influence.

Through time, humans have adapted the objects they sit on into something like a chair with all its “chair-ness”, just as the human has seen many different chairs and sitting-objects through time and now instantly recognizes the “sitt-abily” being radiated by the chair, thus instinctively directs themselves to sit on it.

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Jáskiewicz uses the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour to consolidate that buildings and humans can mutually affect each other (p. 79), but the question on weather buildings can have agency is not of our key interest, but rather the interesting idea of mutual evolution between buildings and humans that he afterwards follows, similar to the one exemplified by the earlier mentioned evolvement of a staircase. A course that we will further pursue in present thesis: “Once humans erect and begin to inhabit buildings (or any other architectural spaces), these buildings simultaneously begin to have a lasting effect on humans. This leads to humans modifying their habitats further, erecting new and different buildings, transforming, demolishing and re-erecting existing ones, continuously re-organizing and re-decorating, resulting in re-attributing meanings and functions to architectural places.” (p. 80) The buildings and cities erected by humans is shaping our lives, just as we initially shape and design them with our visions, desires and needs. But these very visions, desires and needs are too shaped by previous experience with space and structures, be it our grandmother’s kitchen as Peter Zumthor (1998, p. 9) recalls in his earliest memory of an architectural experience, or a certain apartment that has made a lasting impression in our mind and body of a particular kind. They will shape how we experience homes in the future and thus what desires and needs that define our actions towards building and inhabiting new buildings.

A home image Even though the main purpose in Kevin Lynch’s book (1960) The Image of the City, is to advocate for better city planning, present thesis will employ his notion of environmental image to support the idea that a good relationship to one’s surroundings is important for our quality of life, and thereby useful for measuring whether or not a given building will make its inhabitants able to dwell. In the city-scale terminology of Lynch, the environment ‘suggests its own features’, and the observer selects and uses it according to his own purposes, making it a two-way process between the two, where the observer in the end plays an active role in creating his own image of the environment, suited to his own needs (p. 6).

According to Lynch, “A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security” (p. 4) empathizing the aforementioned influence of our relation to our surroundings on our well being, and then concluding “it means that the sweet sense of home is strongest when home is not only familiar but distinctive as well.” (p. 5). A distinct home is a clear environmental image, a good relationship with a legible agreement between the implied actors. The notions of familiar and distinctive can be seen 36

as parallels to the concepts of orientation and identification that we used from Norberg-Schulz. Familiar, in Lynch’ optic is the idea that the different elements that constitute a city are recognizable to the register of a human’s experiences, and thereby enables them to navigate among said elements. A distinctive environment, Lynch argues, “not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience” (p. 5).

Norberg-Schulz empathizes the importance of a good environmental relation by saying that it is in fact by building architecture, and thus identifying with the environment, that we establish this relation: “works of architecture are objects of human identification because they embody existential meanings, making the world stand forth as it is” (Norberg-Schulz, 1985, p.19). The idea of a well established image of the home as something that reveals itself to us, creating the relation that we need for our well-being, is important to this thesis. This relation is crucial and it requires an unfolding in order to explore the qualities of a lived experience within a home that has the ability to evolve along with its inhabitant. The aim in the experiments of the Nursery phase will revolve around these experiences and how it affects our understanding of concepts such as dwelling, relationship and control.

In the final chapter of the book, Lynch advocates a simultaneous process alongside the one of reshaping the cities into better (city) images, the one of educating the citizen into a better viewer, giving them the competence to act upon their visual environment. Similar to the idea of a ‘slow dance of agency’ where architecture and humans have a mutual influence on each other, suggested by Jaskiewicz, Lynch expresses his hope for a spiral process where the ‘visually educated’ citizens can critically relate to their environment, further shaping this in a useful way, affecting next generations of citizens whose ideas for the future is even more qualified. The last sentence of the book coins his hope for the future: “If art and audience grow together, then our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to millions of their inhabitants” (1960, p. 120). This hope supports the idea of architecture and inhabitants growing together, forming a mutual relation to each other and their environment, evolving homes according to their dreams and ideas.

The nature of architecture will thus take the shape of what is known by the humans who built it, had a need for it, or dreamt of it. With modern technology now a prevailing factor in modern architecture, great visions of the future will foster great futures and in turn even greater ideas will come forth, if we are to follow this notion. Visions in architecture is however not something belonging to the future. In this chapter we have accounted for the notion of dwelling as an important aspect of human well-being, as well as the fact that it is possible for humans to evolve with their buildings, thus paving the way for a future of mutually developed architecture where inhabitants has an increased influence on shaping their 37

homes. In the coming section we will entertain the idea that some already existing techniques in the architectural design practice can provide valuable material for imagining dreams of future architecture, and a certain type of modern technology might be able to support these existing techniques, something we will be using in our last experiment in the Adoption phase.

Visionary fiction As discussed previously, architecture has a significant effect on humans, and humans and buildings exercise mutual influence on each other. This reciprocal relationship calls for a mutual obligation, and thus great visions for the future is a dominant practise within architecture. In his book, Visionary Architecture (2006), Neil Spiller argues that thoughts on visionary architecture is as old as the architectural practise itself. Works of imagination have been pushing the boundaries for ‘the possible’ and has had free rein within the world of drawings and models: “It is often unbuilt and might be unbuildable” (p.4).

Fig. 13: Scale model in 1:33 of Skuespilhuset with scale figures. Model built by students from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture

Spiller makes an important point regarding the influence of technology on the architectural practise, and this argument is at the core of this thesis: The point that today’s technology has caught up with our imagination (p. 1), making even the most exceptional structures possible in real-life and thus paving the way for even more possibilities to take into account when designing. The influence of technology is the reason we are even able to imagine future scenarios with adaptive houses, and thus aspire to investigate its impact.

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Fig. 14: Camera phone in the movie Metropolis, 1927. Fig. 15: Worlds Fair 1939 in NY. Fig. 16: British Pavillion, Shanghai world EXPO 2010.

This idea can be compared to an already existing practise within the field of architecture and design: Architects often make scale models with little scale figures in them to provide a way of imagining how a building would look when erected (Fig. 13). If the model is in a scale of 1:200 it is possible to comprehend how the building will look in its context of e.g. neighboring houses, urban space or landscape. 1:50 models or larger allows the designer or anyone with interest in the project to insert themselves within the confinements of the scene thus making it possible to imagine themselves standing in the space and experiencing its impact.

We would like to compare the architectural model to the concept of design fiction. Design fiction uses prototypes of various kinds to make imaginable what is not yet possible. It expands our imaginational space and dissolves the constraints of reality, providing the ground for inventing concepts otherwise, at least presently, impossible. An example are science fiction movies that inspire actual designs and ideas, such as the camera phone, the sliding doors of Star Trek, or the hologram monitor (Fig. 14).

The architectural pavilion as seen in world’s fairs and biennales (Fig. 15 and 16) can be seen as a kind of architectural piece of design fiction as it exhibits great ambitions on behalf of architecture, and lets the audience experience, although in full scale, the power of architectural interventions. It is a visionary design space where dreams of the future gets to unfold. The architect and theorist Lebbeus Woods describes the concept of the architectural pavilion as a space that can expand the scope and depth of experiences with architecture (Woods, 2011).

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Following Spiller’s claim that technology have now made possible what was hitherto only in our imagination, one such technology comes in the shape of virtual reality (VR). VR might be capable of virtually prototyping an experience of being inside a virtual model of a building. Just like architects create virtual models and render them into images that display the spaces of their project, VR could situate us inside those virtual models and let us walk around the spaces, letting us experience the unbuild spaces.

Is it possible to engage in such a process and maintain an embodied experience of space? One answer to such a question comes from posthuman thinker Mark Hansen (2006) in his book Bodies in code, where he seeks to update the embodied apparatus of Merleau-ponty. Hansen expands on how digital technologies alter bodily experiences in a phenomenology of ‘technics’ and analyses various forms of digital art and virtual reality experiences to do so. Just as Merleau-Ponty, Hansen holds that the body is still the primary access to the world. He further expands this with modern technology and holds that: “the primacy of the body as ontological access to the world and the role of tactility in the actualization of such access – effect a passage from the axiom that has been my focus thus far (all virtual reality is mixed reality) to the more general axiom that all reality is mixed reality [our emphasis]”. (p. 6) Because the body acts in conjunction with this technical environment and still provides us with our primary link with the physical world, this virtual environment is not only ’technical’. This conception of body-technology relation creates a reality, which is rooted in a “fluid interpenetration of realms” (p.2). As such, it is argued that it is an embodied reality that ”foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world” (p.5). Rather than a fantasy-world, our body’s perceptuomotor skills guarantee a seamless integration of the technical elements and virtual reality and thus becomes “one more realm among others that can be accessed through embodied perception or enaction” (p.5). Put simply, technology might ‘refunctionalize’ the body, but there is no ontological shift as this reconfiguration points back to the body as a source for experiencing the physical world; The ultimate background, as Hansen calls it.

A way of enabling us to experience ideas and designs before they are built is using the notion that virtual reality can provide an embodied experience of space, thus letting inhabitants and designers insert themselves into the future building. This is something we will explore further in the experiment of the Adoption phase.

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The notion of dwelling will provide us with an ability to describe how humans relate to their surrounding environment as well as how they are able to feel ’at home’ in their personal living spaces. The significance of the home as a place for contemplation and storing personal values has emphasized the importance of investigating how the relationship between man and built space can evolve in the future.

One of the many means with which the future can be shaped is by imagining great visionary ideas of future buildings. These spaces might be able to be experienced before they are actually built with help from technologies such as virtual reality that allow us to explore through our bodies, even though we are not actually standing inside a psysical space. Imagination is an essential theme with Merleau-Ponty, and as he expresses it: ‘Reflection on the meaning or the essence of what we live through is neutral to the distinction between internal and external experience’’ (1964, p. 64). The point that imagination can be externalised is an essential to our explorative process, as we not only seek to challenge our perspectives on the future through first-person phenomenology, but furthermore will seek the aid of imagination externalised as virtual experiences.

The phenomenological understanding of how we percieve the world through our bodies will further be elaborated in the chapter Embodied space, but first we will seek to expand our imaginative space in a very analog way, with the help of test particpants in the Incubation phase.

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Incubation phase Aim To broaden our horizon we wanted to initially seek out possibilities of future adaptive homes to challenge our own exploration. Thus we engaged a group of test participants to help us expand our imaginative space. In order to try and dismantle any restraining ideas of what is technologically possible in present time we wanted to establish an experimental space that allowed for vivid imagination. At the same time we wanted to connect any emerging ideas to their real life conditions of everyday life. We chose to situate the experiments in the homes of the participants and make them imagine the future right in a familiar setting with everyday activities.

This marks the beginning of our explorative process of gaining insight into the future of architectural adaptivity. This initial experiment is furthermore an attempt to confront our own personal thoughts and questions on this matter in our ambition to be as open and non-dictating as possible. Even though we are dealing with technology not yet invented, the concern in this phase is less with proposals for specific designs and more in staging an interpretive experience where participants can envision the impact this 42

Fig. 1: Artifact

1x

1x Design and Quality IKEA of Sweden

Activate your intelligent house by placing the Husingen Vuoro Artefact on any horizontal surface in your home (the floor, a table, the windowsill, on a shelf etc.).

This is now your house in the future. This is the future.

Your home is an intelligent environment - living alongside you.

It can do anything you can think of, if you want it to - it can be aware of data about things such as your bodily states or know about events that might occur in the world around you. You can share thoughts and emotions. It is exactly what you imagine it to be.

How would you like your house to respond to you?

With what?

How would you like your house to behave?

What can it do?

How do you communicate with it?

Do you at all?

Are you aware of its presence?

Are others?

Is it taking part in your life?

Are you a part of its life?

This notebook is an anonymous entrance to imagination. Write down your thoughts, what you do in your home and what your home does.

Write about your daily life together, what happens when you are not together and any exceptional events that might occur. Use words, drawings, icons as you prefer.

This is an experiment on how the future relationship between humans and technology in the built environment could be imagined.

Thank you for participating!

Fig. 2: Instructions inside notebooks

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future technology will have on their everyday lives. To try and steer the experiment is this direction we took use of narratives and artifacts. The methods used for this experiment will be accounted for in the following, but first it is necessary to outline how the experiment was designed and which components it consisted of.

Design Participants I order to gain diverse but insightful answers, our participants consisted of five persons with varying backgrounds that we picked based on our judgement of their abilities to meet our demands for this experiment. They consisted of: Two males and three females in ages around 25-35. Their educational backgrounds consisted of architecture, pedagogy (working with children around 13-14), psychology (with research experience in artificial intelligence) and media aesthetics.

Components of the experiment The following components was given to the test subjects prior to the experiment: A notebook for writing down thoughts (Fig. 3). On the first pages a short text framing the experiment is provided (Fig. 2). A small artifact (Fig. 1), which acted as the representation of the intelligent system. Participants were able to chose between different ones, thus picking one which they were comfortable with. The artifacts were created with magnetized components, so the participants would to be able to ’turn off ’ the system by unplugging the two parts. A narrative (Fig. 4) describing the development of the adaptive environment and how humans came to live in it, along with a short prose with inspirational questions. The participants were instructed to bring it all home and read the letter with the narrative as the very first thing.

Method The experiment takes inspiration from Susan Kozel’s (2007) article Embodied imagination: a hybrid method of designing for intimacy, wherein the ambition is to investigate “the future of social and affective computing where technology can contribute, not just to the functional, but to the expressive and emotional texture of people’s lives.” (p.209). The project let a group of test-subjects bring home a non-technological wearable sleeve and invited them to imagine it’s technological uses in a future setting. They were given a 44

Fig. 3: Notebooks with instructions inside, accompanied by artifacts.

A History of the Future - a brief fictitious overview Due to the extreme weather changes in the first part of the 21st century, a surge in development of intelligent houses that could adapt to future weather changes began. This coincided with a rapid development and general interest in the perspectives of intelligent technology.

In the meantime IKEA had long been wanting to expand its housing systems into the domain of artificial intelligence and began funding a series of research projects with the aim of creating adaptive systems where humans could benefit from living in adaptive systems - both from an environmental as well as a personal perspective.

to best suit its inhabitants: Structural elements would be flexible and light intake and surfaces could be controlled by inhabitants.

The next version, Husingen Hemnäs corrected issues with daylight conditions and allowed the inhabitant to fully control where light went in by simply pointing and waving towards the walls. Further investigations into internal generation of energy was conducted, and with Husingen Adapp the first self-developed zero-energy house emerged.

The humble cabin would expand over a period of 1-5 years, depending on the surrounding environment, as the energy from sun, water or soil was harvested.

In order to progress development of responsive systems with focus on personal space and environment, IKEA entered a partnership with a finnish company specialised in artificial intelligence and robotics: VerkkoMind alongside swedish energy producer: Vattenfall.

Peter Agnefjäll is the visionary director behind these initiatives. Back in 2013 he had stepped in as the new president and CEO of the IKEA Group saying at the press conference held in Montreal, Canada: ”People´s needs and dreams of a better living and life at home are the foundation of our business” and promising sustainability as an integrated part of the future of the corporation - an ambition that still held true many years later.

The initial prototypes IKEA Husingen was a fully furnished house with configurations to match whomever entered was the first in a series of pre-fab houses sold by IKEA and placed in small groups in picturesque surroundings in the western part of Canada. The walls were entirely transparent letting the occupants view the surrounding landscape, but with a light diffusing electrofield, leaving the windows seemingly dimmed from the outside. These buildings would provide a barrier to sound, insects, weather and dust, and maintain the desired internal temperature. On the inside a wide array of individual environments could be provided

Fig. 4: Fictitious narrative

The development of personal space Agnefjäll alongside leading researchers concluded, that while initial research showed great promise of adaptive systems from perspectives of environment and personal space, the intimate experience of ones home had always been the main interest point for IKEA, and they thus began development of adaptive systems solely based on humans every day experiences within their home. VerkkoMind was bought by IKEA Group and, while still being an environmentally

conscious company, the ambition was now to establish housing projects where people had the chance to experience their home as a lived intelligent space as part of their everyday life - adapting and interacting in a multitude of ways.

IKEA Husingen Vuoro It was decided to establish a housing project in Göteborg - a central node in scandinavia and a melting pot for technological progress of artificial intelligence and human-computer science.

You are one of the people chosen to live in Husingen Vuoro. You will participate by living, experiencing and imagining.

This is a metaphor for imagining what this house might be - what your desires and dreams for such a place could be and how you could imagine living and interacting with it. You will be given a notebook that contains a series of questions that is meant as a recipe to help you answer certain questions. Maybe you can come up with other questions as well.

Write everything down in your notebook thoughts, drawings, questions, answers, fears, pleasures and hopes. Your entries will be anonymous and will be used for analysis of what such a personal space could be envisioned as.

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notebook with a short instructive prose, one that in no way dictated their thoughts, but let them imagine their own personal ideas of how this technology could work. To further give depth to the narrative and aid the participants in the imagination we sought inspiration from Mission from mars (2005) - a method for exploring user requirements for children using a narrative space. The study creates a fictional encounter revolving around martians wanting to learn more about school children’s use of school bags on our planet. It stages a session where the children are interviewed by the martians through a video conversation between the earth and their spaceship.

Our approach is positioned between the two above mentioned papers. We provided a background story on how the adaptive architecture was initially developed and how it had evolved through the years into what it was when our test subjects were to imagine its nature. The narrative will be deliberate in trying to invoke both an imaginative ambition as well as a sense of emotional connection to the future house, while carefully avoiding any dictation on how the technological outfit will be shaped.

The intention of this research is to gather data on the perspectives of the phenomenon of living in an intelligent personal space – an adaptive environment. Based on Kvale’s (1996) recommended approach, it will be developed with a consent-agreement; one that informs participants that they are participating in in a specific kind of research and that all their information is confidential, to gain the trust of the participants. As we invited people to imagine these spaces in a safe setting, our ambition was that it would remove initial prejudices of dystopian intelligent machines and technology gone out of control.

Furthermore, as we seek to remain explorative in our approach, we wanted to retain the possibility to invite some of them back in our next phase, and thus wanted them to feel comfortable with our research, as the ambition is to conduct semi-structured phenomenological interviews, where questions are “directed to the participant’s experiences, feelings, beliefs and convictions about the theme in question” (p.194, Kruger, 1999).

