Technology Infused Spaces

City-Tech-Space Technology Infused Spaces

Cities of today rest on technological foundations that drive entire economies and socio-cultural systems. The traditional meanings of space have tremendously changed since the advent of technology. This paper amasses an ongoing discourse on media and technologies in society, linking it to space. We argue for the need of a technological perspective to the designer in order to find their relevance in a world riddled with Globalization and Capitalism.

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his paper hopes to bring forth the ways in which technology is infused/ embedded within the city and space. Technologically infused space, simply put, is one where machine or code is embedded within the built in ways that modify its nature spatially. The spaces themselves cannot be studied in isolation from the socio-economic context around which they are built. Therefore our pursuit towards understanding spaces of this nature concurs with the social construction of the spaces.

Technology has changed the way we go about our lives and the way we negotiate with space. This transformation is not just about spatial perception, but intersects with notions of city and user.

CITY “The spaces and rhythms of contemporary cities are radically different to those described in classic theories of urbanism” (Buck-Morss 1989).

This section begins by talking about the contemporary city, and the experiential qualities that come associated with it, building on the argument that the uniqueness to this urban experience can largely be attributed to its technological bearings. Using Marx’s historical materialism to establish the significance of material productive forces i.e. Technology in its capability to influence society and cities, presents code and machine not just as neutral but political tools.

The first section deals with the city and its users, and the economy central to its sustenance. It encapsulates the ‘urban’ experience and the economic reasons of it being the way it is. The urban experience is subtly seen as blended with technological references.

TECH The second section directly deals with these technological bearings, as a foreground to the urban experience. It is here that Delhi is tested in the mould of the contemporary city. Technology and its parameters are defined, limiting our scope to direct engagement with spaces. The resultant is a larger picture, linking an economic process to its technological means.

The spatial experience is enabled and dictated by technological interventions and solutions. The aim of the City-Tech section is in encapsulating the experience of the contemporary city and establishing the innate technological roots of this experience. A zoomed-in spatial experience which is of relevance to the practitioners of space is the focus of the third section.

SPACE The third section delves into the realm of technology-infused spaces beginning with its definition and scope. The paper understands these spaces as varying shades of grey, and instead of classifying, builds a conceptual framework to arrive at a narrative to look at the ways in which technology-infused

spaces are experienced within the city. Hence it explore spaces in their attributes of performance, interactivity, transience, code, virtual, etc in the context of Delhi.

Any discussions about Cities today are incomplete without including ideas of surveillance and privatization, Globalization and digitalization, cybernetics and biometrics, power and authority. The end is a full circle coming back to the city, and connect the dots between a globalizing world and technology.

This section brushes on these ideas to put them together under the aegis of a technological perspective.

A section for Architects argues the need for practitioners of space to incorporate ideas of technology within the spatial discourse, and understand space from a technological lens rather than sleepwalk into technological initiation.

While the premise of this paper is to shed light on the spatial possibilities enabled by technology, it also establishes through the experience of the city, the irrevocable significance of technology in the world today. A systematic approach of looking at spaces through the possibilities of that space does justice to the subject of study, technology infused spaces, while condensing simultaneous connections to theoretical discourse (surveillance, privatization, globalization, cybernetics, etc), types of technologies (virtual, digital, assemblage), and spatial commentaries (phantasm, ethereal, transience) thus covering spaces alongside their politics.

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City is experiential. The city is sensorium. The city is modern and chaos. Always envisioned as constantly moving forward, the contemporary city is now a dynamic entity, ever-changing, uncontained. To comprehend it, the city needs to be realized in psychological and spatial terms. The psyche of the city user is a response to the material forces at play around him. While the psychological can be explained by the socio-economic on all levels i.e. the city and the individual; the spatial aspect of the city becomes the crux of our study. Neither can be studied in isolation from the other. Before technology comes into the picture, what makes the city?

City and the Dweller- Psychological, spatial experience Building from Marx’s historical materialism, which perhaps seems to make more sense now than ever, society functions on the material productive forces that provide them with indispensable relations of production, which is the economic foundation of the city and society. The socio-cultural, political and legal substructure of society rests on this very foundation. And the ideas and collective consciousness of society depend on these very material conditions (Marx 1859). Simply put, the way man/woman is and thinks is determined by the way they produce for subsistence. The objective, economic-sociological factor is the determinant of the human condition of the time.

