In this letter, I would like to
focus on two questions: how digital technologies will shape the future of
architecture beyond form finding? What kind of adjustments we may need to make
to tackle with the new disruptions in the digital revolution?
We are now seeing a moment that digital revolution
is changing every domain of urban lives. The way buildings and urban spaces are designed,
built up, lived in and even thought about is now part physical and part
digital. Innovations like Contiki and Thingsquare enable us to connect almost
every component in a building to the internet and make our built environment
much smarter than ever before. Architectural standards like WELL Building
Standards has set up to address new opportunities and challenges in the digital
revolution. New mode of urban businesses and jobs which were simply not exist
few years ago are also created, such as Mobike and urban computing scientists.
Digital technologies are also a powerful tool for architects to improve the way to
communicate useful information to users(habitant). With digital technologies as
data mining and HCI, Architects will now know their users better: not only who
will use the buildings but also how they want to use it and how they feel about
using it. Because of the sensing networks and IOT, personal health and genetic
tests data will also be connected to the built environment, thus buildings are
able to adjust to the best mode for enhancing wellness of users. Additionally,
emotion components and interaction sectors will be added in to buildings, which
will humanize the environments and build up a new type of social networks in
both physical and digital sides.
In addition, digital technologies offer new
opportunities to citizens to engage in future democracy agenda. Architects may
consider engaging collaboration with a network of non-designers in design
process for public projects in the future. By sharing their proposed building
plan and 3D models with citizens, architects will get immediate and live feedback
from their users. It will enable the public, private and community sectors to
contribute ideas, comments and proposals in real time.
However, as Henning Meyer from London School of Economics
and Political Science mentions, in the digital revolution, we are undoubtedly
faced with large-scale disruptions in many areas that require adjustments. People
(include architects) need to be educated, or they might lose their jobs, their
voice and their rights. For example, when I was working on a smart parking
project last year, the impact of the digital technologies on the employment is
obvious: Instead of ten people, we only need one person to do the same thing now,
and 9 of 10 of the current employees might be laid off. When architectures and
urban environment become smarter, low-skill workers may lose their jobs.
I couldn't agree more with what Vicente Guallart, chief architect
of Barcelona, said, that every time we have economic and cultural progress we should
visualize this in the public space. Unfortunately, in
most cases, the progress is very private and capitalistic. Expertise and resource
always goes to big mansions. While high income group are enjoying the convenience
brought by digital technologies, low income group are suffering from the
broader gap between experts and non-experts. I believe digital technologies are
much more powerful than we thought. By changing the physical environment,
we can transform issues like social inequality, urban violence and losing sense
of community. I am interested in the idea of integrating Interaction design and
user research into architecture. What I would like to explore with digital technologies
are not new patterns and new forms, but their impacts on human emotion,
communication behavior, public health, security and equality.
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