In order to analyze the content of the notebooks, we considered Van Manen’s work (1990) and phenomenological approach in his mentioned Researching Lived Experience (pp.30-31) where he establishes an approach of six steps for analyzing the lived experience: ”Practical bodily encounters with things in our environment” (2000, p.232). Of particular inspiration to this phase was the notions of ‘investigating experiences as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it’ as well as the idea of bracketing out essential themes that characterize the phenomenon through writing and rewriting.

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Interpretation and analysis After a period of 7 days we received the notebooks and finalized the participation of the test subjects with interviews where they had the opportunity to elaborate and submit additional thoughts in an open structure. In these interviews, several of the participants expressed initial difficulties when commencing on writing down their thoughts, which was to some extent expected given the difficult nature of the subject. Eventually all overcame their initial apprehension and wrote down various stories, contributed with drawings and conceptual ideas. Following Van Manen’s approach, we embarked upon continuous readings of the participant’s texts, while constantly filtering through our own preconceptions and prejudices and noting certain distinct patterns. These patterns were then re-written with regards to certain themes and concepts in the text, and then finally bracketed into more essential themes. Finally, remembering the essential themes, which occur in the phenomenon of living with an intelligent environment, we divided the descriptions of the notebooks into different categories: Spatial aspects This category consisted of descriptions on how different elements of the home could be flexible and allow for change according to needs. One participant wrote about shared space in their apartment building: ”Today I get 20 m2 tomorrow you have them” and another one reflected on it as ”dissolving the idea of yours and mine”. Another version of this was rooms changing into being better suited for the kids of one participant playing “dragon fort” (Fig. 5) and yet another imagined furniture changing according to different dimensions of their body.

Flexible walls:

Many different types of adjustments to light intake were imagined by participants, some including being woken up by the sunrise and others as a way of being closer with the natural surroundings. Seeing og sensing other parts of the house or rooms in which other family members were, was also a dominant whish.

Transparency and light-intake:

Artificial sunrises and perfect working conditions were wished for in this category, along with individually adapted settings emerging upon entering a room.

Artificial light: Fig. 5: Drawing in notebook. ”Kids room adjust to their game.

Dragon forts need many levels”

Design:

One participant mentioned the wish to choose between different designs for their walls.

Some imagined growing furniture and walls and one talked of wearing their house like a cocoon or a skin.

Biological features:

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Bodily aspects Knowledge and sense inputs:

and food.

Several participants imagined their houses knowing their taste in music

One imagined the house knowing about their social life and well-being, having the ability to analyze and take actions such as turning off its own voice feature because it noticed that the inhabitant enjoyed speaking with it so much that they rarely got out and spoke to people.

Quality of life:

One participant had the idea that their house would generate a weekly “Me-report” of bodily states. Another described how they lost 20 pounds and got a better posture since moving in because of training initiated by the house and adaptive furniture. Many mentions of increased healthy living were dependent of initiatives from the house as well as freeing up time for healthy activities while the house takes care of practical duties Health:

Service:

Mentions of the house making life easier for its participants by e.g. vacuuming or grocery shopping, cooking dinner etc. were prevalent.

Several participants assign voices to their houses, some as a helpful aid in communicating, some as an uncanny surprise when coming home and one participant imagine being woken by their favorite Bach symphony.

Sound (Music/Voice):

Cognitive aspects Participants in several cases describe their home as a kind of authoritative figure that knows what is good and bad for them. Two participants have assigned their house with a gender and a name (“Muse” and “Vera” (Fig. 6)).

Personality:

Examples of emotional attachment were described as one participant missing their house and checking up on it while out, another had the house join in family dinners and celebrations and finally one wonders ”Could the house become your friend?”

Emotions:

Different variations of interactive communication points are described and one participant even imagines the house having an avatar that they can interact with, and another having a specific place on the wall in each room where the ”main access” to the house was (Fig. 7).

Avatar/interactive point:

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Fig. 6: Writings in notebook: ”I have framed my sound/speaker system in each room, I might not keep the frames up, but I thought I’d try to give Vera a spot on the wall, like if she was family. I don’t know, my partner thought I was weird (...).”

Some participants imagine that their house can update them on news and weather, while others wish for an easier use of communication technology by having the house send and reply to various communications. One participant mentions an issue of surveillance and a fear of misuse if the passwords for the house should fall in the wrong hands.

Connectivity:

The notebook within

Fig. 7: Drawing in notebook: Main access point to house marked on the wall with little holes for the voice to come through.

The thoughts in the notebooks were insightful, honest, creative and even humorous at times. There were both thoughts on happiness and well being as well as thoughts on control, surveillance, and concern for technology. It consisted of thoughts on greater biological and societal contexts as well as viewing the house essentially as a ‘butler’ or advanced service function. Concrete technological suggestions was mainly focused around various needs for interfaces, control panels, as well as incorporating existing technology like news, television, email into the fabric of the home, obsoleting the need for computers or other portable monitors. Themes from ubiquitous computing and mobile technology, especially regarding health monitoring of various bodily data, were used to imagine a better quality of life and achieve goals such as weight loss or even a better posture. Some of the participants made up various stories about their life by describing daily lives as a personal narrative, very much like dream scenarios of an easier and better life with technology, and other times a certain amount of insecurity crept into their descriptions, eg. wondering if having too high a level of service would make one happier or just cut away some of the experiences that came along with grocery shopping and cooking without the help of computation. These ‘small-scale phenomenologies’ ranged from a more distanced and academic writing style, over asking big questions about our society to a personal diary of hopes and fears – at times also illustrated and drawn as such.

Technology An interesting thing to note is that although we had informed the participants that they would be part of a non-technological experiment, many of them still asked what the artifact could do, when they were first presented with it. This obviously didn’t hinder the participants in their imagination, rather, we believe the analogous approach helped them focus their attention and imagination upon things other than the limited functionalities of a device. The object, combined with the fictional narrative, helped lead the way as they were already making up imagined futures, and so the participants just had to follow along on that lead. Another advantage of not using technology at such an early stage of the process is, as mentioned, the lack of ‘thought-steering’ or dictating of any kind, which gave them a chance to not let current technological approaches influence how future technology and their experience of it were imagined.

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Sociality – Personality - Control Participants felt the need to somehow become familiar with the imagined technology, and gave them names (some even decided that the technology had a certain gender). This signifies a certain need to become familiar and include the technology as a ‘part of the family’. Among the mentions of personality and voice, one participant noted how the house suggested it removed its’ own voice, as the participant was engaging too much in conversation with the technology, which thus resulted in a lack of social interaction with other humans (Fig. 8).

Other commented more directly on an ambivalence in thinking that the house probably ‘knows best’, yet still wanting to have a certain amount of control and reservation for intelligent technology. Not knowing of Isaac Asimov, one of the participants formulated a certain set of rules for security, which were very akin to Asimov’s (1950) three laws of robotics in I, robot. The loosely based rules the participant formulated were: “It shouldn’t be able to harm me or any guest I have.”

“Of course it should follow its own impulses and whatever it needs to do to function as a house, just as long as it doesn’t mean that humans are harmed.”

In the interview following the return of the notebook, the participant mentioned that they had felt ‘obliged’ to somehow remain critical and not to become too fond of technology because, as he said: “ it could watch me as I am sleeping”. This touches on an interesting point on how there still remains a divide between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural’ in contemporary discourse. The effect areas such as ubiquitous computing and mobile technology has in mediating our everyday life has yet to be completely understood and might coincide with some of the challenges that Adaptive Architecture will come to face, as such process is not only about technological adaptations – it is about equally human. As Rheingold (1991) states in Virtual Reality, we need to find out how “humans might harmonize with technical environments whose say is (and has always been) inescapable.” (p.134).

As mentioned, a notable tendency among participants was that of technology becoming a service function and for some even something like a waitress or butler: cooking food, cleaning and filling the fridge. The idea of a future home as an inside-out service robot will not be a part of our investigation, as it would relate more to research done in connection with smart houses or service technology. As technology continues to weave itself into everyday life, our next approach needs to step a bit closer to this reciprocal relationship between the home and its inhabitant. As many participants remained undecided 50

Fig. 8: Writings in notebook: ”After the first month of habits analyzing in my new home, Muse - as I’d named my house - suggested that we switch off her voice respond that I had otherwise set to the voice of Angelina Jolie. Muse’s reason for this was that I was prone to self-isolating behavior and it seemed I was more often choosing Muse as a partner for conversation rather than my friends.”

on the level of control the intelligent should be able to exert, the next goal will be to confront the human with not only adaptivity, but also an explicit and quickly changing entity within a familiar setting – such as their home. None of the participants mentioned the need to unplug their device at any point, although it was explicitly made an option with the magnetized components of the artifact, although they might have mentally ‘unplugged’ whenever they weren’t thinking of the experiment and writing the notebooks.

According to our interpretations, this creates a correlation between human intimacy and their willingness to adaptability. Despite the abovementioned concerns of the participants, their needs and beliefs slowly became apparent as they expressed a desire for an intimate and caring relationship with the adaptive home. Following this, an interesting approach could be to have an intelligent house that shows direct signs of care for its inhabitants. This could allow for a thorough investigation of the ‘intimacy’ and shared living space that seem to latently be expressed in many of the participants thoughts of how it might be to co-inhabit an adaptive house.

Moving forward As we are taking inspiration from the Growth Plan (2009), the first part of the plan, Incubation, has a high focus on creativity and imagintion, which we sought to qualify by a phenomenological orientation.

Before engaging in the experimentation of the next phase, we will seek to further the imaginative approach and the thoughts progressed in this phase by commencing in a phenomenological thought experiment of what future adaptive architecture might entail. This will be carried out in the next chapter Embodied Space, which furthermore contains an explication of concepts central to present thesis, such as embodiment and human-technology relations.

The next phase, the Nursery phase, will focus on staged testing in a specifically constructed lab-setting to investigate participants in a ‘fine-tuning of a system to the specifics of its context’ (p.4). The experiments in this setting involve technology to a much higher degree than present phase and participants take part in home-like situations, where they interact with prototypes on varying ’personality’. Present phase have exhibited participants referring to their imaginative houses as being either very human-like, having personality and ability to communicate, while others seemed to think of the imagined interactions as more biological and subtle. This, correlated with the questions of control and relations that arose when participants discussed whether their homes should be able to comment or modify their behaviors or whether it should act more as a submissive service function that obeys the demands of the participants.

Insights from present experiment alongside our theoretical explorations will serve as foundation for the staging of experience and the divisions between different levels of protype intelligence and ’personality’ in the next experiment.

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Embodied space The hopes and burdens of adaptive architecture

This chapter will engage in an interrelating thought experiment and first-person phenomenological examination of what architecture in the future might be like. It is furthermore an explication of what embodiment means to our experience of the world. Embodiment is an integral part of phenomenological theory and serves the role of expanding the capacity of present thesis to analyse and interpret the relations and experiences occurring between the human body and built space. In order to further qualify our role as examiners through the explorative process of the Growth Plan, our approach in this chapter is conducted to cultivate a vocabulary that enables us to describe how humans dwell in their homes. The thought experiment will consist of imagining, in the setting of our hometown, how a future adaptive city might be experienced from a perspective of an inhabitant having experienced the transformation from the static paradigms of the present to one of adaptivity. This chapter will thus take the experimental shape of an alternation between a fictional narrative, theoretical concepts of embodiment, and interpretation of experiences.

By imagining future adaptive homes and investigating the experience of being in such homes, it is furthermore a qualification of our ability to construct experiments and allow for valuable experiences and 52

the furthering of our roles as ‘expert performers’, which will be revisited in the Adoption Phase. This approach is partly inspired by design fiction, a term invented by Julian Bleecker, who in A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction (2009) writes: “Why not employ science fiction to stretch the imagination?

Throw out the disciplinary constraints one assumes under the regime of fact and explore possible fictional logics and assumptions in order to reconsider the present” (p. 6). Another inspiration is Susan Kozel who we sought out through our ambition to qualify our own insights by way of imagination and bodily inspection. Kozel’s (2007) method in Closer is established between a fluctuation of personal first-person phenomenological narratives and a priori findings and attempts at imagining technological scenarios of the future. Since the fictional narratives used in the Incubation Phase proved to be quite effective to situate our test participants in their own future homes, the same approach is employed to challenge our own way of thinking. [the story begins]

I’m standing between the remains of two large concrete blocks in a part of Copenhagen that is scheduled for ‘Adaptive redevelopment’. This used to be one of the areas, which closely resembled what one would call a ‘ghetto’ – a place where a large quantity of people inhabited rigid structures of apartments in similar sizes. Something people of today, who grew up inhabiting houses calibrated to our embodied form of life, probably will have a hard time comprehending. It was one of these apartment blocks where large anonymous

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surfaces seemed to hinder any attempt of relation to the body as well as any sense of belonging. As I find myself standing between two large walls of concrete, what is left of this housing project, I partly feel as if I am interrupting a conversation between two friends sharing a final breath. How do I relate to this? Can I describe this relation?

[Story pauses]

Relation - the Flesh To describe relations, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ can be of aid. In his work Visible invisible (1968), he suggested that meaning arises from the intertwining of bodies, architectural or human, rather than belonging to one particular entity. Flesh accounts for the space between bodies and also the space in which their relations are enacted. So standing between walls as in the above bit of imaginative text can be said to be standing in the ‘flesh’: the space ‘in-between’ (p.133) Merleau-Ponty regards this as the ‘living perception’ of the ‘lived body’. The experience of the world is not some ‘reality-representation‘ that is attainable only through a rational approach; what is needed for a direct representation is experience. The flesh doesn’t represent some flowing energy, which can be found in all of nature. It is the intertwining, the reversible relationship, between the sensible and the sensate. Despite the fact that one shouldn’t think of flesh as actual ‘skin’, it can help us think of the invisible connections and relations that can exist between objects. In the story of this chapter, it might help to think of the relation to the concrete walls as a process of relation that grows into a single piece of flesh. When we see, we are also being seen, and thus we enfold ourselves into the reversible flesh: “When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts … opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.” (1968, p.123) The ‘overlapping difference’ between seeing and being seen is what allows for the world to present itself as it is perceived. Following this, for the subject in the story, there is no ‘objective reality’ that exists outside of what the subject perceives, no separate dimensions dividing the objects and the subject.

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[Story continues]

The urban textures of the space enfold my emotions. As I see traces of some worn down markings, I think I’m actually standing in an old parking lot, yet what is brought to my attention is that my standing in-between lets me sense the dialogue between these two remnants of a rigid concrete structure. I wonder if the inhabitants that once lived here could have imagined how different this environment could be? Could they have imagined an urban space where its inhabitants didn’t feel the powerful divide of interior and exterior, of city and nature, of technology and environment? This large space in-between certainly seems to signify the distance between life then and now. In this space I am continually consulting the light and spatial qualities in order to understand this new sense of space.

The body’s way of attuning itself to the environment has been described as shifting keys in a melody. As I ‘tune’ myself to these surroundings, my relation in-between the past and the future is starkly brought to my attention, when I notice one of the test-tents being erected a stone’s throw from where I am standing. These tents always gets planted as

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initial test-houses to gather data before the actual construction of the real homes begin.

My experience seem stretched out between me‘interrupting’ building blocks of the past, these new test-tents of the future, and memories of what human nesting was before built space was approached with ambitions of adaptivity. As I let memories linger in nostalgia, it is clear that I am not only relating to this very moment, I am submerged with various temporal and spatial qualities. The experience feels like an examination of how engaging with the surroundings can unfold a sense or memory ‘of being at home’ with animate as well as inanimate objects.

I believe this entails a primary virtue for architectural development, as my embodied experiences over time could benefit from an intelligent environment that adapts to my need of belonging and sustaining relations over time: a certain co-evolution. The ‘burden’ of adaptive architecture, as one might call it, is that it is inherently bound to human existence and therefore needs to mirror that need of relating and belonging, which achieves its finest expression through mutual relationships. And despite the seemingly solid components involved in the relation between building and human, this relation is a fragile one. Standing beside the tectonic character of the raw material that once emerged in the so-called ’ghetto’, I know it will all soon be gone, and so will I, as I make my way over to the adaptive test-tent.

How might we make sense of adaptive space? Mark Hansen (2006) offers his view on living in ‘advanced technology’ in his chapter on wearable space: “the more digitally deterritorialized the architectural frame is, the more central the body becomes as the framer of spatial information.” (p.177). We’ll return to the story, which now unfolds in the adaptive test-space.

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[Story pauses]

[Story continues]

The space I currently reside in certainly helps to further the metaphor of wearing the space in the same way as my body wears its skin - the ‘skin bag’ as some call it. I mentioned that they began constructing buildings by way of adjusting them to our embodied way of being. This feeling is mostly induced by a sense-input, as the house quickly becomes aware my presence and attempts to make me aware of its own experiences of the new surroundings. I experience it as a sense of uneasy territory and a feeling of un-firm ground, which is induced by the tent still being constructed and sensors being put into the soil beneath. I have plans on visiting a more finished house later on, as this system still feels unfinished and that the intentions of the adaptive space cannot be fully realized.

The floor curves in certain places and I am challenged to walk upwards and sideways at times. Having lived in an adaptive house for some years now, I am aware that much of my sense of being ’at home’ is mediated by technology: something artificial. But my own common sense that in earlier years would have told me that a stern structure, a rigid house, would be the ideal place to leave and protect parts of my dreams, my body, and daily life, feels challenged when experiencing a fluid structure that offers me not only rigidity and

[Story pauses]

protection, but a tectonic and emotional embrace.

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Space and phenomenology Edmund Husserl founded the discipline of phenomenology in the 19th century: a method of rigorous analysing the structures of experience. Here, he maintained that consciousness is intentional: always oriented towards something (Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 2000). In the imagined story, the subject is about to move deeper into the test-space and further examine the experience of being in such an environment. The phenomenological goal is to study the structure of consciousness in order to discover the world as it is experienced from a first-person perspective - unlike an approach of using collected empirical data (2007, p.4). As such, this exercise will hold no appeal to a scientific explanations of the world, rather, as Francisco Varela (1996) describes it, it is a self-induced and “sudden, transient suspension of belief about what is being examined, a putting in abeyance of our habitual discourse about something, a bracketing of the pre-set structuring that constitutes the ubiquitous background of everyday life” (p.344).

In the story, the chief tool of measuring and relating to space comes in the shape of the body. The relation to built space in such a technological setting will probably mean that the subject employ some form of technics in order to relate to themselves. What is meant by employing technics is that the body’s perceptive capacities and the relation to technology are closely tied together. Don Ihde will be used to expand on this point later.