City is the center of commercial activity. Cities crumble when their economies do. Everything here is attached to a money-value and can be quantified. The city is supplied almost exclusively by production for the market where the producer and purchaser never interact directly (Simmel 1980). The economic exchange, an important social function becomes a rational impersonal exchange.

Nothing is left ambiguous. Innovations like watches bring notions of precision and punctuality. Time is paced. Everything is quantified. The city dweller’s mind as a result becomes a calculating rational tool. While emotional response is reserved for those close to us, most of our social exchanges employ a rational, calculating, quantifying mind.

There is heightened social plasticity within an atomized society. Lost amidst the crowd, the city dweller is in a constant struggle for individuality. Conflictingly, distances have reduced, time has shortened and means have emerged that allows the city-dweller to foster a complex network of social relationships of far bigger magnitudes than was possible before. Mobility is a universal application, and not associated to distances alone. Communication can now happen digitally over screens. Anonymity and pseudonymity engage with the virtually isolated, new kinds of social networks have emerged. Users of technologies are connected in real-time with users all over the world. A lot is happening within the city for the user.

“The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” (Simmel 1980). The urban experience is one of shocks and constantly changing images. The human sensorium has built resistance through impersonality to parry these shocks (R Subramaniam 2002).

Attention spans have shortened; and distracted, fleeting responses to external and internal stimuli are pavlovian. The intensified emotional incidence of rapid stimuli of the city ran in tandem with technological means.

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Digital media has informed spatial perception and usage (Verstegen 2001).

New electronic media has brought sensing and experiencing to the foreground of spatial experience (McLuhan M 1964).

Advertising and displays, global malls and arcades have brought the commercial center to profitable ends.

Virtual social media and mobiles have enabled social plasticity, and multiplicity in social relations.

Large transport infrastructures: metro, underground subway, monorail and airports have reduced a sense of distances and time.

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For the purpose of this seminar, technology is to be understood as the drive for efficiency (as with machines), its active verb technique as an ensemble of means (Ellul 1964). However the technological process does not work in isolation from socio-political processes. And more often than not, technology can be used as a political tool. When entering the spatial realm, technology takes form in machines, code, networks and assemblage (Kitchin, Dodge 2011) that together with the built modify and create new spaces. These spaces possess characteristics that are possible only because of the presence of these technologies. These characteristics of space, are referred to as the attributes of technological spaces.

This City, a Product of Technology.

The economic system of the city was facilitating and simultaneously facilitated by a technological drive. In the Indian context, the economic reform of 1991 enabled a neo liberal capitalism in its cities. Foreign exchange and investment steadily stabilized the nation salvaging it’s economic state. A steadily growing tertiary sector of information workers became the city’s majority dwellers. The Indian city was a land of opportunity, and witnessed unprecedented migration and an exponential growth in urban population. For a capitalist free market, the city dweller was a consuming mass. The market became the center-stage of city economy. So much so, that the market and consumer culture gradually consumed the public realm. Entire professional industries emerged, catering to strategize, manage, advertize and aid consumption. Multi-national giants established stakes within markets which became global in themselves. A strong unplanned response to all this presented itself in interstices within the formal hegemony of policy and planning. Slums emerged, so did pirate markets (Sundaram), resettlement colonies and urban villages. > English is the principal language for the business transactions in India. > India has the second largest and the fastest growing pool of technical manpower. > High availability of Computer literate, English speaking and educated customer care professionals. > India has the lowest manpower cost. Manpower cost is approximately one-tenth of what it is overseas. The annual cost per agent in USA is approximately $40,000 while in India it is around $5000.

