The Patterned by Nature installation at the Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, designed by Plebian Design, Hypersonic Design & Engineering, and Sosolimited.

Great news: In November, my colleagues and I will host the Media Architecture Biennale 2012 in Aarhus. The Biennale brings together artists, academia and industry in the exploration of the meeting between architecture and digital media. The design of media architecture invites, shapes and creates encounters between people and the built environment, and digital media open up rich opportunities for dialog and engaging experiences.

As an emerging field, many perspectives are still coming together, and the challenges are as abundant as the opportunities. Public space and urban environments are increasingly shaped by elements of media architecture.

The vision of the Media Architecture Biennale is to provide an excellent forum for awareness, discussion and solutions; to bring together the best minds and organizations; and to present to the each other and the world the state-of-the-art of media architecture.

This year, we will extend the existing format with an academic conference track, new exhibition, awards and industry sessions, as well as a full day of workshops. We have a great crew organizing the Biennale; I’ll be heading the academic track as program chair alongside Ava Fatah from The Bartlett and we’re really excited about shaping this part of the Biennale. There’s more info to be found on the Biennale’s official home on the web, on Twitter (#mab2012) and on Facebook.

Hope to see you there!

Brilliant talk by Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, at the 2011 Eyeo festival. Barton’s projects explore collaborative and participatory storytelling using a variety of digital means – mobile devices, touchscreens, social media etc – and across a range of domains, from museums to exhibits and places of worship. The talk is packed with examples of this work and insights on creating meaningful modes of sharing.

With several of these technologies, we are only just beginning to see how we can employ them to scaffold interesting and worthwhile encounters. I suppose that this is one of the reasons why research in this area is so absorbing; new media emerge, old media transform, and we have so many opportunities to not just study, but actively experiment with and help shape what these technologies mean for us.

At the upcoming Designing Interactive Systems conference, held in Newcastle in June, I’m arranging a workshop in collaboration with professors Kim Halskov and Steve Harrison. The goal of the workshop is to advance the practical and theoretical understanding of documenting and reflecting on design processes. During design processes, tons of information comes into play, including sources of inspiration brought in to the creative process, design concepts created by desigerns, key decisions on how to move forward, user feedback, sketches, prototypes, and lots more. We wish to explore how design processes that extend over longer periods of time, weeks to several months, can be captured and documented, for instance through the use of collaborative web systems, how this data can be analysed, and what types of research insights such work can yield. In addition to discussing these issues during the workshop, it is the goals of the workshop is to establish a community of researchers and designers with a special interest in capturing and mapping design processes.

The workshop will be held on June 12th, if you wish to participate please visit the dedicated workshop website and send us your submission before March 5th.

These days I’m visiting the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon for the Interact conference. In addition to listening to interesting talks, partaking in discussions about designing for the city and the intersections of participatory design and critical design, and of course enjoying the local cuisine, I’m here to give a talk based on the paper Understanding the Dynamics of Engaging Interactions in Public Spaces, co-authored with Christian Dindler and Kim Halskov. You can download a preliminary version of the paper [.pdf] and/or enjoy the slides below.

In the paper, we look at some of the interactive installations we have developed for public spaces, ranging from a tangible tabletop installation for product presentation in a department store (the Lego Table) over a room-sized assembly of installations for an aquarium (the Hydroscopes [.pdf]) to a large-scale media façade installation (Aarhus by Light). In each case, we have explored particular façets of engagement, but when we compare the three cases it seems clear that we cannot adequately understand and explain what is going on if we focus on the system that we design and the immediate relations between user(s) and that system. In short, we need to adopt a more systemic perspective. On this basis, we propose that such perspective has to encompass physical, social, cultural and content-oriented dimensions of engagement. In the paper, we analyse specific situations of how the installations were used in practice by utilising the four aspects. What becomes very clear when we take these different aspects into use in our analyses is that engagement is very dynamic phenomenon. There are numerous transitions and shifts in how intensely people are engaged and which of the four aspects play a role at different points in time. In the paper, we use three concepts to describe these developments, namely emergence, relations and transformations. In combination, the dimensions of engagement and the terms to describe how they unfold in practice offer a first take on a framework for understanding the dynamics of engaging interactions in public spaces.