In phenomenology, perception is not pre-given because the meaning we extrapolate comes from our subjective experience of it. To discover the world, we must set aside our natural attitude: our preconceived, naïve, notion of the world. Through this reflective movement and ‘setting aside’ (called epoché or bracketing) it is possible to describe the objects we are oriented towards. (Moran, 2000, p.155-156). Merleau-Ponty goes further by saying that way in which the ‘lived body’ interacts with its surroundings decide how it is perceived. In the story, the experience of being in an adaptive house is a subjective phenomenon in which the knowledge of what is in the house is created because it can be felt, seen, touched and heard. Following Merleau-Ponty, the understanding of this experience entails a concrete coupling of cognitive and bodily experiences, which at times must be accessed by way of examples. As the research area of present thesis is one of the future, the examples employed here will come by aid of the imagined story, which will soon be returned to. First, a closer look at the body.

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Body Habitual, personal, biological, personal, organic. Merleau-Ponty uses many terms to describe our bodily layers of interaction. As Moran writes, he uses the “distinction between the inanimate physical body and the living animate body to argue that humans are indeed inserted into the world in a very specific, organic way, determined by the nature of our sensory and motor capabilities” (p.423). For clarity, the terms objective body and lived body will be used here. The objective body is made of muscles, bones etc. and the lived body is that of pre-reflective experience. Simply put, the lived body is not situated in objective space and is not an object at all; it is what makes us eligible to perceive our surroundings. The lived body and consciousness resides in an “I can” and not an “I think” (p.159). According to Merleau-Ponty, what provides us with a pre-reflective and immediate knowledge of our body is what he calls the ‘body schema’. It can be described as emerging from what “with autopoietic theory, we have called the operational perspective of the embodied organism” (p. 39). It holds the key to linking the bodily senses with our perception and motility (p.42). Autopoietic is a key biological term, used by thinkers such as Varela and it relates the body schema to our research questions on co-evolution between humans and built space, as it deals with the continuously generated and emergent relation between components in a biological system (The tree of Knowledge, 1988). It’s important to note that the body-schema represents not just knowledge of our bodily parts, but also a structure that comes prior to bodily experiences. With this knowledge, we will return to the story.

[Story continues]

In the left side of the test-tent I move into a small cave that the environment has generated to test my impression in a process of algorithmic evaluation. As I move closer, I bow my head slightly, as I sense the opening isn’t customized precisely to my height.

I move in this space and sense both distance and softness and slowly create a subjective space of assigned meaning in the shape of possibilities for bodily movement. This awareness of my ’margins’, the poential of movements and space, is what can be said to be informed by the aforementioned ’body schema’. My experience of this cave is subjective, as the features of this cave is distinctly contingent on said schema. Of course it exists objectively, yet my experience of it is produced in partnership with my senses.

The daydreaming interface I leave the cave and make my way into an open area that is still being constructed. I raise my hand to cover my eyes, as I am met with a bright light coming from the walls of the house. The light panels are still not covered in any texture yet, so the intensity is at

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a maximum level and not what I am used to in my own home. But what are the qualities of inhabiting a space that adapts to you? By me inhabiting it, it is a practical, or rather, bodily space. It revolves around me as a physical entity and with its intelligence and adaptivity, it attempts to meet my needs.

[Story pauses]

Inhabitation When understanding how we need to develop a fitting adaptivity, which humans can co-inhabit with the house, we must understand our way of inhabiting space. According to Merleau-Ponty, shielding one’s eyes is not just an instinctive response, as claimed by empirical science, because the body as a concept cannot be within ‘objective space’ (1945, p.108). It is a body space, which is the foundation for our ability to organize and perceive our bodily movements: “it is no longer seen as the straightforward result of associations established during experience, but a total awareness of my posture in the inter-sensory world” (p.114). In the story, all distance and possibilities of touch in the adaptive house are given meaning because of the motility of the body. What is important for Merleau-Ponty is that the body is not understood as reducible to single parts or organs – there are no independent functions, rather, there is a bodily totality of function (p.112). If we are to follow this in our research, the human’s relation to an adaptive environment is not one of ‘position’ like it would be between inanimate objects. It is a ‘situational’ spatiality, because of our embodied way of being. As mentioned, the flesh can be used to represent an intertwining structure, which establishes a connection between all beings (1981, p. 96).

In such a reciprocal relationship, enhanced by technology, the distance between inhabitant and adaptive house isn’t to be understood metrically but through experience. Such principles might indicate how construction of our research experiments should come by way of actively engaging in the creation and experience of them. Moreover, it might help in understanding why enablement of co-evolution between inhabitant and built space must be a relation that emerges over time.

As I interact and feel the environment flowing with me, my active body comes to new understandings of what it is like to build a nest – it must happen in an active relation.

In Poetics of space (1958) Bachelard writes that “that the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace … The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (p. 6-7). Seeing as how my values and dreams somehow come to slowly shape the space I am in, Bachelard’s delicate description of what constitutes a home begin to make sense in a

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[Story continues]

physical manner. I am not just sensing in this changing environment, I test and judge my surroundings with my imagination and daydreams of what might unfold in this relationship.

Bachelard uses natural, transformative, elements such as fire and water in his treatise of experience. He uses water to take note of its surface and how it makes you experience yourself in the mirror reflection and thus engage in a heightened state of self-reflectivity.

Advancing this metaphor of the waters surface, I imagine that the goal for future built space could be formulated as the following: Adaptive architecture does not just create a mirror as the ocean’s surface - it enables you

[Story pauses]

to see into its depths.

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Moving deeper into the bowels of the house, I will seek to theorize on the technology that surrounds my experience.

Body & technology Don Ihde applies the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in what he calls post-phenomenology. He seeks to understand our relation to technology by way of a “a modified, hybrid phenomenology” (2009, p. 23). It incorporates analysis of body-technology relations and draws on phenomenology for its core concepts. In Bodies in Technology (2003) embodiment is analysed with regards to bodily perceptions in various digital and virtual contexts in order to shed light on the role that technology plays in our relation with the world. We’ve learned that Merleau-Ponty sees our interaction with the world as processed through embodiment. Ihde takes this notion and seeks to explicate what it means for our relationship and “what is invariable in the way humans experience their technologies” (2002, p. 111).

Firstly he identifies the ‘embodiment relation’ in which artifacts are experienced as means through which one’s environment is encountered. Examples of this are what we experience when using a microscope, talking on the phone etc. These things become extensions of us, much in the same way as more complex matters such as ’online presence’ and other virtual embodiments. I, as he writes: ’take the technologies into my experiencing in a particular way by way of perceiving through such technologies and through the reflexive transformation of my perceptual and body sense.” (p. 72). Secondly we have the hermeneutic relation: a relation that requires interpretation. Originally a term from Heidegger, Ihde seeks to build upon his theory and claims that this relation shows that our perception is joined with technology, as it is the one that interprets and sends forth information in code, symbols etc. A thermometer interprets parts of nature and hands it over to me, yet I also have to interpret the data. This is of course a simple example and this relation increases in complexity as the technology becomes more advanced. A further point is that technology is ‘multistable’, as Ihde call it (p.106), and mentions that Heidegger, in his famous example of the hammer, failed to elaborate how technologies does not just have a single purpose but can shift context. A hammer could be an object of art or a paperweight, which further increases the complexity. A complexity that perhaps will see the boundaries between human and non-human become increasingly blurred as developments in intelligent systems and adaptive architecture move forward. A design principle that could be extrapolated from the multistability of technology, is that development of Adaptive Architecture with an embodied focus should be aimed towards interaction with the inhabitant that is rich and complex, rather than complicated. A principle, which can be said to echo Einstein’s famous remark that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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[Story continues]

Data stream The newer test spaces are usually constructed in a circular pattern. I’m in one of the outer rooms of the circle that shares its walls with the outside environment. The walls are not completely opaque but have a mixed surface of material from the wall and a data-stream running across it. It is an extension to the systems that lets me sense and ’feel the house’. I’m met with different environmental data that is being displayed in front of me.

It’s abstract patterns on how the weather is colliding with the building surface, they resemble waves, rising and descending bars that display whatever I might like. I’ve learned

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to interpret these patterns through a continuous process of adaption to how I best cope with data-streams. The house is constantly estimating its own fertility with the purpose of providing nutrition to its inhabitants. Above me is hologram that indicates where different biological produces are ripe and ready to harvest, as well as emerging areas for fertile ground and possibilities for planting new crops in the vertical gardens around the house. The systems that let data merge and weld into my consciousness through these kinds of data-streams is something I remember as challenging at first, yet just as writing or learning to decipher symbols while achieving a sailing-certificate, it slowly became habit in conjunction with the mutual adaption between me and the house. Now, as raindrops starts to show on the surface of the walls, I will probably try and find a transport-shuttle, as I am heading across town for my final destination.

The technosphere As a way of understanding the increasingly complex technological environment in which we reside, Ihde uses the term ‘technosphere’. An adaptive house, as the one just described in the story, with its various intelligence systems of light, air-condition, data-streams, health, and ‘mood’ will all be part of the backdrop of this ’sphere’. In this built and evolving environment there is not always a direct interaction with the artifacts, yet the fluidity of this backdrop engages us with the world. Ihde’s third relation is what he calls ‘alterity relations’ (2002, p.81); here technology is experienced as an ‘other’: something we can interact with, but not something that is under our total control. Flying a kite could be one such relation and, with increasing complexity, the adaptive house is another. As seen with Ihde’s three relations, the relation between humans and technology is percieved as different layers of attention and control. The data-stream of the shifting weather that is observed in the story can be said to supply a representation of something that is neither under the control of the inhabitant nor the technology. In the third relation, we can relate to the house as another person, as it takes on an ’existence’ due to its autonomy. Following this, questions of the human’s own agency in light of the increasingly technological environment is very prevalent in fields such a post-humanism. The discussion of disembodiment and loss of agency are unavoidable, yet what we seek to investigate is how technology can enhance our intertwinement with the world, rather than hinder it. We’ll return to the final destination of the story.

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[Story pauses]

[Story continues]

House of intertwinement Located not far from the sea in Amager lies one of the earliest adaptive ‘clusters’ that was built by IKEA. It still retains its’ original cocoon-shape; the first adaptive houses did not have full capability to evolve its outer shell with input from humans. They have kept it this way to commemorate the new shifts in our relations with the intelligent materials.

A cocoon is a cultural symbol in most of the world and can be seen as a metaphor of a process or a ‘becoming’ something new. The inspiration for the initial building design was furthermore based on the golden European urodidae moth as IKEA wanted to show the adaptable potential of the housing project, as moths are famous for their ability to mimic other things in nature. Notions of mimesis in nature are easy to come by as the veins and arteries of the vast networks in the building makes for useful metaphors of something living. Its main function is now as an exhibition room. Most of the intelligence systems of the house aren’t noticeable, yet human input and presence is still the molding factor.

As it rarely gets visited anymore, it responds vividly to my presence and commences appropriate synchronization. As I mentioned, Merleau-Ponty stated that embodiment of artifacts happens through habit, which then affects the body schema. As the weather outside is rather cold, I keep my jacket and backpack on while walking along the long hallways in the outer shell of the cocoon. I am usually prone to being cold, yet the house, having noticed my presence and delicate preferences, slowly begins to heat up the hallway.

I am in a bit of a rush and engage in a series of awkward movements in an attempt to take of my jacket while trying to keep moving forward. Through my bodily awarness of my jacket I engage in a balancing act trying to not hit anything, as were it an extension of my body. Yet, this balancing act is conditioned by what surrounds me:

rapidly adaptable

walls. To make a shortcut, I lean towards one of the soft inner walls. This is a habit of mine that has grown out of always being in a rush and having gained new desired by live in these adaptable buildings. The wall opens as if I was wearing the space, as I lean towards it. This extension of my body was an inconceivable way of interaction with houses in the past, yet in my ‘fashion’ of moving, I have embodied and habitated the potential of the spatial qualities. Following Ihde, we are already interpreting ourselves through textures of technology, but humans have always interpreted themselves in light of the world. If feels like my self-reflection in light of this ‘technosphere’ only implies an increased environmental connection. I am engaged with the world through this lived space,

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the buildings spatiality is grounded in my body, and I sense the vastness of the structure.

This is not a given in any ways, but a result of a cultural inhabitation of these new technologies. Adaptive space has become a place where interpersonal lives unfold and as I reach my final destination, I am met by the view of the ocean: A large space with adapted walls to expose the roaring waves and the howl of the wind. The scenery rubs the textures of my imagination and almost overwhelms my body along with exhaling walls of the house. �Architecture must be precipitous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, tender, colourful, obscene, randy, dreamy, en-nearing, distancing, wet, dry and heart-stopping.

[Story ends]

Architecture must blaze!� (Wolf D. Prix, Manifesto, 1980)

Adaptive cottage

Environmental circuitry and sensors

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Closing the circuit The first-person phenomenological exercise through this chapter have sought to draw out an understanding of how adaptive architecture can be translated into a ‘lived space’ on the grounds of our embodiment. From the initial writing of the story, the subsequent analysis and re-writing with theoretical concepts, the goal has been to uncover ways in which we might be able to investigate qualities of future built space in our experiments. In one of his stories (1981), Rudyard Kipling posed the question: how can you claim to know a country, when you have never been outside it? With this experimental approach we’ve attempted to step outside our present technological paradigms and sought to investigate ways to incorporate a wider spectrum of concepts into our exploration before converging on our proposal for future development. The exercise of imagining future adaptive space is not a simple exercise but submitting ourselves to such an approach is aimed at furthering the quality of our anticipations as part of our own process in the Growth Plan. The question of how we connect with our surrounding environment and how the relation to nature for humans living in a city can be altered by adaptive architecture has been a lingering question throughout the story. Returning to the technology-critical Bachelard and his thoughts on urban life: “ … a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees.” (1958, p.27) The quote stands in contrast to what we believe is a possibility for adaptive architecture, as it assumes technology as something far removed from the biological and intimate. Of course it would be anachronistic to expect Bachelard to know how technology would evolve, yet it seems quite deterministic to think that technology would render intimacy and the feeling of home completely artificial as long as humans reside, inhabit and create value with it. Secondly, the contrast between a house in the country and big city life is also one that must be contested. We don’t know how cities of the future will evolve and we might not be able to bring the sociality of urban life into a remote hut in a forest, yet the interconnectedness with nature that urban life is accused of lacking is something that an adaptive architecture can be aimed at alleviating as indicated in present chapter.

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In the coming phase of experiments, the Nursery, the concepts we have explored here will be used create a synthesis with our findings from the earlier phase. This approach is to help figure out which phenomena and relations we need to investigate and to ensure that we remain explorative in the qualification of such experiences, as we now will conduct live experiments between interactive technology and human test-participants in a staged lab setting.

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Nursery phase Aim In our second phase of experimentation our own version of the Nursery phase takes shape of an environment that allows for more controlled and staged testing. As Ross (2009) writes in Growth Plan: “The knowledge generated in the Nursery phase has the form of design principles� (p.3) and how these parameters relate to human physiological and behavioral processes. Our main objective was to stage experiences for participants within a setting where phenomena of architectural and relational character could be observed. The experiences of spatial and temporal character would be analyzed in a context of existential phenomenology where the experience of human participants is observed. With this in mind, and based on our prior phase and subsequent analysis, we developed seven fully working prototypes to be tested in a lab setting.

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Design The environment consists of a rig built in the InterMedia lab at ITU (Fig. 1-2). It was built in a scale to which human bodies can relate intimately. The space was 4x4x3 meters, evaluated as a similar size to a living room in an average apartment. The space was not personalized by use of certain colors or objects, and the atmosphere was kept neutral by only using a few simple pieces of furniture. This was in order to help participants relate their experiences in the environment to a feeling of home, as they were asked to bring their own personal items and thus actively take part in the creation of what a home environment in this setting meant.

Fig. 1: Elevation of experiment set-up 71

Personal items and staging As mentioned, to allow participants to engage the neutral space in a more personal manner, they were asked to bring personal items of affection. Before beginning our sessions they would shortly be asked to explain why they have brought their particular items and then asked to place it in a specific area in order to orient them towards the environment. The staging of these sessions are inspired by performance art, which will be explained below.

The participants Three participants were chosen with backgrounds in architecture, performance, and media aesthetics, with the latter being a participant from the Incubation phase. The participants were chosen on the basis of their personalities and backgrounds, as it was evaluated that a combination of these could provide valuable data in an experiential exploration. The participants will be referred to as A, B and C in accounts of their experiences throughout the chapter.

The setup of the experiment The participants were first introduced to the general set-up: the three positions of our method, the three prototype environments and the question approach. Each session with the participants would last for roughly one hour and would be repeated for all three prototypes. A paper with a question-guide was provided to assist the instructor in questioning the experiencer and point them in the desired direction (see appendix 1). We had constructed some narratives on the prototypes that the participants read and afterwards brought over to the environment setting: the rig. Here, they were told that for the first two test levels, the experiencer, a role we will introduce shortly, should stand closest to the walls, and the other two should keep further back. This was done due to the technical nature of the second level, which uses infrared sensors and reacts to the highest point within the walls, so this would work best if only one person was closest to the walls at a time. It was also to foster the idea of the first level being controlled by sensors, and not, in fact, by ourselves. A high table was at the very back to provide a natural place to stand and a place for the observer to take notes. To deter participants from attempting to ’figure out’ how the technology interacted, projectors, sensors, wires, kinects and cables were visible as well as the structure of the rig holding the two adjacent pieces of canvas acting as the walls.

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Fabric with projections

Fig. 2: Plan of experiment set-up 73

Initial prototype design When initially designing the different prototypes we asked ourselves the following question: “Does the building material emanate a certain mood or invite different ways of interacting with it?” and “What if the perceived personality of the building material was translated into how the prototype would act? “ Some architectural materials can be perceived as concave or convex in the sense of how they relate to the body. This is not meant as a description of form but rather as a perceived property that has to do with the sensation or feeling of the material surface. A smooth wooden surface heated by the sun is perceived as concave because it is emitting a sense of warmth, approachability and from afar one can imagine how the wood would feel and smell. A surface of newly laid brick wall with raw edges of the bricks not yet ground by the wind and weather, or a metal facade with multiple sharp edges and raw joints is on the other hand emitting a sense of hostility and such a surface might be perceived as convex. Other opposites in material properties could perhaps be assigned the same liveliness and studied as living architectural surfaces, such as horizontal and vertical materials, heavy and light, transparent and opaque, etc. As mentioned, we initially crafted seven prototypes with different material qualities. Some focused on higher degrees of intelligent behavior while others were designed to focus more on material properties, such as horizontality and verticality. After testing all the prototypes in our lab setting, three of the seven were chosen, as they best offered a behavior and material quality that would let the participants experience a gradual change in environmental ‘personality’ and interaction. The initial seven prototypes were thus narrowed down to the following three: Lowest level - biological cognitive ability and material Middle level - simple cognitive ability and material Highest level - advanced cognitive ability and material Three prototypes of adaptive environments The three prototypes with increasing levels of intelligence allowed us to study how the participants will perceive different ‘personalities’ of the lab space. As mentioned, the levels are also partly a progression that is derived from our previous experiment, where participants were encouraged to imagine how their own “living” home would look like.