The India Advantage Source: Call Centre Calling : Technology, network and location -Raqs Media Collective Original: http://www.delhicall.com/why-india.html

India today is an important global player, with immense economic potential. Its cities are teeming with information workers, dealing with abstraction, making for the majority of its middle class (a 70.95% GDP contribution by the tertiary sector (Economic survey of Delhi, 2005-06) makes their voices heard over the urban poor). There are imprints of globalization, and efforts of the nation state to project a global image in a globalizing economy (like the Commonwealth Games). Large scale projects and events of global scales are also an effort to present Delhi (and India, as in the case of smart cities) as a node of investment, as the collective vision and future aspirations of all parties involved. Major Indian Cities have becomes centers of services and business through which capital and other resources flow in and out of their economies.

The neo-liberal capitalist Delhi demonstrates the urban experience of the contemporary city.

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… the common, everyday objects of industrial culture have as much of value to teach us as that canon of cultural "treasures" which we have for so long been taught to revere.

– Buck-Morss, Dielectics of Seeing

Technology-infused spaces Technologically infused architecture is one where machine or code is embedded within the built in ways that modify its nature spatially. Technology-infused spaces are hence spaces owing their attributes to technologies, assemblage, technological artefacts, software and codes. The placement of a telephone within a booth gives that space its function. The projection onto a screen is what facilitates the purpose of a cinema hall. It is these embedded technologies that allow spaces to perform in a certain way.

The notion of performance of space can stretch further from the traditional notions of neutrality, staticity and specificity of space. Space moves. Spaces changes temporally, transforms, flows into. How does technology enable these attributes of space?

On closer inspection one finds that some technologies function in deterministic ways in spaces. Most studies on software and technologies focus largely on how it affects social systems and how they are formed, organized and regulated only with relation to time and place with the space in which they exist being a mere coincidence. Hence, these accounts of the relationship of society and software are independent of the spatial component. However, society does not function aspatially, but rather forms an important component shaping social relations with the intricate formation of layers of context that hold people and things together. Kitchin and Dodge’s ‘Code/Space’ (2011) talks about the kind of space whose very spatiality depends on the existence of code to make that space function in a certain way, some of which we discuss in our framework.

These spaces can simultaneously be both global and local where it is grounded in spatiality in the local context while can be accessed and controlled via network from anywhere in the world. One of the opportunities when designing spaces that have code infused in them is how a space can be made intelligent and how the sensors can be used by the user to match their own preferences.

It is ultimately upto the designer to provide for these as code steadily become a part of the designed space.

There is a multitude of ways and degrees in which technology has manifested in all disciplines, including space. Any attempt to classify these spaces is but impossible because the technological process is constantly updating, moving forward, at the same time expanding epistemologically; with a plethora of interconnected manifestations that seem to overlap in a dense network of their material histories and social construction. So rather than attempt to divide on the basis of types of technologies, we chose to look at their spatial possibilities.

Imagining space to be a contained entity, a bubble, defined in its edges (as has been the purpose of walls in design); one can begin to observe this these edges are not as definite and that the space undergoes transformation. This transformation has broadly been structured into three kinds of transformation.

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Fig: (top) attributes/ possibilities of technology-infusd space Source: Author

Surface| Perform| Interact Stretch| Morph| Extend

Network| Connect| Flow

The first kind, ‘Interact’, is spaces that exist within their spatial extents, but within that boundary find ways to facilitate function or allow new spatial possibilies within that space.

The second, ‘Morph’ looks at spaces that stretch these spatial extents beyond four walls in their user experience into phantasmatic/virtual/simulated/cyber/ digital space.

‘Network’ covers this extension to the next level where space becomes capable of connecting to another allowing mutual exchange, becoming transient or part of a network.

This isn’t an attempt to classify but explore the ways through which spaces transform, and build a narrative from there. (The image above is only but a conceptual marker for thinking about how spaces are experienced today, and not an attempt towards their classification.) More important than the narrative is the arrival to a collective realisation of innateness of a technological facet to spaces.

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Fig: (clockwise from topright) Paharganj at night, Connaught Place arcades, Ghantaghar electronic market, Palika underground market Source: http://goo.gl/VShXhA, http://goo.gl/1OpJFx, http://goo.gl/GArQZs, http://goo.gl/gur1JH,

Interact There are ways in which spaces perform in immediacy to their surroundings and interact with their users. Surfaces are, with much success, used in the contemporary city to disperse ideas of consumption and popular culture. There are visual stimuli of rapidly changing imagery on streets, in public spaces, the metro, in malls and shops, as far as the eye can see. The eyes are attuned to Neon Displays and signboards, signage and graffiti; hybrid spatial ensembles that users interact with on a daily basis. The city experience is these sensations.

