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On Wednesday night, I gave a talk at "The Influencers" lecture -- as part of the dotdotdot lecture series sponsored by the SVA's Interaction Design MFA program. I talked about Christopher Alexander -- how interaction designers and computer scientists love him but architects hate him. I also included some research I'm doing that links Alexander's early work to early artificial intelligence. My presentation is below, but the PDF version has my notes (you'll want them for the middle of the presentation, when I describe Notes on the Synthesis of Form & A Pattern Language).

Thank you so much to Liz Danzico, chair of the SVA's Interaction Design MFA and her team for inviting me, and the other excellent speakers: Allegra Burnette, Steven Heller and Jason Santa Maria for a stimulating and fun evening.

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

A version of this piece was published last spring in Manifold, published by Rice School of Architecture. It's a review of a lecture Neil Denari gave a year ago at Princeton titled "Shrinkwrapping Vague Things."  In his studio last fall at Princeton, "Air Tight," Denari's students designed a showcase for potential buyers of the Airbus A380: a tightly controlled experience, completely interior and wrapped around the Airbus.

At the lecture and in our dinner conversation afterwards, I was struck by that Denari's approached reminded me of what interaction designers do, from research and photographic explorations, down to crafting the tiny details. It's difficult to do on all scales, the macro to the micro, but Denari manages with aplomb. "Design at All Scales" is the firm's slogan. (We also got to geek out about the line-ups for the Golden Palominos and Public Image Limited, but that's a different story.)
- - -
Immaculate Surface and Covert Construction

Neil Denari knows how to interact with his audience, how to externalize the projects, how to gauge the room, how to wield an image. He can argue about the lineup of 80s bands that you probably don't know. Above all, he is a deft architect with a broad portfolio of built projects, one who practices design at every scale. Denari's November 7, 2007 lecture at Princeton featured his scalar acrobatics and cultural ergonomics: the process of organizing into place a shrinkwrapping of vague things.

Ankles, eyes, hands, codes, software

Denari frames arguments with photographs. The images operate on a Lilliputian level, his lens catching young adults in Shibuya on a sultry August night. From the street-grade vantage, he catches the ankles of his subjects as the camera looks up at them against a black night sky. They are illuminated by small signs and doorways on a side street, and by Shibuya's grandest interface: the Qfront with its famous living billboard (the one you remember from Lost in Translation, with the walking elephant). The photographs capture moments at different scales. These instances shift from the body, to the door, to the sign, to the street, to the billboard. They catch people's interactions with devices, and yet the devices stand in juxtaposition with the spaces they inhabit: a boy holds a game controller in a crowded arcade; a photocopier backs against a sea of blue cubicles opposite a religious shrine. It is the relationship of the hand, the eye, and the billboard, a triangular interaction, micro-to-mini-to-macro, that Denari brilliantly catches.

Denari's moves reflect the approach of interaction design. This discipline is the creation of the products, systems and interfaces (usually electronic) with which people engage. It developed in the early 1980s out of the desire for the interior behavior of a computer to meet the molded exterior of its hardware. Doing this effectively requires an understanding of several levels of interiority: human behavior, system function, and site limitation, to name a few. Could we see his projects, especially his interior renovations, as a new type of software that brings many interactions into focus?

Pristine, in effect

Denari twice mentions Antonioni's Blow-Up during his lecture. This isn't a surprise, given the ways his zooming in and zooming out reveals what is not available upon first glance. MUFG Nagoya (a private client center for one of the world's largest banks)uses separations of scant millimeters on panels and joints on its 28-meter black stainless steel façade; zygotic shapes forming into circles and then lighting for the entrance; tangerine custom furniture for the lobby.

But zooming out to the High Line 23, a residential building on New York's High Line, Denari occupies a different dimension altogether. Here, it is a matter of hacking building code. Each facet of the "leftover" site the 13-story residential tower will occupy is won through negotiation. "Zoning x Desire = What it takes to build in Manhattan," quips the DMNA website. The building is the manifestation of these interstices. For the projects he showed, the typical plan and program are straightforward, nearly boring. It is always section that shows the potential and kinetic energy; it is the ceiling plan that shows the ulterior motive for circulation of the body and the eye. In construction, the elements meld together smoothly, vacuum-formed and glossy.