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Fig. 3: Highest level prototype

(Fig. 4): code driven with no sensor inputs.

Employs own inherent behavior. Evolves slowly, plant-like, but fast enough to see change with human eyes. Can be affected from surrounding environment and actors, but adaptation and response takes effect slowly. External influences cause a change around a certain parameter, but do not affect the overall systems logic.

Lowest level

(Fig. 5): code driven with infrared sensor inputs.

This level of intelligence is highly dependable upon instructions from the user, yet has its’ own inherent logic, albeit limited. It is essentially coded to ‘follow the leader’, but has random movements coded into its behavior.

Middle level

(Fig. 3): Controlled mostly by us without the knowledge of the participants, known as the ‘wizard-of-oz’ method.

This prototype displays human-like intelligence and a high degree of independence. Communicating and even directing, as were it an ‘equal’. In this experiment, we took inspiration from another experiment from using the Growth Plan, as the prototype is said to be controlled by the computer, but will be controlled by us while we observe the interaction behind the scenes.

Highest level

Fig. 4: Lowest level prototype

Note on the highest level: In the experiment with the Growth Plan approach (2011) they use participants external to the experiment to control the lighting-environment. As our prototype would be easier to ‘read’ and uses far more interactivity, we needed to control it ourselves, as an outsider would perhaps exhibit behavior too revealing.

Fig. 5: Middlelevel prototype

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Method - Explorative approach in the Nursery phase We looked to a performance-based research method as it appears in Kjell Yngve Petersen and Karin Søndergaard’s Light as experiential material (2013) and Staging multi-modal explorative research using formalised techniques of performing arts (2011) in order to qualify the perceived experiences of our participants. In this phase we observe, analyse and interpret participants’ experiences of the phenomenon: Inhabiting and relating to an interactive, adaptive environment in the shape of a living room space.

The experiential method of Petersen and Søndergaard allows us to observe participants and make adjustments between sessions in order qualify our own exploration of the phenomenon. The researchers describe the method as a “framework that can be applied and adapted to various knowledge enterprises that needs to unpack experiential qualities that are situation specific and partly generated by the investigator in the process.” (2011, p.1). The experiential aspect of this framework were of particular interest to us, as we sought for the participants to not only get a sense of space, but also incorporate their own embodied engagement as they were rehearsing their own articulation of the experiences. Petersen and Søndergaard apply techniques for gathering evidence and seek to structure research inquiry through exploratory approaches. As the method seeks to bridge the gap between more rigid research structures and artistic approaches, we not only felt it was apt for our approach, but was easily re-configurable to our needs. Petersen and Søndergaard defines their ‘staged experientiality’ as a triangular set of observational positions for participants. Our interpretation of the positions is as follows: • The first participant observes from a position inside the experience of a performative engagement, wherefrom the lab space is explored and the participant speaks from her first-person experience.

• The second participant observes from a position outside the experience in continuous discussion with the first, — a referent position as external observer who interviews and reflects on the first-person experience.

• The third participant observes from an outside position and document the first-person experience likewise from an external position, taking notes and using a camera to document.

To investigate the phenomenon of the different intelligent prototypes by positioning the participants inside the experience: “The question is how the world is experienced while in action, and how these 76

insights might inform transient perspectives and enable thinking of the experiential in architectural invention and experimentation.” (p.12). Our interpretation of these experiences will be done by phenomenological analysis. This is to supplement the enhanced reflectivity that the triangulation method enables its participants to gain, which hopefully will provide insight into how participants experience the materials that constitute our lab space, when such materials exhibit intelligence and varying degrees of interactivity.

Use of analysis In the previous chapter, Embodied space, it is mentioned how, according to Husserl, phenomenological analysis is conducted through ‘bracketing’: a reflective approach conducted in order to understand and describe the phenomena we are investigating (Moran, 2000). As we include test-participants that we observe, engage with, and interview in this phase, the approach will differ a bit from that of text-interpretation. Through the experiential performance method we are allowed to observe how participants feel and think in a very direct manner. The focus is to directly observe how participants describe their experience in a manner that is not dictated but oriented towards the lived experience in an open manner. This requires question asked in an open structure, which we explicate in the coming sections.

As we both observe and engage with participants, the requirement is for us to view the experience from the participants point of view without our own knowledge or thoughts of what it means to be in such an environment and ”enter into the individual’s lifeworld and use the self as an experiencing interpreter” (1994, p. 48). It is a way of engaging the experience from different perspectives, which will later be contrasted and re-experienced with video-recordings and notes on the sessions. This is to give a foundation for our analysis to be as rich and qualified as possible when we focus on the experience of the phenomenon, rather than the phenomenon itself.

Narratives The research conducted in this thesis cannot avoid being conditioned by the fact that we are investigating experiences with technologies that doesn’t exist in homes today. To allow the experiment to be positioned as close to our desired phenomena as possible, an imaginative tool in the shape of narratives was therefore deemed a useful supplementation in the staging of experiences for our participants (Fig 6). This will also aid in creating some coherence, as some of our participants also took part in the Incubation phase, where the narratives given there generally were of help to the imaginative process. As mentioned, we needed a more rigorous structure of questions – one that allowed for openness and yet more guiding than the approach offered by the performance based method. To develop the questions, we created a 77

India Express New Delhi, 26th of February 2045 As a result of last century’s pioneering within the field of computerized building materials, several successful cases have now been recorded.

Traditional building materials, such as steel, concrete, composite and glass are being combined with computational power to enable the building to do various performances, such as responding to its environment, its inhabitants or networks of other buildings. Some experiments has turned autonomous and is no longer in need of human intervention or technical upkeep. “The future of the build environment has never looked more exciting” says Senior Analyst of the Delhi Institute of Future Studies, Eric Chandar. Some projects have occurred spontaneously while others were planned and hoped for through several years.

What they all have in common is that they are representing the future to come of building environment. In this article we will take a look at three very different cases and the people living with and around them.

The first case took place In Tokyo, where the japanese architects SANAA have made experiments with implementing technology in their famous white cubical townhouses. SANAA co-founder Ryue Nishizawa is known for experimenting with alternative ways of settling in urban areas, and in 2002 he came up with the concept of the Moriyama House; a system of small white houses placed closely together, creating small paths and alleyways, imitating traditional japanese houses and their courtyards. In an enclave of Moriyama houses, a new prototype was made with the potential to grow itself among the other houses. The idea was to let intelligent materials learn from existing buildings and based on the success and failures displayed over the years, it would build a shelter shaped and moulded by the experience of the materials, rather than the architect. Nishizawa began living in the primitive shed as soon as it provided enough shelter, as a way of giving the house feedback on its progress. The house seemed to increase its pace at that time, being very sensitive to human presence and displaying active signs of effort to provide for human needs. The house is still in an early stage, but Nishizawa is using it as a part of his studio, and likes to refer to it as “the House-Being”, an equal occupant of the area, together with himself and the other residents. “The presence of the House-Being is felt as soon as you enter. No day looks the same, just like in a forest, but this is a forest of houses, building themselves” Nishizawa elaborates. Recently the new house has developed a way of communicating with the residents. Dots

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of light can move around on the concrete walls, letting the inhabitants know where the house’s attention is. This trait were encouraged by Nishizawa himself, as he found it uneasy to not have a specific point of communication to turn to, and it has since showed to be of great use when introducing visitors to this new phenomenon, Nishizawa points out.

Second occurrence happened In Udaipur, Rajasthan.

A new type of energy efficient intelligent house is a popular investment for many middle class families. These houses can regulate and adapt the energy use of the house according to season, weather and the use of the individual family as well as the local network of houses. If a house is not in use it will fall into a state of hibernation and use just enough energy to keep the structure in good condition, distributing any excess power to other houses.

In the area of Madhuban in Udaipur a house was on sale for a very long time, due to water damage in the basement. It had been out of service, keeping to itself for almost two decades. Kids would play in the front garden and the windowless wall between the living room and the garden would serve as a perfect backdrop for various games of ball play. Akshay Kumar Dutta, a 5 year old boy from the Dutta family living two houses over, used to play every night after school, and when no other kids were around, he would bounce the ball back and forth between himself and the wall to practise. He soon started noticing how the shadows on the wall were acting strange. Many of the cracks and fractures on the wall he had thought was just due to the lack of maintenance, but then he started to notice that the cracks were not always in the same place. They would move, from time to time. At first he thought nothing of it, but when the pattern of cracks and scratches started to imitate his movements, he went back to his own house to get his father.

“I was very sceptical at first, but my son seemed so determined on showing me his discovery that I followed him along”, Romesh Kumar Dutta remembered, “and when we came into the garden, the pattern welcomed us by spreading its movements all along the wall as we walked beside it. It was as if it wanted company to play with.”

The phenomenon has since been studied by scholars, among them Dr. Sunish Rakel from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. It is believed that the house, having been idle for so long, started reacting to the tremors and vibrations coming through from the outside when the kids were playing. “It soon started perceiving the activity as something it should react to, and almost as if it missed the company of humans, it found a way to reach out and

communicate with the kids outside”, Dr. Rakel says.

For the third and last case we move to the Canadian region of British Columbia. Here, the project “Husingen Hemnäs” initiated by IKEA had been running for decades when inhabitant, and technical engineer on the pilot project, Lars Verderström discovered a malfunction on one of the surfaces. Husingen Hemnäs was built to let the inhabitants have complete control over the amount of natural light in their house. The walls are made up of an epoxy blend with phase shifting carbon fibers and encapsules air for insulation. Nanocomputers are woven into the polyepoxy and enable the fibers to shift between modes of opaque, translucent and transparent. The inhabitants can control the level of transparency by simple gestures, letting light in or shutting it out as they prefer. The nanocomputers are controlled by a central server, linked to several input sensors that allows the house to respond in a coherent manner on the inhabitants location, position, gestures and level of physical activity. The system is able to adjust its behavior over time, responding to the way the inhabitants of the house express their needs for light and darkness, and learning how best to suit their needs. It is even able to tell different people apart, due to a highly evolved method of motion recognition.

When Lars Vederström one morning woke and found the surface moving by itself, he was at first convinced that the system had somehow broken down and was unable to react. After studying it for a while, he realised that it was acting on its own, creatively making patterns he had never seen before. The walls were, after being inspired by Vederström and his family for years, now coming up with their own suggestions to light design, and it was displaying its full range of beauty.

“The possibilities with this new kind of merge between 20th century and 21st century technology has not yet been thoroughly mapped, but expectations are high, and I think they are justified” says Vederström.

Fig. 6: A history of the future - A brief fictitious overview

two-person version of the experiment with said performance method, where we progressed through the various prototypes, switching roles of asking and experiencing, while having a camera mounted on our body to record a first-person perspective of the experience.

Questions and home Our sessions, usually around 20 minutes, would then be reviewed, while attempting to understand our experience from an observing perspective. Like a phenomenological approach to writing and rewriting our own experience, the recordings from the camera were used to understand our concepts within the experience and how they might suit the performance method. Our initial structure of questioning was very open and were based around the exploratory verbs of “affect,” “influence,” “impact,” “determine,” “cause,” “relate”, “describe”, “compare”, which was then coupled with key concepts such as dwelling, place, space, room, embodiment, personality, intimacy, control and home.

Through our own participation in these experiments, one of the early insights came in the form of understanding what constitutes a home. The questions regarding a sense of dwelling and feeling ‘at home’ quickly became one tied to certain objects of affection. To create this sensation a lab environment, we, almost intuitively, started unpacking certain personal elements, leaving them around the room. This helped create a certain feeling of dwelling, not just within a rather sterile environment, but one that we were trying to build a relationship with as were it our own home. The approach of staging such an experience and engaging back and forth helped us understand what we were creating in that “The experience of architecture emerges out of the activities of living and is shaped by the negotiation between our experiential accounts and our performative engagement.“ (2013, p.17) Afterwards, one of the key categories of our questioning came in the form of relation and time. A relationship is built in key moments – evolving over time. Therefore, a structure to be forced upon our participants would be to continuously ask about their sense of relation to and of the room. Intially submitting ourselves to the same structure yielded various results as time passed, but also allowed us, shifting between interviewer and experiencer, to step back in a pre-experienced relation with the room and then rediscovering it anew. This circular motion quickly helped a sense of feeling at home with the environment, but also helped to understand one’s own bodily relation over time and how we move about in the room and how certain personalities created attraction and intimacy, which was helpful when analysing the experience of the participants.

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Findings On the participants’ exploration: Despite our efforts, the setting of the experiment inside the lab had the effect of making the participants curious about the technology itself. The downside of this was that too much attention was paid to how it functioned and whether it could be figured out. The advantage was that it made them do things with their body, exploring with great eagerness and using their bodies in various ways: Lying on the floor, standing on a chair, waving arms, walking in abstract patterns, jumping, sitting in different positions in different places. Although the visible technology did make them question how it all worked, it eventually also made them question how they worked, and more important how they “work” together with technology.

Instructions: Assuming the role of instructors in the experiment not only meant knowing when to give directions, but knowing when to let the experiences of the participants flow by not interfering. The participants needed to get a sense of ownership of the space and we quickly realised that the few times we gave instructions, it bore too much weight and ultimately led them away from attaining their feeling of ‘home’, which we sought to stage. In letting the participants delve into their own experience, they quickly played to their own performative strengths and gained immediate ownership of the setup. In the breaks they gave encouragement and feedback, something that in the end meant a strengthened sense of ‘togetherness’ not only with each other, but also with their inhabited space.

Although we at times felt the need to ask more questions - if the participants for example strayed far off the question sheet - an afterthought to be made, is that the experiment also was about us being able to be cleared of our preconceived notions of what should be asked and which issues are most pertinent to discuss. In a bigger picture, our phenomenological approach very much calls for a ‘clearing’ of prejudice and re-evaluation of our own experiences. Part of this is also a constant call for a challenge in one’s own understanding in search for an ‘invariable’ result - this is one of the tools necessary to understand how to enable development of adaptive architecture with a human focus.

Aesthetics: It is in the human nature to always compare surroundings to something we find recognisable. The different graphical appearances of the three rooms resulted in a lot of time spent discovering, musing, 80

commenting and experiencing the aesthetics of the graphical look. After a little while with each environment, the participants got to a deeper and more philosophical level. The graphical look was, after all, not stimulating enough to take up all the attention.

Narratives: The use of narratives served at first as a transition into the imaginative space we were establishing around the participants. Upon given a general introduction they were asked to read the fictive article describing the origin of the three environments. In the beginning of the first round, the impressions of the environment drowned out the memory of the narrative, but upon introducing the second environment and mentioning the story once more, the participants took it into account when experiencing the mid level environment, and specifically referred to the pattern as cracks made by the house, as was the case in the story.

When asked how their initial mindset was, when arriving at the lab, all participants answered that they were full of expectations and expressed great enthusiasm. Seen in this perspective the narrative must have had a great impact, them being very open and susceptible to our molding of their mindset. We expected the questions to be based more on the story, but a high degree of autonomy was exercised in this area, as described later. ’Highest’ level prototype: The fact that we were controlling the ‘intelligence’ in the environment gained insights into how to communicate with humans on behalf of a non-human entity. The participants were in a situation where they had to interpret and interact with something whose nature they were not completely sure of, but displayed high levels of intuition. The following will be an account of how one of the conversations occurred between the experiencer (A) and the person who asked the questions (B) (Fig. 7-9): A: “It feels very obvious that it reacts to me. It is mirror-like, it seems to imitate me.”

B: “How does it feel?”

A: “Like I want to follow it. Or perhaps be a bit controversial.”

A: “Yes, I am starting to react to it, like it is alive. I am trying to figure out its logic.”

A walks back and forth and attempt to make it follow across the room. When A stops the particle begins to grow rapidly in size. A says that they think it is because they are standing still.

A: “It is very focused on me. Not my diary (note: the personal thing A brought)”.

Fig. 7-9: Interaction with the highest level prototype.

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Participant A went on to express doubts about whether the prototype was reacting to her or if she was reacting to the prototype. It was evident that the participants were not sure whether the environment was just perceived by them as intelligent, or if it actually was. It also made them consider the possibility of the environment doing harm in some way to them, or just suddenly behaving differently and changing to a grumpy mood. This sparked a discussion on how humans should be introduced to new technology, and an assumption was that the implementation of systems like these should be on a very small and gradual scale, to not scare of inhabitants of these future environments. But it was specifically expressed that this progress should begin immediately, since all three participants were puzzled about why these kind of technological features were not seen anywhere in contemporary architecture. Another account will follow, this time with participant B as the experiencer and participant C as the questionnaire: B: “I’m not even lying, I really would like such a wall at home. An LED wall that you can make gestures to.”

B then talks about purpose and how were not accustomed to stand in front of our walls like this. Why do we lie on the floor of the Tate modern in front of a sun? B asked. And why do we lie on the beach?

C: How would it be in your daily life?

B: “I actually think it is weird that we don’t experience rooms as living. What if we treated people like we treats rooms?

B then states that she would like for the house to know how she feels. But afterwards expressed concerns of being hacked with such personal information.

C: “Would the house know more about you, than you know about yourself ?”

B is now lying on the floor.

B: “Does it know that I am lying down now? Can it feel that I am restless?”

C: “How does this change your relation to your home? Would it change your feeling of home if it reacted to you?”

B: “I would actually like if my home could react a bit more to me. It’s not that way now.”

B: “My home has it’s own frames, it’s not built for me. It has not experienced the things I have through my life. That would always be a bit of an issue.”

From this short account of the conversation between the participants, it is obvious that they quickly became accustomed to the surroundings and were able to immerse themselves in the setting. When participant B goes on a tangent on why we don’t stand in front of walls but lie on the ground of museums or beaches, it seems to be a comment on how humans are quick to adapt culturally. In the same session as the one above, the observer, C, had written in her notes that they thought they would begin to talk with the prototype, if they had it at home, as it felt very sympathetic in its movements.