The Global typology of Shopping Mall is carefully designed to uses techniques and spatial planning to entice and immerse the consumer (Koolhas 1998).

Much thought and investment goes into strategizing and designing spaces that promote consumption. Klein (2010) talks about how culture has been surrendered to forces of marketing in which the media plays a big role. Successful corporations are highly focused on producing images which is a part of marketing for creating wealth and cultural influence. Commodity as social evaluation is a stereotype that exists now more than ever. To add it this, Consumer credit allows the shopper to make purchases beyond the extents of what physical cash used to provide before, has consumerism spawning more dangerously than ever. Advertising and ‘window shopping’ exist on the premise of using every inch of vertical surface to showcase material culture. McQuire(2008) looked at this very aspect of technology on the built calling it media architecture. Media has pervaded the world in all forms and shapes and contemporary architecture has incorporated it significantly. The spaces of our daily life are invaded by economic space which is highly subjected to the insistent market, communication, advertisements and building meaning. (Carmona et al. 2003) Designers understand the effectiveness of these strategies in enabling consumption. The shopping mall, cultural centers like Dilli Haat, open avenues of Connaught place, or much simply even provisions of selling vertical surfaces as advertising space is a careful deliberation of how spaces can be used to promote and sell consumer lifestyles. Needless to say this is a heavily debated issue that

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revolves around the loss of ‘publicness’, privatization, corporatization and the ethics of people friendly-design, to the inevitability of capital systems.

Spaces transform. The use of a Wi-Fi router allows the consumer in a café to temporarily transform the cafe into their workspace. A person engrossed in their phone or tablet in the subway changes the space around him from public into a private one. These transformations happen within the presence of technologies in that space, when some conditions are met. The cafe is a open to this transformation for the timings that it is running, and till the customer is

Fig: (top to bottom) privately engaging spheres in metro compartment, transforming workplace in a cafe.

consuming coffee while they work.

https://s-media-cacheak0.pinimg.com/736x /80/2f/61/802f616e-

Spaces performing/interacting is best illustrated in Delhi by looking at the 100acre cultural complex of Swaminarayan Akshardham, situated near the bank of the river Yamuna. A cultural-political-economic icon, today, it showcases India’s traditions of art, architecture, wisdom and spirituality. Technologically powerful machinery and computer systems are put to use to keep the attractions running. Life size mannequins utilise a combination of robotics, fiber optics, light and sound to portray scenes from the life of the young Swaminarayan in the Hall of Values, an audio animatrix show. An IMAX theatre show called Neelkanth Darshan that charts his life from childhood to adulthood includes extensive use of aerial photography and even a computer generated shot of the Mansarovar Lake. The final attraction of the series is the Sanskruti Vihar boat ride. Long boats, with the fore and aft designed to make them look like swans, run on tracks that are concealed under water. The Yagnapurush Kund - musical fountains within a large step well echoes Vedic chants0656 with a light and sound show.

4D cinema halls, assembly lines, factories, recording studios, amusement parks, light and sound shows. Spaces amalgamated with high end technologies are designed with an expertise on the technology running that space. To the creation of these new infused spaces, the built becomes part of the machine. With dominant tech-spaces slowly becoming prevalent, the designer finds relevance by updating their knowledge to include these technologies.

The stimuli are not just visual but slowly responding to more than the one sense. Buildings and spaces are becoming more and more interactive to their users courtesy new technologies. Body scanners, heat detectors, automated systems that respond to occupancy, smart cards, biometrics, turnstiles are only but a few of the many implements that have changed the way we experience and negotiate with space. Sometimes a number of these technological objects work in tandem to facilitate a process. As users experiencing space we have become

Source: (original) http://img839.imageshack. us/img839/9921/63184872. png ,

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Fig: technological assemblage and informing screens Source:ViewSonic brochure.