Fascinating use of 3D scenography in this dance performance, Cinématique, developed by Compagnie Adrien M. 3D projection seems to be taking off (we have worked on a number of such projects in my research group 1, 2, 3), and this is an impressive example of what can be accomplshed with seemingly simple geometrical shapes projected onto an empty stage. What really makes the scenography come to life in this case is the performance of the dancers and the ways in which they respond to and at time influence the visuals.

As ever more displays find their way into urban spaces, it becomes clear that there ought to be better ways of putting urban displays to use than just replicating content and interaction forms from past interfaces. These displays – which go under headings such as urban screens, media façades, media architecture, etc. – can be said to form a new medium, and as such they prompt interaction designers, content providers, and even decision makers to reconsider their practices and preconceptions.

In addition to exploring how individual digital displays function in the city, one of the major challenges is to consider how such displays can be part of a larger assembly of interweaving technologies. A few weeks ago, Nordkapp and Urbanscale presented Urbanflow, a so-called operating system for cities. In brief, Urbanflow envisions how interconnected urban displays may be put to use so that they may be more meaningful and valuable to inhabitants and visitors. The core functions of the system are journey planning and wayfinding, service discovery, ambient data, and citizen feedback.

Urbanscale has an extensive post outlining the underlying principles of the scenario, which to me stands as the most coherent vision of situated urban displays so far. For the past four years, we have been carrying out a number of experiments in the same vein in the Center for Digital Urban Living, e.g. Climate on the Wall, in which we explored public discussions in public spaces, Aarhus by Light, in which we explored the transformation of social behaviour in a transitional space, and the Danish Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai, which explored the entire façade as display. However, these installations can all be seen as stand-alone experiments to the extent that they are installations with individual modes of interaction drawing on more or less prefixed content.

Looking at Urbanflow, I am particularly fascinated with how the scenario considers a) how displays may actually be useful and meaningful in their context (which is sadly not always the case with urban displays), and b) how the displays are integrated into the larger ecology of digital technologies and services in the city. In my experiences this integration is probably also the most complex challenge to address in practice. It remains to be seen if and how the vision can be realized, but the conceptual groundwork is certainly there.

This morning I held a presentation about information visualization at the Headstart social media community. The slides of the presentation are embedded above and present an overview of current trends in information visualization. In particular, I focus on how information visualization expands beyond personal devices and displays (e.g. phones and laptops) into objects, rooms, architecture and public spaces.

Starting out from traditional screen-based visualizations such as newsmap.jp, Gareth Lloyd’s A history of the world in 100 seconds, and Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s brilliant we feel fine, i move on to discuss how visualizations are increasingly distributed into physical spaces, e.g. the Maeve installation for the Venice Biennale, into objects, e.g. the Ambient Orb, onto objects, e.g. the Mejlby Stone, and finally integrated into or projected onto architecture, such as the Danish Pavilion for the 2010 Expo in Shanghai and the participative Climate Wall installation.

The talk was recorded and you can view it below. Be warned, although the slides are in English, the talk is in Danish.

Here are a couple of snippets from the interview to whet your appetite:

“I think of urban design in terms of comfort with multi-scalar thinking, the ability to link the big and the small, from large landscapes to small urban interventions. I’ve done a lot of research with ecologists, working a lot to translate ecology theory into urban theory: how do we read cities as ecosystems?”

“There’s also a class called “Sensing,” in which students build sensors, collect environmental data, do mapping and create their own aerial photography using balloons. They launch their own satellites and collect infrared data.”

The launch of our research center, Digital Urban Living, three years ago seems to have coincided with an explosive interest in urban informatics and the changing experiences and practices of and in the city brought about by digital technologies. Since I’ve brought many topics from this research into my teaching, it’s good to get some insights into how colleagues around the world go about teaching their students the proper skills to address the changing urban landscape in the face of emerging technologies.