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The prototype yielded many descriptions of how they felt that they were not always in control; how the technology attempted to ‘lure’ them to do things, as mentioned in our account, one participant even wondered if the technology “lured” their or if it was the other way around, and how much of this perception was created in their mind. Another question posed was why we relate to the experiment as we do – one person said “I don’t think I would ever stand like this in front of a person – perhaps my boyfriend”. This also spurred a discussion of how we not only need to engage with technology in the same way as perhaps humans, but also that technology should be seen in a different light, as the home can be just as much alive and have a relationship to you as other emotional elements in your life. As they slowly began to gesture and figure out how the technology worked, they always evolved a certain way to communicate. Of course they didn’t know that we were actually controlling how the prototype would act, so what really occurred was two people learning to speak through an abstract technological language.

Unintended by us, these cycles of communication led to a participant starting to mention how they were ‘hungry’ for a new way to communicate with their surroundings. It was an unintended insight that grew from the time spent with the prototype. The comment on communication was mentioned towards the ending of the session, after two rotations of participants with the prototype.

‘Middle’ level prototype: Initially the second prototype (Fig. 10-11) was perceived as more independent than we had intended. It was supposed to follow participants around, but also have its own subtle autonomous ‘growth’, but it was perceived much more like having its own ways and not caring too much about the presence of the participant. A reason for it not being perceived as being very responsive was perhaps that this experiment came after the one with the highest form of ‘intelligence’ in terms of interaction, and thus this one was perhaps very autonomous compared to the other. As time passed this sense of independence grew into interesting talks about its “personality traits”: One participant mentioned, in a talk referencing its “flickering personality”, that it should “stop thinking so much.” Another person noted that they felt like the prototype wanted some sort of contact, but not completely voluntarily. Like it wasn’t really as interested in getting to know them and that it could sometimes seem a little threatening. In the end one participant remarked that they had begun to wonder if it really was lonely, and that such a home would perhaps be sad to live in. Participants used the narratives more with this prototype in order to aid their experience, as they had trouble getting comfortable with it and experience the relation.

As this was the intelligence with the highest amount of activity and visual clues this perhaps demonstrates that humans in general won’t take kindly to a very active house. As time passed participants became more accustomed to the rapid growth of the environment, yet expressed that it was more difficult to ‘read’ its Fig. 10-11: Interaction with the middle level prototype.

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intentions, as were it a human. One participant expressed that they wanted them to be friends, but was unsure of what it might think of her. They also expressed that their immediate impression were not all too positive, but that they also maybe needed some time with it.

‘Lowest’ level prototype: The final level to explore had no sensory input from the participants, but here the fictitious background story created the “interaction” as the participants were asked to imagine that they were currently in a house that had responded over a long stretch of time, and hence the looks of it were not coincidental, but were shaped and molded depending from previous generations of inhabitants. This difference in the scale of time slowed the pace of the interaction noticeably. The participants seemed almost mesmerized by the aesthetics of it, dreaming away. The tone of their voices went down, the pace of speech and movement slowed, and they seemed in almost a collective state of meditation. This was caused partly by our instructions: They were told that the last part was more informal and as the experiment moved on, we instructed them in a less structured manner, where their roles were more flowing. This was done by the estimate that they had now gotten used to being in the test environment, and that they felt that they knew how this was supposed to be done (We had complimented them, told them that things were going well etc.), as well as the fact that they were sitting, eating lunch in an intimate setting.

As time went on with the experiment and the participants became more comfortable with the method, a certain reciprocal relationship started to develop – maybe it was just the sense of having known the environment for a longer period, but it was also in everyone’s conviction that the environment was there to care for them. They expressed generally more positive things about this prototype than the others, some even talked about wanting to change their own home and how possibilities for changing the wall or being more in contact with nature also arose from this. The peculiar nature of the material surface made the participants develop an idea of a “relationship” with it. This relationship seemed even and filled with initial admiration and the room was not, as mentioned by many in the previous experiment, seen as something that should service one’s needs.

All participants clearly expressed the feeling of calmness and “being in the center of a mass” - “one that takes care and is very knowing.” They were describing its motion and evolving as a form of communication or relationship: a dialogue.

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Analysis of experiment As we adhere to a phenomenological approach, the goal has been to be descriptive and to focus on the experience of the phenomenon itself, rather than trying to explain it. We seek to not take the experience of what it means to live in a home for granted, but instead explore the details and nuances of how this relation is experienced by our participants. The experience of being in one’s own home might seem simple, yet it is full of little details of sense and relation. As we have seen in this experiment, such a relation changes in quality when interactive technology becomes part of the relational experience.

As mentioned in Embodied space (section: body & technology), Don Ihde (2002) writes that: ”No technology, is one thing, nor is it incapable of belonging to multiple contexts.” (p.106).

In analysing the experience of our participants, it is important to note that technologies can be applied to multiple contexts. Firstly, as Ihde argues, they are ‘multi stable’ and can in such an unknown environment as our lab setting be complex to understand at first. Secondly, this also allowed for the participants to relate their experience to many different purposes. When a participant talked about how they wanted to explore the world and wanted a new way of communication, it was a purpose of the technology that we had not intended for, but it creates an interesting emphasis moving forward. In the first-person story of the Embodied space chapter, it was similarly imagined that we perhaps would be enabled through an intelligent wall or window to interpret data from the outside environment and communicate with the world in that regard. The thought of seeing built space as a means to acquire new ways of communicating or interpreting the world could indicate that humans long for more meaningful or intertwining relations to their homes; A relation technology could help enhance. The mutual relationship that occurs between the body and technology is a point Ihde also notes on: ”What stands out first is that all human-technology relations are two-way relations” (p.137). When we take use and employ technology, so does technology use and employ us. It is a relationship of mutuality and a ‘slow dance of agency’.

We mentioned that our participants began to engage differently with the prototypes after a certain amount of time. One way this was expressed was through them noting how they would begin to stand in front of the wall in particular ways. As one person said “I wouldn’t do this with any one… perhaps my boyfriend.” It spurred a discussion and an experience of how it was weird that they were used to lie on the floor in a museum or other cultural habits, but engaging with a wall in such a manner was not. Not yet, at least.

As mentioned, in his theories of how bodies relate to technology, Ihde draws on Merleau-Ponty and his thoughts on how “the things pass into us as well as we into the things.” (1968, p.123). The participants’ experiences of evolving reciprocal relations to the interactive systems tell us not to underestimate the 85

importance of investigating not only how technology becomes entangled with our daily habits, but also what consequences the temporal aspects has on a relation to such an evolvement. Furthermore, this will perhaps help us understand how an adaptable environment influences the way in which we experience our own movement and habits over time.

Scale and relation The scale of the experiment helped the participants engage in a sense of being ‘held’ or somehow being in a ‘womb’ like state. In the third session one participant referred to the room as something organic “holding them inside it” – something that was not seen as scary. This feeling and the participant’s statement initiated an interesting discussion on what it “means to have a home”. The feeling they recognized of being “held” were similar to the feeling they got when they were in their home, although this environment were distinctly different than their home. This tells us that the feeling of being protected and held by an environment can be imitated by the nature of this organic pattern.

Carsten Thau (2010) refers to the french philosopher Michel Serres who sees the home as a “membrane between the human and the outer world”, made up by “language and images”. On this account Thau’s own idea of the home as being an “imagination space” and a “medium of the senses” is useful to describe the relationship that emerged as the participants engaged with the environment, filled it with their own images and slowly developed a language unique to the constellation.

According to Norberg-Schulz (1985) “to dwell implies the establishment of a meaningful relationship between man and a given environment.” The question is then, if this relationship can be established regardless of time span. Our inhabitants showed multiple signs of relating to the test environment, embedding their bodies through explorative movements and apropriating it by way of placing their personal items. As the feeling of dwelling in the environment increased, the participants were more explorative in their ways of communicating with the environment, and in some cases, more inventive when imagining how this communication could take on new shapes. One participant said they longed for additional layers of communication, some that were more “biological” - to better suit the nature of humans instead of the possibilities of communication technology. The idea of mutual adaptation seemed vital for participants to ‘get along’ with the intelligent environment.

The unpacking of their own items had some notions of them wanting the technology to notice the items just as much as them. In the first experiment, one participant said that they were trying to figure out whether the experiment were trying to respond to them or their item – is this the insinuation of a way in which this experiment dissolves the borders between who is the observer and who is observed? There 86

didn’t seem to be a distinction between subjects and objects – it all blended together in their experiences.

The items also proved our assumption of being an important part of feeling at home in a place. Two out of three participants specifically expressed a stronger connection to the part of the room where their personal thing was. Another participant said something similar about the place in which they were standing when the experiment began. Norberg-Schulz (1985) talks about the place where “private dwelling takes place” as a place “where man gathers and expresses those memories which make up his personal world”. The items are thus serving as connections to personal memories, as well as distinct places in the environment. Such connections seem feasible to enhance through an environment that recognizes the importance of having personal values reflected and merged into everyday experience.

Moving forward In order to enable the attainment of valuable insights and develop of experiments, the aim of the Nursery phase was to create experiments that mimiced real life situations in our particular context. These insights will be confronted when exploring them in an actual real life setting, which will take place in the Adoption phase. The advantage of our approach in this phase was the ability to test various settings and ‘personalities’. We were able to combine a certain amount of complexity to the experience and stage it in a flexible way with our method from Petersen and Søndergaard (2013).

As mentioned in our analysis of the participants’ relation to the prototypes, their reflection on their own habits and how the prototypes, after a period of time, started to influence the way in which they experienced their own movements and started to adapt with the environment, is something we will attempt to unfold; not only for a longer period of time, but within the confinement of the home. Our understanding of co-evolution and what it means to evolve a relation to one’s home over time will thus be our focus moving forward. Furthering our exploration of said relationship will heighten our ability to assert which qualities are imperative for enabling co-evolution, when developing a system that mediates the relation between inhabitant and built space.

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Artificial Evolution Artificial life (Alife) was conceived in the late 1980’s with Chris Langton at the Santa Fe Institute, sparking a new kind of study: The study of biology though the attempt to create it (Keeley, 1998, p. 252). Langton argued how Alife complements traditional biology: “Whereas traditional biology is primarily concerned with the analysis of living organisms and biological phenomena, Alife is concerned with the synthesis of life-like behavior (...) traditional biology studies life-as-we-know-it, Alife seeks to explore the possibilities of life-as-it-could-be” (Keeley, 1998, p. 253). Moshe Sipper (1995) points out that the difference is only in the smallest parts; the basic components: “artificial cells versus live cells”, and that “higher-level phenomena are completely genuine” (p.5). Some claim that Alife can only be seen as a test tool of simulation, to test theories about living things, without claiming that the synthetic “creatures” are actually alive (Boden, 2000). Others see Alife as living, albeit different in nature from the biological life forms, they still ‘feed’ on processing power, reproduce and adapt to their surroundings.

An often mentioned example of the latter is Thomas Ray’s Tierra Project. Tierra is a world inside a computer with creatures in the shape of computer programs that can reproduce and adapt to their environment, fighting and cooperating for their share of the assigned memory space (Keeley, 1998). The interesting thing about this ecosystem is that it all started with just one type of creature that was able to reproduce and inherit traits from its parents. Evolution did its job and several new creatures came to 88

be, fighting for memory space on the computer’s hard drive. The first thought that comes to mind is of course: what would happen if Tierra were given more memory space? How many new creature-programs would develop, and would programs that we have never heard of, or let alone been able to imagine, come forth? It is our contention that artificial life can expand the reach of our imagination, enabling us to create things and ideas that would otherwise be impossible, following Langton’s aforementioned idea of studying life-as-it-could-be. An important aspect and source of inspiration for Alife is the phenomenon that made the creatures of Ray’s Tierra world expand in diversity and the very same strategy that created the diverse range of flora and fauna currently residing on our planet: evolution. When entertaining the idea of future buildings growing, evolving or just changing themselves without human interference, we must keep in mind where this thought originates: With our own ability to do just that.

Evolution In nature, evolution is a long term phenomenon, it means change over generations. It is an unavoidable process happening autonomous and with no defined goal. The idea of evolution is thus not to create perfect entities, there is no such general idea, it just happens that the ones that are fittest, best adapted to their environments, survive to reproduce.

The corn poppy flower of most danish corn fields can vary in their shade of red colour. Variation is the first important element of evolution. Of all the poppies in the cornfield, the ones that have the brightest red color attract the attention of the bees the best. Therefore, the pollen of those that are the most red is being spread a little more than the rest of the different shades of lighter reds. Thus the genes of red ones will be passed on more than the others. Over time, the poppies in the field will all be more bright red (Fig. 1). An evolution has occurred through natural selection where the most fit to a given environment is gaining dominance over the course of a number of generations.

In artificial life, evolutionary algorithms use mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection. These algorithms are used to solve problems, such as recognizing a human face from a balloon or detecting useful words out of random gibberish. The goal of these algorithms is finding the most optimal solution, sorting out the less fit solutions, in a generated population of possibilities. What decides if a member of the population is fit is the fitness function, an equation that calculates how well adapted a given member of the population is. Variation operators such as recombination and mutation make sure that the sufficient diversity for viable results is present and selection (as a result of the fitness function) is pushing quality (Eiben and Smith, 2003, p. 16).

Fig 1: Poppy flowers evolving into more and more intense shades of red.

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Another concept in artificial evolution is the distinction between genotypes and phenotypes. Genotypes are the genes that decide how the poppies look, and the poppies are the phenotypes, the outcome of the genes, the actual flowers. The genotypes are the “recipe� for the phenotypes and the phenotypes are a representation of the genotypes (Eiben and Smith, 2003). In artificial evolution it is said that the process happening between the two is encoding and decoding, referring to genes as a code for their representations. The distinction between genotypes and phenotypes are useful for recognizing the differences between the recipe for a member of a population and the actual member. The recipe is what evolves through evolution, not the actual member.

In a population where all members are made up of random circles with two dots and a line, more and more face-like patterns can be developed by giving those with the best face-traits the best chance of reproducing and passing their genes onto the next generation of the population. As evolution does its job, in the end we will end up with a population that all have face-like characteristics (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

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Fig. 2 continued: Images generated by an interactive evolutionary code sketch in Processing. Code by Daniel Shiffman (2012) 91

In this example, the solution to the problem the algorithm is trying to solve, is already defined. According to Eiben and Smith (2003) it is misleading to see the process of evolution as optimising or “making better”, even though it is getting closer and closer to optimal values over time. On the contrary they argue that artificial evolution should be seen as what it is in nature: A process of adaptation where the fitness function is an expression of environmental requirements (Eiben and Smith, 2003, p. 16). If the members of the face population do not meet the requirements of the environment (have natural hues of colour, have features organized in a certain way and scaled accordingly) they will have only a small chance of surviving and thus a small chance of influencing the next generation.

The example above was created with a code example from Daniel Shiffman’s book The Nature of Code (2012). It did in fact not have a traditional fitness function, as this program was intended to “search” for something only loosely defined. This program had all the same features as the algorithms described above, except some of the major attributes were replaced by a completely new entity: us, the humans.

Interactive evolutionary algorithms In interactive evolution, the fitness function is determined by the preferences of humans (Takagi, 2001).

Instead of being a calculated chance depending on a predefined measure for fitness, it is entirely the user that assigns the chance of each member of the population to be kept or sorted out. The whole idea behind evolutionary algorithms is then not to develop the most fitting answer to an already defined problem, but to develop the most desirable answer - according to the preferences of the given user. Put in another way: The fittest answer is the one that the user likes the most.

Interactive evolution and co-evolution takes into account what environment a given algorithm is situated in, and can thus be dependent on other algorithms or entities. Co-evolution between several interconnected algorithms can both affect the main population negatively or positively. It can improve its chances of surviving or it can make certain individuals unfit. The main population can affect the subpopulation which in turn have an altered influence back on the main population, and so on (Eiben and Smith, 2003, p. 221-222). The point here is that the success of the population highly depends on its surroundings and in that regard, it resembles the natural world to a higher degree than a closed system with a predefined measure of success like traditional evolutionary algorithms, which are built to search for a solution to a well-defined problem. An analogy for this is the poppy example again: The poppies on the field adapts to both the bees and several other factors in the environment. The bees might develop a better eyesight over generations, making the difference in colour less important for their choice of 92

flowers, and thus increasing the amount of lighter tones in the population over time, since all colors now gets pollinated. Note again that the criteria of success here is not better eyesight or optimal tone of color, since neither of these can be claimed to exist. Success is when both species are well adapted to their environment, ultimately surviving, living, reproducing. In nature, as well as in evolutionary algorithms, there is no search for perfection, merely the best adapted features in a given, but ever changing, situation.

Akin to a phenomenological approach, interactive evolution is a highly subjective method, an openended way of exploring possibilities without having a clearly defined goal. Eiben and Smith compares it to the way in which humans act as guiding oracles in selecting certain individuals from a population based on some desirable features, fast horses, bushy growth and many flowers, etc: “The result is the emergence of new types of individuals that meet the human expectations better than their ancestors” (p. 227). Incorporating human influence into an evolutionary process is useful when “reasons to prefer certain solutions cannot be formalised” (p. 227) - if the desired outcome is variable and changes over the course of time. It is complicated to write a fitness function for intuition and the capability of complexity possessed by humans is much more suited for this task. One could even argue that the human, in the situation where the main objective of the evolution is to develop the most desired solution, represents the environment in which the evolutionary algorithm is situated and thus functions as the measure for fitness that the population have to adapt to. The nature of the environment to which the program have to adapt thus has the nature of a human being; it fluctuates and alters its perspective according to its subjective

Subjective evaluation

Impression of goal in mind

Impression of system output

Fig. 3: simplified version of Hideyuki Takagi’s model. Pscychological space in which the goal in mind of the user is situated together with the impression of the system output. The difference between impression and goal in mind form the subjective evaluation of the user, which then becomes the third parameter that the program adjusts after, forming its its candidates for next evaluation.

Subjective evaluation

System output of goal in mind

Parameter II Parameter I

Psychological space

Parameter space 93

perceptions and opinions. Takagi (2001, p. 2) calls this ‘environment’ the “psychological space” which describes the space in which our idea of a “goal in mind” exists. This space then has a parallel space, the “parameter space” in which the algorithm searches for the optimal values dependent on the input from users. The input from the user, the fitness function, is then the axis between the two spaces that maps the ‘idea of a goal’ of the user onto the parameter space and results in an output in constant pursuit of the goal in mind, even if it fluctuates and changes. See fig 3.