Or do they? With the 1956 House of the Future, Peter and Alison Smithson created a plastic house with undulating, white, pristine surfaces--at least, in effect. In reality, the Smithsons achieved the surface effect through layers of plaster on plywood: the result of detailed crafting and not of space-age manufacture.  As Denari zeroes in on the ceiling detail of the MUFG Ginza banking branch, he first shows the underlying metal framing. He then notes the moment where the wooden surface bends to meet the white, planar pathways of the ceiling.

But here, appearance and construction differ. Handworked stucco achieves the effect, not technology. It is similar to the prototyping tools industrial and automotive designers use as they model the form factor: they sculpt it from clay. Denari wins with cleverness, for knowing the right design tool for the job. When technology can't offer pristine effects, it doesn't matter whether the year is 1956 or 2007. The hand completes the curve and the eye is none the wiser.
 
Shrinkwrapping vague things, then, commands an understanding of motion beneath the surface, bringing things into alignment, the structures the film clings to. Denari plies these things on all levels in his conversations as well as his buildings. It is eye, hand and billboard, the laws and politics governing the site as much as it is 80s avant-garde rock and a contrail connecting LA to Tokyo. Through all its scales of operation, it is the dance of interaction that sculpts his immaculate surfaces of covert construction.

(Thanks to Shawn Protz and Enrique Ramirez for their insights and to the editors and staff at Manifold.)

I'm a few days out from the fabulous third Design Engaged, so well-organized by Andrew Otwell, Jenn Bove, Boris Anthony and Mouna Andraos. I've talked to so many people at the event about things grand and banal, and now, I've reimmersed in school's more theoretical issues of critique, history and theory.

All of these things leave me thinking about the nature of design as it seemed to be defined by the community surrounding Design Engaged.

There is a real privileging of Making, to the extent that I feel I should capitalize the word. Making includes building something, prototyping, manufacturing a product. Making seems to be particularly valued when it results in something being not only prototyped but manufactured. It relies on tools and materials. Other things go into Making, like sketching, molding, and wiring. But Making does not seem to include writing, researching, or interpreting.

Design is the endeavor of form and forming. What to design and how to do it is the primary, vital question of the designer. Form takes place not only by work in three dimensions and by machines, but through conversation, interpretations and argument, by pencils and words and feedback. Since cybernetics, design has taken on networks and feedback, as a correcting mechanism, to define design problems, to introduce possibilities of the agency of objects.

Design can encompass the forming of things that never get built. This is the realm of sketch, drawing, rendering, model, maquette. All of these involve some manner of imagination, conception, figuration. Their formation may may be pinned up on a wall to be critiqued, may see their way into stacks of construction drawings or business plans. It may also stop at any moment: left in a sketchbook or hard drive, balled up after being spit from a plotter, left in a pile of old models, rejected in a competition, turned down by a client. If the instances of design only matter in their manufacture or construction, much -- or even most -- of design and architectural history must be written off.

The history of design since the founding of the Bauhaus (1918-1933) tackles the questions of building and making within a theoretical and built context. In the education and work of designer, there are many stops on the way: learnings of color and form, practice in a specific field, discovery of how all the fields converge to make the work of art. But also, this same trajectory tries to make sense of itself -- to perform, to write, to photograph, to document, to share.

Does Making leave out interpretation or sensemaking? If it excludes these activities, what does that say in turn for the nature of design? And where does it leave those of us for whom design involves these other activities?

I'm reminded of an e.e. cummings poem:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

Ralph Rapson passed away this weekend at the age of 93. He left a 70 year legacy as an architect. Rapson studied at Michigan and Cranbrook (under Eliel Saarinen), went on to teach at the New Bauhaus at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and enjoyed a 30 tenure as dean of the University of Minnesota school of architecture. His buildings included embassies in Scandinavia and a variety of iconic buildings in Minneapolis. His work shares a similar legacy to that of Paul Rudolph and Kevin Roche--monolithic, 1950s-70s era buildings that have fallen out of favor but were still important. In Minneapolis, he designed the Cedar-Riverside housing complex (1973), the solid Rarig fine arts center on the University of Minnesota campus, and the newly demolished Guthrie Theater.