(Original) http://www. firstpost.com/living/illustrations-delhi-metro-willm a ke - w a n t - t a ke - c r a z y ride-2150303.html

used to standard procedures of navigating through the city on a regular basis.

The city experience is these procedures.

Getting into a bus from the back door, securing a ticket from the conductor, getting out from the front door. Getting in through a security check in, entering the metro at the platform. Listening to music or engaging in phone screens, exiting the metro, using the token to check out. Procuring Identity card at the front desk of the American Center, going through a security check, using the library, exit. What comes as second nature to us now, these procedures are taught over time, conditioned as a result of living in Delhi.

These procedures are systemic, assemblage of machines and code that create order to spatial usage. A simple example would be, the procedure to check into important public nodes within the city of Delhi, the Delhi metro, Dilli haat, Select City Mall (or any other mall for that instance), embassies, corporate offices, Palika market is a sequence of actions on the users part, and technologies that make this procedure possible.

Queue > All belongings through an X-ray machine > Pass through a scanner > Frisking with a metal detector > Secure Belongings > Use integrated circuit cards > Carry through...

Interactive technologies create impersonal systems with minimal manual intervention. While they ease the labor involved and make certain processes efficient, they are also responsible for creating hostile public environments, subject people to compromise with rights to their own bodies, choice and freedom.

Users of space need to question the relevance of these systems challenge their relevance and dehumanized stature, as should practitioners of space. While the politics of these systems, biometrics, scanners are subject of academic discourse, their position in design practice is rarely questioned.

Among technology enabled surfaces, one innovation steals the show. The television screen is slowly slimming and growing as architectural surface, creeping in a big way into contemporary urbanism. These together with satellite networks and fibre optics that transcend regional or national boundaries have had a profound impact on the relation between media and public spaces. The integration of media in public spaces have served to revitalize these places as they had been on the decline when the society had withdrawn into the private sphere(Harvey, 2003). In the larger sense globalization is said to manifest when the notion of the world as an entity is performed by technology.

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Vertical surfaces of wall and screens. Posters, billboards, digital signboards, advertisements, information displays and signage are ways in which vertical surfaces are carefully designed and invested in to disperse information among users within a space. These surfaces inform and direct popular culture as well as wayfinding in space, largely public. They mostly benefit commerce within the city. At the same time they also speeden up processes that would take much longer if they were manual, one can’t imagine getting into the metro without these systems that supposedly makes it all less hassle-free. Systems like biometrics create failsafe efficient solutions to make tracking people and information easy, but this information isn’t safe from misuse either.

Within the defined space, functions change temporally when technology intervenes. Space performs because technologies enable their function. Surfaces and screens inform spaces and what they are intended for. Automated systems respond to users of space. These changes that occur within spaces are insufficiently accounted for within the realm of design because of our ignorance towards these changes and their underlying politics.

Morph Some spaces are, because of machine or code, able to transform/change/expand their spatial and functional possibilities. This extension is unique to these spaces in lieu of the ways in which space is extended. Unlike the third type, these kinds of spaces are still rooted to one physical space. The extension is dependent on that physical space, and there is no channelling or exchange between spaces (like in the case of the third type). Security/spy cameras coupled with screen are allowing a convenient way to keep an eye over spaces, at the same time dictating human behaviour and creating ‘power over’. Digital screen are phantasmatic projections of real spaces. Spaces are merging with virtual.

There is cyberspace.

When we look at spaces whose boundaries are pushed by the use of technologies, rarely do we comprehend the power of everyday objects of technological nature in transforming or stretching spatial possibilities. A central computer database allows us to access books within a library much like a cashier’s counter in a supermarket, without which the functions of both spaces get reduced to a large storage hall. A projector grants an auditorium function. Screens of laptops and mobiles transform the space around the user into a private one.

Performative screens are transcending the boundaries of the public realm and are creeping into the private homes. The television screen that acts as a portal

Fig: Surfaces for advertisement in GIP mall, Noida.