To fully understand this notion, we found it useful to join it with Eiben and Smith’s description of the phenotype space and genotype space in traditional evolutionary algorithms. They use this partition to describe how one must create an evolutionary algorithm by defining a link between “the real world” and “the EA world”, the first being the original problem context and the second being where the solution is searched for. The model in Fig. 4 illustrates the loop that takes place when the program is running.

As a disadvantage of involving humans, Eiben and Smith mentions the speed and reach of the evolution; limited coverage must be accepted since, due to time and cognitive limitations, a human can only process a certain amount of generations with a foreseeable population number. On the other hand, Eiben and Smith also mentions the increased exploration and diversity that can occur when humans “play” with an evolutionary system; the same thing that increases inconsistency will foster new directions that a fitness function might not be directed at. When involving humans in evaluating phenomena that could not otherwise be evaluated, we get the best of two worlds; the human can best describe its subjective feelings and intuitions, the computer can generate solution suggestions fast, precise and effective, based on the evaluation. This will inevitably become a co-evolution where humans benefit from both the abilities of

Fig. 4: The problem solving space where evolution among the genotypes takes place and produces new candidates, which is then translated (or decoded) into phenotypes, representations of the genotypes, to be evaluated in the problem context space and then providing feedback back into the genotypes to provide the selection of genotypes for the next population of candidates.

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the computer and their own abilities to act as input.

Inspired by nature With visual, audible or other sensible phenotypes, and with selection from the criteria of human preference or desire, whether the purpose is purely aesthetic, practical or both, we are now in the field of using interactive evolution as processes for creating art and design. In this field, designers and artist have a new role that demands the creation of works driven by potential instead of finished designs. Philip Galanter (2010) mentions Mitchell Whitelaw’s notion of “metacreation” that puts the artist in charge of designing the initial process which then is let loose to fulfil its inherent prospective: “Metacreation refers to the role of the artist shifting from the creation of artifacts to the creation of processes that in turn create artifacts” (p. 327).

In his PhD, Jaskiewicz mentions evolution as a safe strategy for evolving adaptive buildings. He claims that in order to solve the problem of adaptive architecture evolving into something dangerous we must look at biology and its understanding of complex systems. Here, the two main qualities is development and evolution, and he thus claims that over time, adaptive architecture will become increasingly more secure and dependable, once it is ‘up and running’. He also argues that a way to avoid that the initial challenges will do any real damage would be to make use of virtual scenarios for testing, before implementing in real life. With virtual scenarios it will be possible to test for the most optimal solution, before even building anything (Jaskiewicz, 2013, p. 83-84). This idea is something that we return to in our final exploration and the blueprint we will suggest for developing adaptive architecture as a coevolutionary process, which involves all implicated systems: the architectural system, the computational process, and its inhabitants.

To use Jaskiewicz’ notion on our definition of interactive evolutionary algorithms, would then suggest that if the fitness of a given population of a particular building system were determined by humans, then this would assure that nothing harmful, unpleasant or unintended would ever evolve further.

Galanter points to the “fitness function bottleneck” that occurs when population is limited due to human evaluation capabilities. Eventually this will exhaust the variation, making the population less probable of producing interesting outputs. According to Galanther, one solution to this problem is to crowdsource the evaluation task, creating a co-evolution dependent on multiple feedbacks from several humans. The question is if polling the public will produce the desired result, and Galanter mentions the artists Komar and Melamid who is famous for ironically creating paintings that mimic the result of polling done by 95

a professional polling company to find out which features the american people prefer in a painting (Galanter, 2010). The picture itself would hardly classify as either inventive nor a result from an extension of human imagination space. However this notion is only valid when accepting the premise that people actually are firstly aware of, and secondly, able to express what they truly need in terms of aesthetic pleasure.

Fig 5-6: Vernacular architecture of Kabul and visualization of Thomas Ray’s Tierra.

Architecture as it could be In the same way as Chris Langton claims that “traditional biology studies life-as-we-know-it, Alife seeks to explore the possibilities of life-as-it-could-be” (Keeley, 1998: 253), we argue for exploring architecture-as-itcould-be. If the same notion as Thomas Ray’s Tierra project (Fig. 6) is employed to adaptive evolutionary architecture, it might enable humans to come up with building designs not possible to imagine through a traditional design process. This is not to say that a computer should solely evolve our future houses. The computer technology should provide the possibility of creating beyond our imagination, using means that go beyond sense, eyesight and logic, but all the time evaluated by humans to push the exploration and development in the best fit direction for human life to unfold.

Computation is often seen as as problem solving method, which searches for the most optimal solution and then terminates. Measures such as speed and effectivity are judged as important factors. A new way of looking at computation is through the eyes of nature. Evolution takes time and “problem solving” in 96

nature is a slow process. The inspiration for evolutionary algorithms is nature itself, and when adapting to human life, adaptive architecture should also adapt to the speed of humans. Just because a computer can process at incredible speeds doesn’t mean we have to. Computation and development of adaptive buildings can be something that evolves as a process where the interplay constantly makes both parties better suited for each other.

In vernacular architecture (Fig. 5) the evolvement of buildings, extra rooms and new kitchens happened from an existing mass, morphing out where space was available and building upwards where it wasn’t, following the idea of knowing only what we need when we really need it. This notion should be kept in mind when imagining buildings that constantly evolve based on the judgement of their users. In his PhD, Jaskiewicz (2013) consider the idea of stretching the sketching phase of a building project to continue into the actual build structure, providing the same adaptive features as the computer or cardboard models on the architect’s table: “The architectural models developed as representations of future habitats could be developed in such a way, that their inherent logics are employed to drive the adaptive processes in actual architectural spaces” (p. 96). Through his thorough analysis of the architectural practise and the functional programming of buildings, Jaskiewicz concludes that the ability to adapt to its environments is an important success criteria for architecture: “Architectural spaces that can be frequently transformed to match changes in the conditions of their internal and external, artificial and natural environment are bound to be more “successful” than those spaces that do not adapt to these changes” (p. 90). He further goes on to say that this criteria is something upon which buildings should be evaluated, as it relates closely to the holistic performance of buildings and therefore the success as living spaces.

Success in this aspect refers to best suited for a given environment, being the preferences of inhabitants and psychical surroundings. Evolution talks about fitness, architects and scientists of success, but the goal is the same: The best environment to unfold life in right now. The same kind of spatial organisation might be perfect in one time and unsuitable in another. Thus evolution never searches for perfection, but for the most fit proposal in a given situation. Alife explores life-as-it-could-be, using artificial means to expand our imagination of what is possible. Evolutionary artificial life can adapt to humans by letting them decide the fitness of the system. The humans in turn will have to acquaint themselves with the system in order to judge it properly, and a space where interplay constantly makes both parties better suited for each other will emerge.

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Adoption phase The goal of this final phase is to explore the implications of the adaptive environment in a real-life setting. Setting the experiment in a real home gave us the ability to observe and experience everyday activities, both in staged performative settings and by way of continuously expose inhabitants to the environment.

In A Design Approach to Socially Adaptive Lighting Environments (2011), the growth plan approach is also employed. In their adoption phase, the use of illusion (wizard-of-oz method) and withholding information from participants about how the technology works (p.6) is used to create the real-life experience that defines this phase. In our Adoption phase this approach is achieved by using interactive evolutionary algorithms as the primary technological prototype. As described in the previous chapter, this technology has its own inherent logic and can be affected by the inputs of humans. This approach brought the reality of the artificially intelligent environment that we seek to subject our participants to, in order to get nearer to a real life experience of developing a mutual relationship with their house.

How will the experience of one’s own home be altered when it is not only gathering the dreams and ideas of its inhabitants and the relation to the place in which it is situated, as mentioned in the Dwelling 97

chapter, but also the presence of the adaptive prototype? How will the presence of other humans (guest-participants) and their subjective experience affect the prototype? How will that in change affect the inhabitants, who will live with an altered system, adapting each time the impact of guests is registered.

It’s a critical co-evolutionary angle with many entrants, which challenges our earlier notions of the home as something distinctly personal. The home is now the subject of several desires, possibly pulling the development of the prototype in each of their own subjective directions.

Preliminary experimental approach In this phase we wanted to test the experience of the space while designing it, so we started out with building a 1:20 scale model of the living room and created furniture, flexible walls and other reconfigurable parts to organize within the room. We then built a ‘virtual reality’-mask (Fig. 1) based on the Google Cardboard model in order to record 3D-video-sessions that would virtually situate us inside the scale model (Fig 2, 3, 4, 5), while reconfiguring furniture and the curtain walls of the prototype.

Fig 1: Head-mounted display. Fig 2-3: Cardboard model viewed through display

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This helped us explore different spatial qualities before we engaged in an actual intervention of the living room itself. Exploring spatial qualities by way of simulation and virtual mechanisms is not an entirely new approach in this area. One of the researchers within Adaptive architecture, Holger Schnädelbach, investigated in his PhD, Mixed reality architecture (2007), ways in which spatial qualities within architecture could be combined with the dynamic potential of technology. He describes how attempts in aligning virtual and physical spaces as ‘equal partners’ would help establish a ‘window’ between physical space and virtual space (p.19). Schnädelbach is concerned with the relationship between the physical and virtual environments, which leads him to his concept of ‘mixed reality architecture’ where physical spaces in different locations are linked through a virtual space. We will be using simulation in the adoption phase, as a way to let our building model evolve while experiencing it through the head-mounted display, the virtual ‘window’ into the physical space we have not yet built. After experiencing one configuration, we would then return to the model to reconfigure it. This gave us a useful tool to explore the spatial qualities and the presence of the evolutionary prototype early in the design phase.

As mentioned in Dwelling, Mark Hansen (2006) claims that virtual reality doesn’t completely drag the human in as part of the virtual, as the body, who is rooted in the physical world, is still an active part in the relation. Mark Hansen’s comment on artist and engineer Myron Krueger’s dealings with the virtual and the body echoes some of the notions that inspires our approach: “One one hand, human embodiment serves to “naturalize” technical modification of the world (and, potentially, of the body) … Embodiment accommodates and self-reorganizes in the face of the ever expanding scope of technics in our world today.” (Bodies in code, p.28).

We do not deal directly with Hansen’s claims of the body being grounded in the virtual and the real in this thesis, but the exploration of the body’s ability to act out certain potential and step out of various constraints in order gain perspective on the experience and space we wish to create, is something that finds it manifestation throughout our process. As such virtual reality becomes another tool in which to engage ourselves as active explorers of built space. The ‘crossing over’ from the virtual to the physical and constructing the parts of the living-room came by way of standing within the room itself, but initially having the head-mounted display on, reconfiguring the model before settling upon a design that we could then realize in the actual livingroom. It eased our approach of constructing the room in that the virtual experience provided the context of a lived everyday experience and gave counterweight to our initial focus on architectural qualities and the way in which we positioned the adaptable walls and evolutionary prototype system.

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Fig. 4-5: Testing set-up in cardboard model with mock-up of algorithm pattern on wall and one wallscreen.

Fig. 6: Cardboard model showing the final set-up of algorithm pattern on wallscreens and walls.

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Design It was decided that the room would be set up amongst all the existing furniture in the living room. We installed two surfaces of adaptable ‘walls’, which consisted of floor-to-ceiling poles with curtains that could be adjusted upwards or sideways to the liking of the inhabitant (See fig. 7).

Two computers connected to two projectors were installed to project the image of the prototype in a position that would display them on the adaptable walls, if one decided to leave the curtain 100% folded out, or partially or fully displayed on the two adjacent outer walls, if the curtain was fully or partially drawn aside.

Fig. 7: Wall screens with walls folded partly and fully out as well ad fully to the side.

Developing the evolutionary prototype Some of the graphical patterns we used in the nursery phase proved to be perceived as more friendly than others by the participants. They favoured the first and last of the prototypes and remarked that the second one was too eerie. Since our final experiment was to be situated in a real home environment, it was important to come up with something that did not disfavour its presence from the beginning. Our point of departure thus became the particle prototype used as the highest level of intelligence in the nursery phase (Fig. 8). For the purpose of this experiment, we needed to first turn it into something that could integrate with the apartment and create an inner logic that would adapt to the inhabitants preferences over time.

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A recurring theme throughout the observations of the past two phases of experiments was that of usefulness in the multiple opportunities for technology to play a role in the homes of humans. Not in the sense of being useful, which a majority of technological appliances already are, but in the sense of using the full potential of computation technology. Through the notebooks and interviews of the Incubation Phase, technology in homes was imagined in various service functions. Some imagined their house having coffee ready for them when they came home, some that it could clean and cook for them, all variations of the legendary housekeeping robot as sought for in some visions of the future.

In the Nursery Phase, the setting and the nature of the arrangement provided an environment where other aspects of living with intelligent adaptive technology came forth. Rather than fantasies of helpful robot houses, the participants described the feeling of being in the room with the technology, impersonated as a visual prototype. As mentioned in the chapter Nursery, this gave us insights into the subjective experience of the participants, but almost no mentions of the outside surroundings were made, as opposed to the Incubation phase where the relationship to the outside was something that several of the participants hoped could be enhanced by future technology. In this experiment we will thus try to re-introduce the context, by making a connection to the surrounding environment and the outside world.

To fully use the potential of computational technology, we wanted to not only let it adapt in an intelligent way, based on complex algorithms, we also wanted it to provide the human and its home with something which could not be gained by other means. Our idea was that computational technology is capable of many things that houses and humans are not. And what better, than to merge the very best of all three of them: The human ability to relate and sense the world through their body and perceive it with their subjective self, the ability of the house to provide not only protection and shelter, but also mental space for defining a happy life, and finally the ability of technology to connect, gather, compute and transform vast amounts of data, connecting the human as well as the house to their surrounding environment. This notion resulted in a decision of letting the computer subject the inhabitant to images from the city in which the apartment was situated. The adaptable pattern generated by the algorithm would then function as a membrane or curtain, filtering the view though its pattern (Fig. 9).

It must be noted here that the pattern was not static in nature and thus still images does not do it favour.

As described later, the ellipses were able to increase and decrease their size with varying speed and with the influence of a random noise function that made them flutter as though they were connected together as a curtain that waved in the wind. In the following two sections we will account for how the algorithm creates the pattern and show how the evolutionary mechanism evolves new variations based on the input from the inhabitant.

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Fig 8: Particle sketch from Nursery phase

Fig. 9: Different instances of the prototype

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Implementation of interactive evolution The algorithm that generates the adaptive pattern is an interactive evolutionary algorithm, that is to say it reacts to inputs of humans, as accounted for in the previous chapter Artificial Evolution. When the algorithm initializes, it generates a population of five members. One member is shown at a time, allowing the inhabitant to rate it between 0 and 9, and then the next member in line is shown. The members of the population thus get assigned fitness depending on the rating given by the inhabitant. The inhabitant was to evaluate the algorithm five times a day, at breakfast, lunch, in the afternoon, at dinner and when having their evening tea.

Based on the evaluation of the five members of one day, the algorithm assigns a fitness score to each member, deciding how much chance each one has of becoming one of the parents for the next generation. The genetic properties of the two chosen parents will then crossover and form the genes for the next generation of five members to be evaluated the following day. A simplified walk through of the code can be seen in fig 10: Initialize: Generate a DNA string of random values Create a population of n members each with DNA values picked random from DNA string Place population in array to hold them Draw: Draw a member of the population Let the user rate the member Draw new member and repeat until all five members are rated Create mating pool Calculate total fitness for whole generation Calculate number of entries to mating pool for each member based on rating by user divided by total fitness High fitness = more entries to mating pool, low fitness = fewer entries Add each member to the mating pool a certain number of times Select two parents randomly and mate their genes creating new children Mutate some children based on mutation rate, by picking new random values from DNA string Create new population of n candidates Draw new population Repeat until terminated

Fig 10: Simplified code version of the interactive evolutionary algorithm to describe the structure with which it works.

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In the initial test runs of the algorithm, we discovered that it quickly evolved into an ‘inbred’ state, where too little variety caused it to remain almost identical for generation after generation. If we chased one certain property it was impossible to turn back and change the look of the prototype. The gene pool was ‘dried out’ because of the lack of variation. In order to ensure variety it was important to make sure that all members had a chance of reproducing, even if they were rated low. The fact that even low rated members could be chosen to contribute half the genes for the next generation, would sometimes give the user outputs that were based on what seemed like something they didn’t choose. For the same reason of variation, the mutation rate was set quite high. In every generation there is a 25% chance of each of the 4 genes defining each member mutating, and thus mutation allows us to introduce variety throughout the evolutionary process, because we will get variations that were not included in the initial five members.

This is on expense for the usability of the set-up, since quite often the user would get results that differed significantly from his preferences, but as usability was not a part of our study, we chose to prioritize variety to allow the inhabitant to explore in depth the possibilities of the prototype, without getting stuck, always having the possibility to evolve in a different direction by changing his preferences.

An advantage of sudden unexpected changes, was that it might be perceived by the participants and guests as the evolutionary systems way of contributing to the home environment, having a mind of its own, thus making it possible to assign it some kind of personality trait, further enforcing the notion of living with something.

Genetic representation The pattern was developed from a previous prototype used in the Nursery phase, it had inherent parameters that we wanted to evolve by using interactive evolution. Since we decided to re-design the pattern so that it resembled a curtain, it was important that this curtain could allow the inhabitant to see more or less of the background image representing the view to the outside world. We chose to let the colour and transparency of the ellipses remain static. The parameters that were able to adapt was hence: The diameter minimum, the diameter maximum, the speed with which it could change and the amount of ellipses. These parameters formed a way for the curtain to intervene by acting like a changing membrane between the inhabitant and the image. Genes resembled the parameters, and a given pattern would thus have 4 genes that can change within a range defined by us. The ranges of the genes were tweaked and experimented with in order to create a design that would both be able to contain great variation for the inhabitant to evaluate, but that would also resemble a natural looking element in the apartment, like a curtain.

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Evolution takes place when genes of members from current generations mix and form the future generations of patterns. The change thus unfolds within the code without inhabitants noticing and only when the representation emerges for them to experience and evaluate, do they see the result of the evolutionary process. The fact that anything is changing is not even visible at first; only after a few generations can humans discover the change. If we put up several generations of patterns next to each other we can see how the mixing of genes, combined with mutation, evolve into more and more similar patterns based on the evaluation of the human (See fig. 10).

Getting stuck Our prototype in the apartment was 28 generations old when it suddenly reached a point of barely changing for several days (Fig. 11). The pattern it had arrived at had been a favorite for some time, but after getting almost no variation in awhile, and being unsatisfied with the lack of movement, we decided

Fig. 11: The pattern of the prototype that was �stuck� for several generations.