I have a long, personal relationship to the Guthrie. I worked there as an usher between 1988 and 1993, around the time the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened (it's now celebrating its 20th birthday). In a renovation for its 25th anniversary in 1988, the Guthrie had already lost many of Rapson's original touches, particularly to the facade-- the original facade is above. Still, the theater interior felt much like what the sketch above belies. I can still tell you that it seated 1441 people, that the colored seats made the house look full when it wasn't, and that nobody was more than 50-odd feet from the stage.

At Christmas a year ago, I went to the Walker Art Center, and both gasped and cried when I saw a backhoe through Rapson's original Guthrie. I still wonder why it had to be knocked down, why it couldn't be preserved. It was a special place and while I love the Jean Nouvel-designed building as well, it's sad to see Rapson's major work disappear.

He was active up until the end of his life -- in an Archinect discussion, someone pointed out that he was in the office on Friday, the very day he died. As Rapson said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune two years ago, "My attitude is well, why not just go on living doing the things I enjoy and live as fully as I can? Who knows what's going to happen? I hope I'm working right up to the last day, It ain't work - it's fun!" he said.

It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video.

Greetings from Austin! I've just arrived for South by Southwest Interactive. This marks #11 for me and the 10th year I've attended (as well as my 10th on the advisory board). It is my favorite time of year -- I'm delighted to be here and to be a part of it again

On Saturday March 9 at 11:30, I am moderating a panel called "Meet the Architects" -- one of the few panels that I can think of that's ever happened at the festival that deals with architecture not as a metaphor but as the actual practice. It's an idea that emerged out of a conversation Bryan Boyer started with Hugh Forrest, the conference director, a year ago, and that continued between me, Bryan, and Enrique Ramirez. The official description goes:

A new kind of digital practice has emerged. We see it in our buildings and our cities: new architectural interfaces, new communities, new ways of thinking about the physical world around us. In "Meet the Architects," we'll take on these ripples in physical architecture and urbanism. This panel tracks new directions in architecture culture at the intersection of digital, film and urban environments; architecture zines, blogs and communities; and architectural and urban research.

The panelists are an excellent bunch. We've brought together Bryan Boyer, who will soon graduate with his master's in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, John Szot, technical director of Brooklyn Digital Foundry, Mimi Zeiger, publisher of Loud Paper and an established architecture critic, and Enrique Ramirez, my classmate, a senior editor at Archinect and the figure behind Aggregat456.

As the panel approaches, I'll be posting information related to the conversation we have (images, recommended books and websites). If you're in Austin, do come. We'd love to see you.

Not much has been published about Cedric Price's Generator project. In fact, not much at all has been published about (or by) Price (1934-2003), an architect who understood architecture as that which set the conditions for interaction, as opposed to imposing formal will on a place. He was famous for statements like, "Technology is the answer... but what was the question?" and for suggesting that architecture might not be the right solution to a problem (maybe you don't need a new house. Maybe you need to leave your wife, he suggested). He is best known for two unbuilt projects: the Fun Palace (1963-67), a collaboration with radical theater director Joan Littlewood, and the Potteries Thinkbelt, a mobile university on rails (1965).  Though he avoided personal technology in his office--the fax didn't have paper; the phone was only answered during strict hours--his ideas presaged concepts we're familiar with today, including the Internet and ubiquitous computing.

Generator (1976-79, unbuilt), sought to create conditions for shifting, changing personal interaction in a reconfigurable and responsive architectural project. It was to serve as a retreat and activity center for small groups of visitors (1 to 100) to the White Oak Plantation on the coastal Georgia-Florida border. Designed for Howard Gilman, the CEO of the Gilman Paper Company and a generous arts patron [1], it followed this open-ended brief:

A building which will not contradict, but enhance, the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere; has to be accessible to the public as well as to private guests; has to create a feeling of seclusion conducive to creative impulses, yet ... accommodate audiences; has to respect the wildness of the environment while accommodating a grand piano; has to respect the continuity of the history of the place while being innovative.[2]

Price developed a scheme of 150 12' by 12' recombinable, mobile cubes with off-the-shelf infill panels, glazing and sliding glass doors; catwalks; screens and boardwalks, all of which could be moved by mobile crane as desired by users to support whatever activities they had in mind, whether public or private, serious or banal.