Source: (original) http:// www.unitechgroup.com/images/gip-noida-pic1.jpg

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Fig: Extension of space into projection screen, experience of a cinema hall, Source: (original) NEUFERT, E. (2000). Neufert Architects’ data. Oxford, Blackwell Science

to spaces far and beyond (Virilio, 1991) also pushes the extents of physical space into the screen. Imagine a possibility when the screen becomes so convincingly capable of augmenting an idea of spaciousness, where sitting in a small room one can forget the spatial limitations of the physical space, and experience it as a spacious combination of virtual and real space. Practitioners of space are experimenting with these possibilities where the screen becomes an extension of physical space. The premise of a cinema hall is in its ability to transport the viewer from the confinement of the hall into an immersive (and momentarily spatial) experience. One sees an extension of space through the projected surface much like the television screen. Different from the visual informative screens and displays of the first type which don’t immerse but inform, these ones are able to transport the viewer into simulated space often by means of imitating or replicating physical spaces and storytelling.

Virtual spaces are spaces of computer programming, a condition possible because of technology. Unlike physical space that we are familiar with, virtual is unfinished, non-linear and non-dialectical. It is a dynamic collection of lists, interactive three dimensional worlds, databases, online archives and search engines.

The virtual space performs an escapist role. The virtual is seen in contrast to the real, offering a way out of the drab of everyday life. Users within the city spend a considerable amount of time engaging virtually. Lovink (2002) brings forward the constant comparison being made between the structuring of information and that of space using architectural principles, in an attempt to better understand the virtual environments that are in the process of being created.

Despite their differences, one should not think of real and virtual as opposites to one another. They both have an open and multidisciplinary character. In fact, instead of attempting to make the virtual like the reality, there should be an effort to infuse the strengths of the virtual world into the physical reality.

This is already happening in small ways in how architects, theorists and urban planners work in today’s age by the use of computers and software.

Designers need to take into account this phenomenon of augmentation of

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Fig: CCTV surveillance allowing extended control over public space from the control room Source: http://www. mdpi.com/sensors/sensors-15-23341/article_deploy/html/images/sensors15-23341-g001-1024.png

physical space into digital, virtual and cyberspace, a possibility which at the moment remains mostly untapped.

Any spatial discourse on technology is incomplete without mentioning surveillance. CCTV systems are technologies that allow an authority to monitor multiple spaces from one space. These systems have infiltrated not just in private residences and businesses but engulfed the public realm. As a result, spaces in the public realm observe surveillance networks that control behaviour and can take away the ‘publicness’ of a space when people are constantly monitored.

In Delhi, one would usually not expect to feel that they are constantly being monitored via surveillance systems. It would be assumed to be confined to certain areas of high security. However, the high tech surveillance industry actually sees a very lucrative market in India with estimated growth of 25% which already has a turnover of 120 million dollars per annum (Sengupta, 2002).

Surveillance cameras have already made their way in most major traffic intersections in Delhi as well as in most apartments, offices, industries and shopping areas. This could have serious implications in how people perceive and behave in these spaces.

Most designers leave solving issues of safety and security to these surveillance systems without thinking of these implications. At the same time, more community engaging spaces and ideas of ‘eyes on the street’ are employed in some spaces to provide sensible alternative solutions to these problems.

In these spaces, the space challenges its notion of association to a physical space, and pushes out of it. This nature in spaces challenges the practice of designers to contain spaces within walls. It spreads out into adjacencies, into cyberspace, into ephemeral simulated spaces. New territories of space and new experiences of traversing through these uncontained spaces calls for a new approach to designing such spaces.

Network Spaces and more so infrastructures are now finding themselves in a network of exchange and interactivity to another spaces and infrastructures via technology. Spaces of transience, of connectivity, of exchange, networked spaces are seen in cities and spaces.

These spaces are not understood independently and function in a technology enabled network. These include spaces that have grown and in turn accelerated globalization, or because of advanced systems (like mass transit, rapid rail, on-

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Fig: 9h 40m buffer space between Delhi-London Sources: (original) https://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6175406/ il_570xN.319351488.jpg , author

line banking, cybernetics, etc).