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that we wanted to try and unhinge it from where it was stuck by rating all the similar instances low and any reward any change with a high rating. At generation 45 it was back to being as varied and lively as when we started, and when we finally stopped at generation 70, we had been through various phases with great variation, trying to explore everything it was capable of.

This notion shows how a developing process like evolution is not a static and fixed representation, but rather an ever changing experience with an inner liveliness. There is no doubt that our prototype could have been designed to incorporate lively surprises, variation as well as better usability for the test persons.

Because of the type of selection mechanism we used, multiple instances of the same DNA could be added to the mating pool if a member was rated high. This resulted in a high chance of both parents of the next generation could have the same DNA. This was what we experienced when first testing the algorithm, and which we compensated for by increasing the mutation rate. This probably solved the problem some of the way, but in the end we ended up with an algorithm that quickly simplified and every once in a while would throw in a completely different type of pattern, usually unlike any of the preferred instances. This ‘behavior’ worked fine for the purpose of our experiment, and it gave us interesting insights into how behavior is perceived and how willing we and our test participants were to except the algorithm as natural in its own way in the frame of the experiment.

The use of algorithms with additional test-participants The algorithm provided us with the sincere experience of living with something intelligent, a computer program manifested as a visual prototype that was capable of reacting on its own, interpreting our inputs.

The fact that the algorithm were convincing became evident when one of our participants referred to it as something she could have discussions with and afterwards commentated on its changing behaviour by saying “Oh so you think you know what I want, huh?” They furthermore wondered how this relation would be if living together with another human and the algorithm. Their thoughts on this was that the algorithm would act as a kind of conciliator between the human inhabitants in that the participant imagined that they would have to all adapt to each other to co-exist.

Test-participants provided a necessary reflection to our own experiences, as the need of assuming several observational positions gave us additional insight into our analysis and further qualified our own role in the experiment.

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Observational structure Three different sessions was executed in order to train ourselves as expert performers. These sessions each represented a different angle on the space that we are exploring. As shown in Fig. 12 the first session, which continued throughout the whole experiment, consisted of ourselves experiencing the room through living with it for 10 days, noting down our own first-person experience. The next was ourselves making 20 minute focussed interview sessions where we each took turn to question each other and get questioned. The last session was a structured performative session where we invited test-participants from the Incubation phase, and where each was assigned a role of instructor, observer and experiencer, assuming the same triangular set of observation positions as in the Nursery phase. An important supplement to the method was that the experiencer will be outfitted with a camera in order to record their 1st person-perspective. This was done with test-participants as well as when we questioned each other. The video from all perspectives would afterwards be re-watched and interpreted by us. We had furthermore added an extra criteria in our questioning: When continuously asking the participants about their relation to the room, the relation was be accompanied by an evaluation, which was then plotted into the evolving algorithm. This was to create a recurrence of relation that brought not only the co-evolving engagement to the forefront, but also the question of who was in control.

Outside of the staged methods various scheduled activities such as lunch with guests and other ‘everyday’ activities were added in order to give depth to the first-person experience for the one of us was living in the space.

Expert performer As our knowledge and qualification has grown throughout this explorative process, our role as a key source of insights will increase in this phase, as we take a more explicit stance as being ‘expert performers’, as specified in Kjell Yngve Petersen and Karin Søndergaard’s (2011) Staging multi-modal explorative research using formalised techniques of performing arts, in which they propose: “a transfer of expert practices from performing arts to a broader field of inquiry, using the capacities of formalised performer technique both to analyse and to design experiential qualities.” (p.2).

The method in their article is derived from the ‘expert performer practice’ of Susan Melrose. In Just intuitive she describes how expert practitioners already think and theorise in “multi-dimensional, 111

Fig. 12: Observational structure. The experiment is obseved through three different angles.

multi-schematic and multi-participant modes” (2005). Following these thoughts, the decision to immerse ourselves in the experience of the adaptive home has evolved throughout our explorative process and culminates with the need of an emergent position to accompany the phenomenological analysis that has been conducted throughout the process. Petersen and Søndergaard notes on insights from other expert performers and writes: “The performer’s embodiment of pre-expressivity is a condition of simultaneously being aware of the inner sensations, the outer relations and the performer’s presence in the event.” (p.4).

Such an internal state of awareness about the experience as is indicated in this quote, aligns itself with our phenomenological approach and treatment of human embodied relations as pre-expressive and emergent.

The physical and written repetition over this extended period of time, the 10 days of the experiment, is aimed at adjusting our ‘unique expert practice’: a heightened intuition and attitude towards our research.

As we conduct this experiment as individual performers we will thus seek to combine these personal capacities to (A) an internal understanding, (B) a relation to other inhabitants and (C) the environment as a whole.

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Living in the adaptive home Here we will give a short introduction to the first-person phenomenology that will take place in the next chapter. It will be an account of the experience of living in the adaptive space and besides being a very personal chapter, it will be used as a stepping stone for analysing the phenomenons identified in this phase and to heighten our understanding of the adoption phase as a whole.

But, how exactly to orient oneself towards a certain experience, when it is so deeply embedded in various pre-existing ideas and experiences, as the home, especially one’s own, is? We needed to look at the cultural, personal and theoretical interpretations already existing in the living-room space in a strictly professional light in order to be able to tell them apart from the lived experience with our prototype. We had already gained an heightened sense of discerning such experiences form the previous experiment in the lab, but this time we had to not only focus in a short period of time on noticing all the subtle nuances in the events taking place, we had to practise this heightened awareness for several days. To become aware of our experience with the house, we approached it with considerable awareness of our presupposed ideas in order to pry open the qualities within this experience of relationship, sensations and emotions.

An experience that was materialized by light, colour, shadows and the spatial interventions of the room.

It was a sensible state of the mind and body, one that embedded itself in the emergent structures of the space.

How will the perceptual experience unfold, especially in the company of participants, guests as well as the adaptive system? Merleau-Ponty’s take on the experience with ‘others’ describes the intertwinement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, but at the same time that the experience will always be a ‘participation in the world’: “The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. The philosopher tries to conceive the world, others and himself and their interrelations.” (1945, p.xxii)

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First-person perspective: A phenomenology of ten days with an unusual partner

”The home should be the treasure chest of living” - Le Corbusier

I’ll start by describing my adaptive, evolutionary, treasure chest. The living room is a large bright room (5 m x 4.60 m x 2.72 m) with a big window in the middle, as the only direct source of natural light. This is the space that contains all the instalments of the adaptive system. Browsing through my various notes, descriptions and video recordings from a first-person perspective when recalling the 10 day experience of living in this system can at times seem like trivial recollections of everydayness. What barges through the triviality of physical and mental notes, and perhaps can be said to be at the core of my experience, lies a feeling of being at the mercy of nature (artificial or not) and at the same time of a connection between me and elements that helped me look beyond what I normally regard as my everyday sense of being at home.

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Getting to the core of the lived experience when inhabiting Room³ has been complex in different ways.

As mentioned in the beginning of this phase, it is a place filled with personal meaning, and once it has been experienced, it is not just an inert box: “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” as Bachelard wrote (1957, p.47). The boundaries of my Room³ have been transcended in more than one way. Not only am I inhabiting my Room³ with something not yet completely familiar to me, the room itself is an ‘inhabitant’ that seeks to reconfigure certain aspects of my lived experience.

Mutuality Many words have been used to describe the outer layer of the home: a shell, cocoon or outer skin. My ‘tectonic skin’, my living room, is supposedly the keeper of my imagination and can in some regard be said to represent an extension or expression of my person. When Room³ initiated its algorithms and attempted to bring the outside closer to my personal space, my immediate thoughts steered towards the eerie intimate feeling, when having uninvited guests at your doorstep, when your home doesn’t feel clean or tidy. I suppose it’s a feeling of ‘nakedness’ or exposure that in some way feels like a misrepresentation, as in being not quite ready to be seen for whom I ‘really am’. But I quickly realised that these thoughts of stepping over my boundaries of intimacy was not quite what was at stake here: no one was there to judge my home or me, something was there to involve itself in my life. I was aware that this supposedly meant an invasion of my home, yet as I entertained these thoughts throughout the 10 days, I realised that that they remained just naive thoughts never manifested in anything substantial.

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Light and space A recent study, Adaptive lighting, poses the following question with regards to human experience of adaptive light in a staged experiment: “Do the dynamics interfere with the person’s activities?” and afterwards says “… the interaction should be designed so that the lighting adaption is experienced as being essential to an individual’s activities” (2015, p.84). Being exposed to adaptive dynamics for longer periods of time in the context of my own home seemed advantageous when pondering questions such as the one above. My activities at times obviously changed from how I inhabited my living room before. But it is not to be understood as if the change in activities drew me away from anything ‘essential’. It rather felt as a shift in values or of a tuning of daily rhythm. Paraphrased from my own personal notes, I made a short note of the thoughts I was harbouring at the time: “My home changes as I change values. It changes when I learn something new or experience something different. When I have received visitors or test-participants, the room will have evolved from the last time they were there. Over time, these changes will be more reflective of my personal experience of being at home and as my interest in discovering new varieties; my needs and beliefs will evolve along with it. The reflection of coherency between the spatial qualities of Room³ and myself will be more evident.”

Fig. 13-14: Prototype on day 1, Prototype on day 7.

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These were thoughts on coherency between the Room³ and me. How it changed over time according to my preferences and thus resembled my ideas of a pleasant view better. Figure xx and xx shows how initially the pattern were made up of small and snow-like dots and the next day they had evolved into being a lot bigger and moving around more.

It also felt as though certain desires were created, a new dependency existed by way of the Room³. I used to have certain needs and beliefs regarding my home. It is my shelter, my personal refuge and where I can look out into the world from my window. Now a new set of needs were beginning to develop; the need to configure the adaptive prototype in a certain way, and with this idea of what way would suit in a given moment, new beliefs emerged as well. These sentiments felt like they linked themselves to some of our initial thoughts in the incubation phase where the needs and beliefs with regards to the home changed as some of our test participants developed more and more advanced ideas of what their home in the future might look like.

My values felt influenced by Room³ as it opened up new possibilities in my living room. Because of their beliefs and interpretations of Room³, guests also influenced my values, yet my initial feelings of intrusion had still not returned.

A night in the adaptive Being in the room both day and night I experienced different feelings of dependency on light at different times. Having sources of natural and artificial light helped me ponder what my lived experience of being in this environment actually entailed; Thoughts, which were especially explicit at night. As I at times sat and typed late in the evening, my understanding of light and space seemed to be experientially inseverable.

I experienced a strong emphasis on how light and space was related when it was most dark. Of course the artificial light gave colour to the darkness and thus created experiences I wasn’t used to from before Room³ was installed. Artificial light with surrounding darkness can also be utilised to create a feeling of enclosure or boundary, as seen in other studies of adaptive light (2013, 2011). In my personal ‘enclosure’ of the night, I experienced that as I was attempting to understand the space I inhabited, via the light that shaped it, it became more of a pondering of qualities of light and lighting as opposed to the phenomenon ‘light’ itself. While I during the daytime would change the walls and move the furniture around the room to my liking, I realised that nightfall made me experiment much more with the subtle changes in the lighting that was now noticeable in the dark of the night. Adjusting the brightness to a 116

lower level on the projector did not have great impact on the image projected, but it made the corner I was sitting in seem less closed, as the lamp on my desk would be more noticeable and expand its light towards the rest of the living room. Light coming from the hallway began to matter more, and while I in the daytime would get a habit of adjusting the walls, that habit would now include the door to the hallway.

It essentially gave me a 3rd adjustable wall to adjust the spatial qualities with. The way I differentiated between between the adjustable walls and the existing features of the apartment (the doors) slowly grew smaller, forming a single unit of ways in which the room became dynamic And I quickly began to incorporate such these new rhythms and adjustments into a habit of what it meant to inhabit the room: Closing the door, opening the window, evaluating, adjusting the wall.

Merleau-Ponty writes that “Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses.” (p.331). Akin to this attunement of sense, I felt much more susceptible to more subtle changes in light and the general movements the algorithms created. During both days and night, I was aware that when I looked for light, I never really saw ‘it’, but instead reflections of it in different surfaces. Just as I tried to bracket the lived experience of inhabiting an adaptive environment, the visual challenge of having light fill and shape the space, yet never materializing itself, led me to further attempt to get to the core of the experience without using too many notions of ‘living room’ and ‘home’ that I had before beginning the process. I needed to immerse myself deeper in the experience, rather than attempting to just observe it. Following my initial thoughts, my living room was a sort of representation of myself and my values,

Fig. 14-15: Different revelations of the ”view” by the prototype, day 5.

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but after a while it felt not merely as a representation anymore, it felt more like its own entity, adapting to me. I’ll leave the night for now, as it mostly helped me gain insights on my relationship with Room³ that hadn’t quite dawned on me during daytime.

Boundaries - the dialectics of inside and outside At times the algorithms felt like an abstract form of window cleaning. With each adaption it felt as if I tried to negotiate a mutual understanding of how much and in what way the world should be revealed – or perhaps – what needed to be revealed to me (Fig. 14-15).

I imagined that from the perspective of the house it was like breathing. Changing its breath was an adjustment of how much of the outside was to be let in, or so it seemed at times. As mentioned in both the chapters on dwelling and embodiment, many theorists believe that we store our imaginations and personal desires within the walls of the home. Having these new ‘openings’ to the outside feels as if not only the windows, but the adaptable walls and, furthermore, my door, becomes a way for me to experience the outside world. This is of course a very metaphorical way of viewing my relation to the house, but my understanding of what my home consists of, as in what I have put into it and how it is shaped, feels like an extension of how I interpret the outside environment; They are the context I pass through in my connection with the world.

I’ve at times felt that just as the real window is like an interface of sorts, the algorithm can be said to resemble a window. I guess you could say both of them are mediums or ‘lenses’ for my perception of the world. As time passed the difference between these ‘lenses’ was something I ceased to remark upon in my notes. If it’s due to my own inattentiveness or my internal accept of these various facades as the ‘same’ is hard to tell, but my experience is that they ‘belong’ in the same manner.

As noted, I am aware that opposites define each other, whether it is light and dark, hard and soft, inside or outside. Sitting at my desk typing, I at times looked up and felt like the interior was negotiating with the exterior in a “contract-like” way. The opposites of the inside and outside defined each other in that they could not be without the other. When looking out, I was not only looking at the streets of my neighbourhood, I was looking at them from inside my home - a distinct difference from looking at the streets when standing outside. The notion of making the environment surrounding my apartment an integral part of the inside of the room in such a way where it would constantly be able to change, obscured the boundaries of the room and created a fluid negotiation between inside and outside. My living room was now revealed partly by natural light and the view from the window, partly by what the 118

outside world that algorithms let me see. This notion was of course something that would exist in my apartment without Room³; the window in the living room would have the same function alone as just described, although the notion was enhanced by the intervention of Room³ and the sense of a fluid negotiation was stronger.

Looking at the outside via the adaptive wall can at times feel like a ‘staged reality’, in that what I see is the product of a mutual agreement between me and the evolutionary algorithm - I am not just looking out on the street like I usually do, what I am seeing is ‘staged’ by the negotiation between me and the algorithm.

It’s a very enactive relationship that constantly flows; yet I find tranquillity in the relation - even when we at times disagree.

The dialectics of outside and inside is addressed in the final parts of Poetics of space (1957). Bachelard speaks of how the ‘open compared to closed’ or ‘inside and outside’ is to be challenged by his phenomenological investigation and how a poetic imagination help dissolve the gap between these terms. He furthermore speaks of how our everyday movements in between open and closed and that these are often turned on its head essentially leaves man a “half-open being” (p.222). This notion of the half-openness or being between sensations, is a feeling I can acknowledge throughout my time spent in Room³. My orientation towards the experience of the adaptive system and what we create together helps me ‘open up’ the room to interpretation. When the meaning arrives, and I begin to review my earlier understanding of concepts, the room begins to ‘close in’ on itself again. This is a constant fluctuation, just as my door to the living room can be opened wide, completely closed, or slightly ajar.

Control Towards the final days of the experiment, the algorithm had reached a point where I at times felt it had become stubborn about what was to be exposed of the outside. It left me with a sensation of two people sharing a room and might disagree on how much cold air should be let in by opening a window or a door. What we disagreed on was not the amount of cold air, but the spatial qualities of the room.

I realize that I at times came to view the experience as being very controlled by information projected onto a surface: an overlay of my daily life. What drastically changed my experience of who was in control was when I started to process the environment with less of a visual focus. When I started navigating the room, changing the walls, the information I was receiving became spatialized. The constant presence of the adaptive system and its inherent peculiarities enabled a feeling of understanding the capacities of the room in a different way. This marked a certain shift in the way I engaged with the Room³, and the 119

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knowledge that became embodied in that relation helped re-open the space to my interpretation. I felt as if I had not only challenged my way of thinking, but also the way my body perceived my living space.

Confronting my body with the experiences had an impact on the way I found myself being at home. My ability to dwell in my own living room was altered because of the presence of the algorithm as I now felt a stronger connection to my home.

Discussion and analysis of the Adoption phase To seek some contrast to the first-person experience it seems fitting to mention ‘expert performer’ and theorist Susan Kozel (2007) and how she in Closer chooses to insert her own body at center stage in her research in confronting and re-experiencing her own embodiment in context of interactive technology.

As we have done in the previous section, Kozel also conducts a first-person phenomenology. Kozel posits that her use of phenomenology “does not attempt to posit truths, but instead acts as a chiasmic, embodied, first-person methodology with the objectives of understanding, expressing and extending lived experience.” (p.16).

In her chapter on responsive architectures she describes her performance Room with a view: Plaatsbepaling, which consisted of a large wooden box (3m x 4m x 3m) equipped with wheels and a door: essentially a moving room (p.169). Over 3 different days she had the box installed in 3 different galleries and lived with, climbed on and moved the large box around. She noted how the wood surface changed according to humidity and how that affected the ability to move the box, as well as how the different surroundings were affecting its way of behaving, like slanted floors and different textures in surfaces. Despite various differences between the experiment of Kozel and ours, her focus on two distinct emergent qualities are something we can expand upon with our experiment: intimacy and ‘sameness over time’ (p.170-171).