In order to determine the initial arrangements--menus, as he called them--Price used programmatic research tools: activity questionnaires filled out by Generator's potential users, who then mapped these against requirements for infrastructure, space, quiet or privacy. He used the small, handheld Three Peg Game to determine the original layout for Generator. 
Its rules were simple: take turns with the other player in forming a line of three same-colored pegs (a "mill"), whether vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The winner is declared when the opponent cannot make a move. "It is usual to play a series of games until one player has a two game lead when he is considered to have won outright," the rules note. From here, in combination with the programmatic exercises, he created what he called menus: arrangements of Generator's cubes, screens and paths that would engage people in unexpected interactions with each other and with Generator as they used it.



Price was particularly interested in the idea that Generator would surprise its users (or for that matter, at least himself). In collaboration with programmer-architects John and Julia Frazer, Generator became "intelligent" with the addition of computer programs and embedded sensors. Each element of Generator would be outfitted with an independent microchip. The sensors would interact with four computer programs that performed a variety of tasks, including keeping inventory, aiding Generator's users to design different layouts, and most powerfully and importantly, getting bored. The boredom routine would run if people did not request changes of Generator frequently enough, or if the parts were not aptly used. It would draw up new plans for Generator, which would be handed off to the social elements of the project.

The social elements of Generator acknowledged that a retreat site composed of mobile, responsive components would prove unfamiliar to visitors without human facilitation. Thus, Price created two roles, "Polariser" and "Factor," to catalyze on-site interpersonal dynamics and logistical requirements. Polariser would encourage people to use Generator in novel ways and facilitate their interactions with each other; Factor would operationalize the desires of Generator's users onsite, operating the mobile crane to suit the menu and handling other human to site requirements. Polariser was Barbara Jakobson, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the person who introduced Price to Gilman. Factor was Wally Prince, the operations manager for the White Oak Plantation.

Like many of Price's projects, Generator was never built. After nearly three years of design, the project was stymied by financial turmoil and a feud within the family-run Gilman Paper Company. Moreover, inasmuch as the project served to benefit employees of the company, the workforce did not support the project: the maintenance requirements were too great. Gilman was unable to clear the hurdle and had to abandon the project. John Frazer continued to hope that the project would be revived, suggesting a new start in 1989, again in 1995, and shortly before Price's death in 2003.

Technologically speaking, it must be said that Generator was a notably prescient project. It represents the nexus of architecture and nascent ubiquitous computing. The technical ideas behind Price and the Frazers' collaboration on Generator have still not been largely realized. Yet all of the groundwork was in place for Generator--its flexible program and its elements--before the sensors and programs were ever discussed. The programs were useful for the ways they could unleash unexpected interactions, but without the investigations into the connection of the social and the site and the underlying concepts, the idea would not have endured--an important precept for designers and architects working at the intersection of pervasive computing and design.

What space does drawing occupy within architecture? Does it exist to support the eventual building of an idea? Or is it something more? Basic architectural education places a heavy emphasis on drawing, on translating an idea out of the air and onto the page. The opinion on the matter swings back and forth over centuries. In a time of greater functionalism and technological push, the drawing is a construction document (Mies van der Rohe's drawings, for example). In the late 18th century and again in the mid to late 1970s, it is visionary, a matter separate of construction.

It's a question of the position of paper architecture, unbuilt commissions, competition entries, sketches. Drawing is vital to architecture, in a literal sense. It brings it architecture to bear. It's a form of meditation, of generation. It builds a future vision, yet its medium is divorced from its future construction. Étienne-Louis Boullée in Architecture, Essai sûr l'art (sometime between 1788 and 1798) that building is auxiliary, which makes the constitution of architecture the dominion of design, of paper.