Global types that emerge as a response to globalization are infact spaces that respond to a wider urban fabric enabled by technology like a unified global organism. Examples of such spaces are large scale transit infrastructures, offshore banks, Multinational corporations, Airports. Zooming in, Bank branches, ATM, Call-centers, cyber-cafes, phone booths, platforms are part of this picture just as well. These network-infrastructures are responsible for creating channels of exchange where physical distances between spaces seem to become redundant. Direct manifestation of technology in this process is seen through the role of cyber channels and network signals. But that doesn’t mean some very physical channels of shortened distance and time are not a result of technology. In both cases, our understanding of spatial distances and exchange has changed considerably. Both are a consequence of technology in direct and indirect ways.

The advent of information technology with telecommunications and the internet has led to a restructuring of the cities with a completely new system of network and nodes due to simultaneous spatial concentration and decentralization that transcends the urban into national and international/global levels (Wheeler, 2000). The future implications of digital communication technology on spaces is profound where these are getting more and more integrated into the built, their “disappearance” (since systems now are virtual and networks wireless) proves to be a threat to the architect’s usual design approach (Mitchell, 2002).

Earlier, there was a stronger link between activities that were in close proximity to each other while distant activities had weaker links. Even with vast networks of transportation systems, the distance remained a major separating factor.

However electronic connection networks have finally managed to bridge the gap, there is a warp in space and time at the global scale because of increasingly stronger interconnectedness of various distant nodes. (Graham and Marvin, 2001) Although the dependence on space and time has been reduced, it does not necessarily imply that one can locate anything anywhere as long as there is internet connectivity. This means that the dependence has only been selectively loosened (Mitchell, 2002). Spaces still continue to be relevant, but in new ways. For instance one can buy music simply by downloading online, yet will have to still be physically present at a barber’s to get a haircut. The demand for quality space is addressed in a manner where one need not live near (or commute to) a central workspace anymore. A consequence would be seen in the suburbanization and growing sizes of dwellings.

Some building types have been reconfigured and fragmented in parts and divisions. A prominent example used to illustrate this is the reduction in the importance of branch banks due to the presence of ATMs and internet transactions. Money has liquefied. This has given way to large scale back offices and

call centres. Same can be said about book stores and other such retail which can be bought online and one only needs several centralized warehouses. This will not only change the demand for built types will also affect the transportation networks (Mitchell, 2002).

With these spaces, the idea of physical distance and adjacencies between spaces gets questioned. The ATM can be scattered around the city. The airport bridges the gap between point of travel and destination and the plane becomes the buffer space between the two. Spaces become channels; time and distance reduce to parameters. Designers are faced with transient spaces, buffer spaces, spaces linked across cities. Within the City certain spaces find themselves slowly becoming redundant while new spaces emerge as consequence. Some spaces simply find themselves in new roles to stay relevant.

Spaces/Technologies are visual interactive systemic Technologies/Spaces are screens virtual code-dependent code-infused Cities/Spaces are global fragmented networked

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Technology isn’t inherently masculine or phallocentric or ethnocentric, although certainly its modes of production and circulation are closely invested in power relations. But in spite of this, it holds a certain promise: it can be used in all sorts of ways with all sorts of aims or goals in mind. It is both the condition of power and a possibility for its subversion, depending on how it is used, by whom, and with what effects.

- Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside The urban experience within the city can be encapsulated as that of shock and hypermobility and phantasm; the virtual is an extension of physical space. The spatial implications of technology are, although not explicitly mentioned, not hard to miss in our cities. Technologies (code and assemblage) have worked in tandem with larger realities of cities today to modify/mutilate/morph new spaces and spatial experiences. The fact that technology has come to negotiate with the spatial experience of a user is evident.

Technology was aimed at making processes efficient, providing solutions. Today it has come to a point where it is looked up to as the premier means to solve issues of the individual, institution, economies, ecology, urban and so on. We jump and see surveillance as the solution to safety and security when we should be seeking socially viable solutions. Biometrics are used to control and limit access to facilities and spaces as much as to provide them. Notions of what is public have changed drastically to a point where we are used to see massive privatization in our public realm. This dependence can be both liberating and dangerous. Cities of today are intensely technology based, and if technology extends to wider audiences, so does all attached politics. The politics of community and politics of technology are interwoven. Unarguably, certain technologies are changing social patterns and molding society.