Kozel’s first point is that she became fond of the box, and built a certain bond by spending a lot of time moving around with it. That this is a ‘surprising’ finding can seem a bit surprising in itself. Humans tend to forge bonds with objects they spend time with in an intimate manner. Time is the more interesting quality she notes upon. She notes that even though she spent time with the box in different places, there was an absorption and an “intangible maturation” (p.172) that allowed her to recognize the sameness that they had evolved together. She uses this notion to explore the claim that phenomenology is sometimes biased towards space rather than time and argues how one must orient the senses to avoid that experience-over-time becoming a linear string of single experiences where the newest is always the most important (p.174). Compared to the limitations Kozel mentions with regards to her exploration, our experiment

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had the opportunity of remaining within the examination for much longer time. The extended time we have spent evolving evolutionary algorithms and furthermore spent within the adaptive environment allows for a depth to our insight when Kozel goes on to address time and responsive architecture by way of architect Greg Lynn. Lynn (1999) shared his thoughts in Biotime on how organization in organically growing systems must be understood in terms of ‘developmental time’: “Evolution and epigenetic growth conceptualize form as a developing process rather than a frozen or fixed condition … the process of developing in time involves an internally constrained organism unfolding in complexity within a contextual field of influences.” (p. 269).

Lynn notes that the differences that emerge from these organic processes are rhythmic. In our experiment, we have been allowed to experience such an emerging rhythm take place between test-participants, the adaptive system, and ourselves. From these rhythms it has been clear that time spent within a room that evolved its spatial qualities alongside the human, creates meaning that differs from the same time spent in a room of static nature. The important aspects were not just the time spent in the room, but the rhythmic aspects that comes with shared control and mutual dependency. Another way to confront these rhythms of my experience was through video recordings of my first-person perspective, while answering explorative questions about the room. Viewing these recordings through a head mounted display engaged me in experiences where I would re-visit my memories of the sessions.

I would get a habit of re-evaluating the thoughts that I’ve had before I gave the answers in the video.

It was an challenging way of doing re-interpretation, but it allowed me to evaluate my own tendencies, and habits which at times can be difficult to get a grasp on. In a phenomenological sense, it became a way to experience what it means to invest memory and movement in lived time: a space that reflects the time and evolution that had occurred between the adaptive house and its inhabitant. Put simply, the time spent inhabiting the adaptive space, observing test-participants, each other, and relating to the system as a whole, can perhaps be said to have been time, which exhibited qualities not usually found in static architecture, but in an evolving organic system. Understanding the significance of time with such qualities might be able to give clues as to how future research of adaptive architecture must be approached in order to provide conditions for dwelling that evolves alongside the individual.

The following chapter will be the culmination of present thesis. In this, we will present a synthesis of our process and subsequently derive our proposal for a blueprint on future development of Adaptive Architecture. The chapter will thus act as proposal for future research as well as conclude present thesis.

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Concluding analysis - Towards possible futures in adaptive architecture

The final chapter of the thesis will consist of the following: 1. A synthesis of our process through the Growth Plan, in which we will address our research questions (Fig. 1) through identifying phenomena with qualities important to our research.

2. A set of key qualities that enables a mutual and co-evolutionary relationship between humans and adaptive built space - identified through our process.

3. A way in which these qualities can be included in a proposal of a new Growth Plan that will be able to sketch possible futures in adaptive architecture.

4. A brief concluding summary.

The qualities and phenomena identified are the outcome and culmination of our constantly evolving process. It incorporates our findings through experiments, tangents of fictional narratives and insights from personal immersion in adaptive spaces. Aspects of research looking into the future is far removed from what simple, everyday, problems that might exist in that future, but our approach comes from an insight into current technological developments and the urgent needs to forecast and develop how the shells in which we live will come to evolve.

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Is it possible for the human to live with something that it shares autonomy with?

What are the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind?

What are the impacts of living in a space that adapts to its inhabitant over time?

Fig. 1: Research Questions

The responsibility to account for technological changes of the future must be taken up by researchers of a broad variety of disciplines in order to ensure a qualified development of how technology will be part of the box that contains our families, bodies, hopes and dreams.

The synthesis presented in the following will eventually lead to a proposal of a blueprint for how future research can be conducted.

1. Evolutionary process through the Growth Plan Each of the three phases differed in experimental and explorative focus. Not knowing precisely what the next phase would be comprised of was an intentional approach in order to generate knowledge in cycles.

As opposed to a process in which a single prototype or experiment is developed and refined, it meant that our cycles of knowledge had impact on how the next prototypes and experiments would be constructed.

As knowledge evolved throughout these cycles, we were allowed to re-evaluate our research questions on the grounds of our new insights and experiences. From the beginning we acknowledged that we wanted to test adaptive architecture in a real home setting, yet what we eventually created would have been entirely different, if we had set out to construct such a setting from the beginning of our exploration without submitting our research to the evolutionary process. For example, early in the process we thought of designing a room that would move tables and interrupt openly in the living space of the inhabitant, but as the research progressed, we began to understand the subtleties of how humans identify and build relationships with their surroundings - especially when they reflect their values or movements. Such insights acted as guiding foci in our design of the experiments and led to an integrated and much more subtle intervention at last.

Strictly classifying which phases our different insights and observations belong to would be contradictory to the process we’ve undergone. While each phase can be said to have its own lifecycle, they are part of a larger organism of emerging knowledge. Without the insights from Incubation phase, our experiments in the Nursery phase would have been different, yet the concepts and insights we gained from Incubation took on new meanings when they were experienced through experiments in Nursery. These new meanings would then be guided by concepts such as embodiment, which in turn would lead to new experimentation. As such, a circulatory connection was made, where insights are in flux (Fig.2).

From a temporal perspective, the consecutive phases have appeared in linear process, yet the knowledge generated through these phases has been evolutionary: a continuous interaction between insights 124

across cycles forming in a cross-referential system. Due to this approach we’ve been allowed to observe phenomena in an evolutionary manner, which will be described in coming sections. The phenomena and experiences consist of many interrelating qualities and are not meant to be understood as pertaining to one particular section, but are divided as such to address our research questions and synthesise the key qualities we have identified.

Experiences/ Experiments Experiences/ Experiments

Experiences/ Experiments

Observations

Observations Observations

Research Question

Incubation Analysing

Nursery

Adoption Analysing Analysing

Fig. 2: A model of the circulatory process through the three phases.

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2. Phenomena of the evolutionary process The phenomena we’ve observed have at times been surprising. With our continuously generated knowledge we’ve also been allowed to look back and re-interpret some experiences. As mentioned, if an experience of an experiment would be interpreted on the grounds of a conceptual approach prior to the experience, our understanding of the concept would possibly change, thus allowing revision. On the ground of our process, the phenomena presented in the following can be said to constitute our understanding of adaptivity in a home. This will lead to the key qualities that will guide our proposal of a new Growth Plan.

Control Despite our initial concerns about the experience of relinquishing control of one’s intimate space to something non-human, it ceased to present itself as a major challenge. In Nursery, our initial interpretation of what the participants’ had experienced in their session with the ‘middle’ intelligence, was that their lack of control made them uncomfortable and regarded the prototype as hostile. Their inability to decipher the prototypes’ intentions and control it had left them frustrated, just as we were frustrated over the algorithm’s inability to recognize our desires in the Adoption Phase. What we realized through the longer period spent in Adoption, was that the issue was not who had control. The issue for the participants in the Nursery was that they had to come to terms with the technology as an ‘other’, to use Ihde’s terms, and realise that how they moved, how they interacted, was a ‘dialogue’ - a relationship that needed time to develop, which one of the participants wondered perhaps was the case.

It was realized that an important thing to consider is the preconceptions humans have about technology: that it is interface tested and should respond directly to us e.g. we are used to control rather than interaction. Having to live with technology that develops over long periods of time is a new relation that humans will most likely need to adapt to in the future. A simple example of such a technology is the iPhone’s Touch ID, which evolves its ability to recognize the user’s fingerprint over time, so that the structures of the thumb are recognized regardless of the angle in which the user places it on the screen.

The fact that the identification does not work very well at first, but after a few days work seamlessly might represent the beginnings of such phenomena on a smaller scale.

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Time

It should be to little surprise that temporality plays a significant part in research regarding adaptive architecture. The quality of temporal phenomena was an underlying theme throughout our process. The understanding of the significance time had to our research was developed as the orientation towards the phenomena of the relationship between human and built space began to evolve.

We observed in the Adoption Phase how time spent with the evolutionary system was experienced as rhythmic as the time spent between the inhabitant and the room was reflected in its dynamic spatial qualities. These changes meant that the experience of living in an adaptive environment felt more akin to being with the room, rather than merely in it. The frames of the home were over time not experienced as static, but rather as an attunement between the built space and inhabitant.

Another phenomenon closely linked to temporality is how the buildings came to be viewed in this context. From the participants thoughts in the Incubation Phase, our own imagined experience of future adaptive buildings in Embodied space, participants sessions in the Nursery Phase, to the combined experiences of the Adoption Phase, the buildings and spaces slowly ceased to be regarded as objects and instead were experienced as something dynamic and living. Our own stance through this is that there perhaps lies an inherent quality in the research and development of Adaptive Architecture if approached from the standpoint of subjects not residing in a technological object, but rather a dynamic habitat, which spatial qualities will come to be shaped by its inhabitant over time. Furthermore, many participants expressed what was essentially an ambition on behalf of future built space, of enabling an enhancement of inhabitants’ connection to their surrounding environment.

If the development of architecture is not approached from the thought of inserting shelter into the natural environment, but rather of having the natural environment help be shaped into shelter, perhaps such a distinction will aid a new paradigm of adaptive buildings. In a broader context, recent years have seen a rapidly growing interest in sustainability that focuses on the way in which our homes must adapt in order to accommodate for the future well being of the planet. The exterior focus of such responsive architectures could aid in a greater architectural coherency with the enabling and co-evolving qualities of the interior that we aim to develop by way of focusing on the well being of the human.

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Relation As observed in the Nursery Phase, the experience of being confronted with their own movements made the participants reflect on the way they would engage with the prototype and what habits were culturally accepted. As built space adapts to the human presence it can be experienced as reflecting a certain value, as the human is providing the input the technology adapts to. The adaptive systems are not just adjusting to the preferences of its inhabitant, but the adaption becomes physically visible. This confrontation has an impact on how the adaptive system is perceived and will affect the way the inhabitants reflect on their own actions and movements. Ihde puts it simply in his description of the two-way relation between humans and technology: “Embodiment, however, is always relativistic, in the sense that it is a relation between the human and the technologies employed.” (2002, p.137).

While these relations were only observed shortly through in our lab-setting, the experience of values being reflected was enhanced when we moved into a real home environment. Objects in a home setting often represent certain values of the inhabitant as well. According to Thau (2010), our home reflect our values as a ‘mirror’, but having the home be adaptive made the inhabitant much more aware of this relation. The experience of living with things that ‘reflected’ value thus took on new meaning, as the spatial qualities of the room began to adapt to the values and preferences of the inhabitant.

As mentioned, many of these phenomena consist of various interrelating factors, some of which have been addressed in these sections. The remaining phenomena, some of which are closely linked to the ones already discussed, will be expressed in the following qualities that we regard as key for enabling coevolution between human and built space.

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3. Key qualities What qualities can emerge from a building’s ability to adapt to its inhabitants? The following qualities are based on the phenomena and insights extrapolated from our evolutionary process when exploring the different aspects of living and imagining the future of adaptive architecture.

The key qualities we have identified aim to develop Adaptive Architecture: that lets inhabitants perceive themselves as participants and creators rather than users.

As technology can free us to more leisure time, it should be aimed at enhancing a way in which we are still part of the creation not just as users of a product. towards a diachronous relationship with its inhabitants.

The relation between the building and its inhabitants should evolve as a mutual relationship in order to ensure the creation of a meaningful relation. This mutual evolvement should take the pace that seems most natural and intuitive to the human to follow the rhythm of the lives of the inhabitant. that is able to enhance relations essential to human inhabitants

e.g. their relation to the natural surroundings, their relation to other humans or their relation to their own body. that can adapt to and support activities in the life of the inhabitant.

Should be adaptable in a way that encompasses our daily rhythm and activities such as socialization, work, upholding of life etc.

It should provide the possibility of adapting to changing needs of inhabitants.

It should not interfere unwanted with everyday activities of the inhabitants

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that emerges respectfully from its surroundings.

Just as the adaptive building should keep its inhabitants interests in focus, the surroundings environment should also be of great concern, since the relationship between inhabitants and the environment is of great importance for the well-being of the inhabitants that prioritizes the spatializing of information.

Understanding information in an adaptive space will possibly have effects on the way in which we receive and exchange it. If we are confronted or engaged spatially by communication, this might lead to new thought patterns and ways of feeling at home. A different knowledge is embodied within an active relation to the home. that accommodates our embodied way of being.

The inhabitants’ active relation to the built space, their movements, actions and embodiment of the space should be reflected in the adaption.

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4. Growth Plan for architecture as-it-could-be We propose that the analytical framework for this future blueprint will still be approached from a standpoint of exploring human experience of built space, as these are key in guiding the development and design of our experiments. The theoretical areas from where we will look to concepts for further analysis, such as artificial life, will be open to be improved by various other areas of expertise found relevant as knowledge is generated through the this proposed process.

Incubation

As our proposal is of the conviction that adaptive architecture must be researched by way of human experience, the aim of this phase is to enable participants to perceive themselves as active creators of their future living space. As the Incubation Phase focuses on quick iterations and exploration, we will include rapid cycles of prototyping to foster new ideas. Our own approach of creating 1:20 models of our experiment spaces, in order to experience them in virtual reality through a head mounted display, will be further developed upon here. From viewing recordings of the first-person view of participants, to making virtual reality scenarios inside the models, we developed a way of rapidly confronting and gaining perspective of the spaces and experiences we attempted to stage. Parallel to the Incubation Phase of present thesis, where the participants were asked to imagine their own house in the future, participants will be asked to create models of their house and imagine how it should evolve and respond to them.

It will be versions of our cardboard models designed specifically to let the participants re-configure the model in order to accommodate a creative and imaginative process to induce a feeling of actively taking part in the shaping of their home environment. Such a sketch environment will allow us to choose the most promising concepts, which we will further explore in the next phase.

Nursery

Our proposal is that this phase should involve advanced cycles of testing intelligent material that can later be incorporated as reiterated versions for further use. With the most promising concepts and identified qualities from the incubation phase, the aim will be directed towards humans exchanging and relating to their home environment. It will be an investigation of ways in which interfaces made to exchange information between built space and the inhabitant can be developed with a focus on 131

being navigated and understood through bodily gestures. The goal will be to observe how humans perceive information from the house in such a manner, and how it in turn affect their understanding and, consequently, their mode of thinking about such engagements. This is not only to expose the knowledge embodied within such a way of perceiving information, but also to challenge the way in which the next cycle of interfaces should be constructed. The experiments will remain experiential and seek to evaluate human behavior and how this way of spatializing information will affect the way in which the participants will experience being ‘at home’ and, ultimately, how it could affect their ability to dwell within the spaces.

Adoption Predefining what the last phase should be comprised of, as well as our own degree of involvement, would be contradictory in an explorative process, but what we can do is clarify how we aim to stage the approach. The aim is to let the sketch environment, staged lab-experiments, and qualified insights grow to become real architecture. The approach of full-scale testing will elaborate elements from the previous phases.

A chosen participant with sufficient qualities will go through the process of realizing a full-scale testspace under our supervision. The supervision is to ensure that what eventually will become a house will exhibit qualities necessary for our further research. The process will begin by way of building models and exploring them through tools from augmented and virtual reality. This will lead to initial testing of built space and finally fully living in it. Through our expertise, we will stage a potential for the way in which the house can evolve. The chosen participant will actualize this potential by inhabiting the house.

This dynamic is aimed at investigating the transformative effect the adaptive house will have on the participants’ everyday life, which at this point will begin to form. In order to fully realize such a dynamic the process and study will have to take place over a much longer period of time than what has been available in present thesis.

In sum, it is imperative for a house to have evolved by virtue of adapting to its inhabitants’ lived experiences over time. This will enable the experience of such a relation to be available for exploration, which hopefully can lead to new paradigms in the development of future adaptive architecture.

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4.Concluding summary The field of exploration and subsequent task for present thesis was defined through its continuously generated research questions. This was approached through an interdisciplinary method that sought to encompass and analyse human experience of adaptive built space through phenomenology while cyclically generating knowledge by the appropriation of the evolutionary phases of the Growth Plan.

The research questions were as follows: 1. Is it feasible for the inhabitant to share autonomy of their home with a non-human intelligent technological system?

2. Can the experience of living with systems of adaptive architecture come to be perceived as an integrated part of daily life?

3. What are the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus in mind?

Through identified phenomena and experiences, these questions were addressed in our final analysis and can be summarized as: 1. Questions of autonomy and control were explored by way of interactive technology and evolutionary algorithms. Interactions, in which the question of shared control was present, came to revolve around the relation it shaped over time and it became ways in which new habits and thoughts were explored and questioned through confrontation. Our research is not in any way conclusive, but can be said to identify several qualities of interacting and sharing autonomy with technology.

2. Over time, the rhythms between built space and inhabitant began to establish an experience of mutuality. This was a quality that became explicated towards the end of our process and is a complex experience of relation that requires further research in order to be fully explored. Â The resources and time to do so were not available in present thesis, as we remark upon in our proposal of a new growth plan. What we can state is that the inhabitant experienced changes in routines that gave a sense of actively participating in the home environment, as the relationship between inhabitant and built space came to be reflected in the spatial qualities.

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3. Describing the benefits of developing adaptive architecture with an embodied and co-evolutionary focus points towards a synthesis of our answers in 1 and 2. While being aware of the constraints we have mentioned, our process has allowed us to investigate experiences that can point towards beneficial effects, when having said focus. The experience of enhancing qualities was observed in several ways.

As the home environment in the final phase adapted over time, the experience of having one’s values reflected enhanced the way built space was regarded as forging an active relation to its inhabitant.

Derived from this was a feeling of being actively engaged with one’s home and the natural environment it helped interpret. Participants experienced how the adaptive space could act as a mediator between humans and how the dynamic systems could enhance connectivity between them. The enhancement of essential matters, which was observed through engaging participants in an active and evolving manner, was targeted at exploring the possibility of having built space accommodate an embodied way of being.

Following this, the experiences we’ve been able to identify through our process, gives indications as to how adaptive architecture can be developed if it is to become an integrated and beneficial part of human lives in the future.

This marks the end of the thesis. We will conclude with a quote that might inspire core criteria for future adaptive homes:

“The ultimate interface would be the human body and human senses.”

Myron W. Kruger Artificial Reality: Past and Future

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