It is necessary to conceive (of architecture) in order to perform it... It is this production of the mind, it is this creation that constitutes architecture that is of consequence to us: the definition of the art of production and bringing to perfection of any building. The art of building is thus but a secondary art that, in our opinion, would be suitably belong to the scientific components of architecture. [5]

Architectural drawings generate new reality by stealth. The nature of drawing reinforces that architecture doesn't need to be built in order to create or occupy social reality, a mode of interaction, a way of life. Drawings provoke and maybe seen "for what is potent in them rather than what is latent," [1] that is, for what is performed instead of than what might be read.

The verb "to draw" (according to the OED) derived from traction and attraction and was used in Old English (c. 897). Over a period of 400 years, it came to connote many other things, including the marks left by tangible items. By the 1300s, "to draw" meant tracing a line across a surface or cutting a furrow with a plow; by the 16th and 17th century, it referred to delineation and construction. From the activity came the concept of the drawing as a discrete object, "The arrangement of the lines which determine form."

James Smith addresses the performance of drawing in his expansive, 1816 tome, The Panorama of Science and Art. He writes, "Drawing, strictly speaking, includes only the art of forming the resemblance of objects by means of out~lines; but it is usual to call those performances drawings, where only a single colour, as Indian ink, is employed to produce shades."[2] Drawing maintained this strict definition stayed for nearly 150 years. The Museum of Modern Art would define drawing as "a unique work on paper" [3] in 1944, adhering to the single-color definition until 1964, when the museum expanded its description to include pastels and watercolors, and in 1971, papiers colliers and other collage forms. [4]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, following Boullée, writes, "In a manner of speaking... the drawing is the architecture, a priviledged [sic] vehicle for expressing architectural intentions: intentions that are poetic in a profound traditional sense, as poesis, as symbol making." From the height of architectural modernism, Walter Benjamin saw the generative in a functionalist view of architectural drawing in his 1933 article, "Rigorous Study of Art." He noted the "marginal" status of architectural drawing and the way in which such drawings exclude all but practitioners of the profession, thanks to their specificity and jargon--their function as a tool for architects. (How is this different today, one has to wonder.) Nonetheless, he sees the drawing as more than just tools of instruction, but as a space for imagined experience. Benjamin writes,

As regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place, a production which less often benefits the reality of architectural planning than it does dreams... There are various indications that confirm the specificity of this world, the most important one being that such architecture is not primarily 'seen,' but rather is imagined as an objective entity and is experienced by those who approach or even enter it as a surrounding space sui generis, that is, without the distancing effect of the frame of the pictorial space. Thus, what is crucial in the consideration of architecture is not seeing but the apprehension of structures. The objective effect of the buildings on the imaginative being of the viewer is more important than their 'being seen.' In short, the most essential characteristic of the architectural drawing is that 'it does not take a pictorial detour.' [7]

It is Robin Evans' conception of architectural drawing as a distinct, particular, and generative act that so strongly resonates with architects and critics. He likens drawing to literary translation, in which the translator moves a text from one language to another without alteration: yet in the act of moving, "things can get bent, broken or lost on the way." [8] The drawing is the translation from one language to another, carrying the idea of a building into the space of communication. Evans elaborates, "for architecture, even in the solitude of pretended autonomy, there is one unfailing communicant, and that is the drawing." What differs for architects vis-à-vis painters and sculptors, however, is the fact that the architect does not work with the direct medium of endeavor.

Two possibilities emerge from this concept. One is that architecture is only what the architect directly touches and manipulates. In this way, the architect relinquishes the broader reach of architecture in the social, political and economic spheres--a fairly limited depiction of architecture's nature. The more interesting possibility (which interests Evans) speaks to the notion of translation and transmutation. In this manner, drawing brings architecture into existence: "The subject-matter (the building or space) will exist after the drawing, not before it. [...] it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing." [8]

And so, architectural drawing is not just documentation for future construction. "What goes out is not always the same as what goes in," Evans writes. Beyond this, it is realism is stood "on its head." Returning to the importance of drawing as potent, we can consider how it gains this power. It's potent, not latent: performed, not read. The act, the action creates this reality through "an enormous and largely unacknowledged generative power: by stealth."[8]