Epilogue, for Architects The meanings and roles of architecture and urban design centered in older traditions of permanence are irrevocably destabilised in complex cities–that is, cities marked by digital networks, acceleration, massive infrastructures for connectivity, and growing estrangement. Those older meanings do not disappear, they remain crucial. But they cannot comfortably address these newer meanings, which include the growing importance of such networks, interconnections, energy flows, subjective cartographies. Architects need to confront the enormity of the urban experience, the overwhelming presence of massive architectures and dense infrastructures in today’s cities, and the irresistible logic of utility that organises much of the investments in cities.

-Saskia Sassen < http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a04/lang_en/theory_sassen_text.htm> In recent times, architectural practice has increasingly become technocratic. Although the top professionals are associated with terms such as visionaries and artists, most mainstream architects spend more time analyzing the flow of information which determines the entire array of complex technological built forms. In fact, in this area, an early 19th century architect would be much more similar to an architect of the Roman times than one belonging to the 20th or 21th century (Braham, 2007).

As practitioners of space, ours is the only discipline that will explore the relationship between technology and space. Technologies of code and artifacts have enabled new dimensions and possibilities when integrated to the built. All urban malaise finds instantly gratifying solutions in technology. Spaces as we knew before have transformed in their very nature. Some have become redundant; while some have found new ways to exist in the urban realm. Some new kinds of spaces have emerged altogether.

Most people and architects still associate the word technology with the means and methods in which one can build physical spaces, yet, over the past few decades the term has gained added meanings at par with processes of Globalization and Digitalization. With this change in meaning, the need of the hour is to study the relation between space and technology.

Technology -infused spaces are a reality of living in Cities everywhere. They are extremely experiential and surround our everyday living experience. In a consumerist era where technology is inevitable, architecture is on the brink of losing its cultural significance.

Spaces are no seen as stable, static, rather are fluid and mobile.

What does it mean to occupy space today when users can simultaneously manifest in multiple spaces via the internet? What is the point of adjacencies when rooms that were next to each other can now be worlds apart?

There is a vast potential in technology beyond its traditional modes of use that is largely untapped by designers of space. Some of these

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possibilities have been explored in the realm of art, particularly public art, digital installations, and media studies. One such example of adopting a technological perspective when dealing with spaces, was the 3x4 (by Professor Paul Sermon, Dr Claire McAndrew, Delhi-based architect Swati Janu and photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam) that merges two identical 3×4 metre room installations at Khoj International Artists Association, Delhi and Southbank Centre, London, to provide a playful, sensorial exploration of networked spaces as new mixed-reality hybrid environments. Similarly ‘Virtual walls’ designed by Bernardo Schorr, explores virtual reality with a small windowless room made liveable with the use of screens that take up different forms according to its intended function in different parts of the day. Here the screens become so convincingly capable of augmenting an idea of spaciousness, that sitting in a small room one can forget the spatial limitations of the physical space, and experience it as a spacious combination of virtual and real space.

Another example is the future model of the New Delhi railway station by Arup group which takes infusion of technology to the next level with ticketless travel and virtual supermarket walls.

As architects it becomes relevant to engage with new technological spaces and to build a vocabulary to include ideas of the virtual, coded, ephemeral, dynamic in the design discourse. These spaces offer immense spatial possibilities and solutions, and make spaces dynamic at the same time as they become dependent on technologies to function. We live in hyper-real cities, richer in their spatial complexity and variety that traditional notions of space can no longer address. A standard notion about built is that the building is talked about as a static, fixed entity. Architecture has moved past simply occupying space by means of its enclosure. Architects need to begin dealing with space directly than around it. A technological perspective enables the architect to talk of the built as an experience of spaces within it that move and change, even if the walls remain fixed. One needs to build this technological perspective to find relevance in a rapidly Globalizing and Digitalizing city. For architects, this means breaking away from the traditional notions of space and embracing a vocabulary that embraces these new technological attributes of space, so that the architect becomes a relevant arbiter in a world where his relevance is questionable.

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