REDIWork

Finally, the whole years work on 'The In-Visible Envelope' has come down to this. Part Business Plan, part Infrastructure, part Web2.0, part Mechanical. Something i call the REDIWork. Remote Distributed Workplace System.

Click on the image below to be redirected to the temporary website.

Renderings

One last post before the finale

The Precedents

RFID Sorting Systems

Go-Get Carshare




Augmented Reality, Teleconferencing

The Manifest


The Envelope - Current Vacant Office Spaces

The Infrastructure - 24hr Remote Infrastructure (Lockers for 4000 people, Data Storage for 4000 people, Security, IT, Concierge, GPS Bicycle and Segway, Central Receptionist/Librarian, Upgrades to Existing Library on site).

The Office Space - To User's Requirements.

Help needed...

Does anyone know how to create a geometry from 3d polylines or contours in 3dsMax or Autocad, or do the same with the massing tool in Revit?

Library Experiments

The Distributed Office

Here is the interim proposal, along with the synopsis ripped off from the flash file. Patience with the flash file it takes a while to load.

Planning

To design a still tower for a society of mobile knowledge workers is redundant. A static, mono-located office space designed for said workers to perform his/her task is defunct considering the anywhere/anytime and ‘anyplace’ potentials that wireless mobility affords.

Is a new highrise office development required? A run by Yahoo! Pipes against market sources such as realcommercial.com.au and commercialrealestate.com.au reveals exact locations and rentable areas in Parramatta. Add those disparate envelopes up and you will find more vacant spaces than those designed for the Parramatta Masterplan. 

In terms of the working environment, no new forms, materials, etc are required, simply upgrades and infrastructure additions. In this case, what are the still forms of space that is required in this new workspace system? Data Farms, Processor Farms, Central Receptionist Areas, Lockers, in short: remote infrastructure. 

Field

Now that there is no top-down architectural hierarchy and order where there is bottom-up micro-coordination, how do you determine a space-syntax to the scheme? 

Geographic features are fed into Yahoo Pipes and measured against end user ratings from bottom up sources such as Truelocal.com. A restaurant located along a nicely designed avenue that is close to public transport scores lightly compared to the strip of restaurants further north of Church Street in which the locals dub “Little Paris”. Fields of influence i.e. likely scope of travel an average user would like to spend travelling to from his/her workplace are extrapolated and densified against the end user ratings. 

Routine

We have established that the relationship between the spaces and external features is one based on something similar to end user ratings and leeways, rather than top-down principles of order, form, scale etc. 

We could now reverse engineer these score to predict likely usages of the vacant building floors, and in turn optimise the organisation of said spaces. For example, a wanderer who is mindset on getting a cup of coffee before work will “given the opportunity” likely end up in a space close to the coffee shop if there is no preconception on where he/she is going to work at. Similarly, A client coming into town requesting a face-to-face meeting will likely be held in a office space close to his/her hotel and near parking facilities.

Remote

A plethora of infrastructure upgrades is likely to be expected to sustain The Distributed Office. To effectively cater for the wireless, anytime/anywhere knowledge work society we will need to implement rigorous plug and play capabilities in the new teleoffices, including integrated access (via swipe card, smartphones etc), hardware docking stations,  shared print facilities and teleconferencing.

Ironically, the only fixed, built function is that relating to the storage of vast data servers and processors located in the refurbished library. Here, traditional office services can integrate and operate in a more efficient manner. A librarian can adopt his/her expertise in indexing and archiving to store all hard-goods and information of multiple peoples and corporations. A centralised receptionist centre can operate like an IT support service, directing all incoming calls, emails, people etc to their respective locations. With this comes an invigorated role of the librarian and the receptionist; once considered as a low assistant based profession can now be redefined as an all-seeing archiver/indexer and a mover/shaker. Premium customers can opt for a concierge service where goods are brought directly to their place. However, the new consolidation entails drawbacks; longer working hours for library staff, and the library itself is expected to operate 24-hours.   

     

Generally, nothing significant needs to be done to the existing vacant lots; besides minor infrastructure upgrades as mentioned.

Hub

Replacing hard information with soft information in the context of a library entails interesting dualities. Books are now seen as technology that behaves in replication and redundancy, one collection stacked upon each other, one edition after another. Social Media and bottom-up information however has the characteristics of renewal and reassembly, updating on the click of the refresh button. While books are collections of many individual objects of single strings of information, digital and social media are its binary opposite; one collection – continually refreshed information.  The building lives in a refreshed state, responding to information, and also to infrastructural use (the coming and going of bikes, the fluctuations in network and computer usage, the amount of hard content stored and retrieved etc). 

  

Creative Futures: Networks + Clusters

Flashback to last semesters trip to one of the creative Sydney talks where people have been tracking the movements of Sydneys design community (literally) though GPS time lapse mapping. The interesting thing from the exercise they did was to show how the office was not just one place you visit everyday; in fact these team workers stop at multiple locations, crossing different suburbs and taking multiple long distance trips throughout the whole day.

Anywho, heres the link to the actual GPS overlay http://gpscreate.com/catch_and_release/

As a side note ive just discovered that the idea of a distributed office have been implemented in the past, and packaged into something Go-Get style called a "Telework Center"

To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder

Montage, with images from own collection and quoted from Bernard Tschumi, "Architecture and Disjunction"

....And to continue again in the words of Tschumi; "Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls." It doesnt matter how a space is designed and where it is placed; nothing exists between architecture, order and program. 

Diagrams: Bernard Tschumi: Parc de la Villette. A programmatic brief is decomposed and reassembled prior to being scattered through an arbitary grid on the site. Images courtesy of Max-Roslin Melser.

As Tschumi stresses that there is no longer any relationship between architecture to program and meaning, can we say that there in the 21st century there is nothing you can draw between the task, the activity, the event and the architecture it is encompassed by, especially now that 'function' and 'cognition' is taken over by portable and wearable devices? Peel the thoughts of architecture away from neogeography, and you will find the most popular places happening in any odd locations; someones warehouse, a piece of road, etc. 

Assume from the above that any location is good to place a space, as long as things will happen in them, forgoing ideas such as siting, site analysis, main views and vistas etc. Consider also that a 'brand new building' for a mobile set of knowledge workers is now defunct. In conclusion, there will not be a brand new CBD precinct physically built into the intended site.

Now consider dispersing space; if the idea of mobile working is that it could occur remotely, we have a premise that the new architecture for the wireless office is parts of here and there. And there are abundant existing office spaces opened for lease and sale. No new spaces are required. Herein lies the invisible envelope. The new building envelope. The distributed office building! 

Net NLA - The Net Leasable Area (NLA) of the existing proposal (107,375 m2), minus the NLA of all the buildings required to be demolished for this masterplan (32,744 m2). Masterplan data sourced from Parramatta City Council. 

Filtered via realcommercial.com and commercialrealestate.com with removal of duplicates, via Yahoo Pipes and ArcGIS.  

  

Now what?

The critique last week hit hard some of the realities of the project which i have been neglecting. Mainly the risk that has become evident now is that the architectural brief itself has almost disappeared.

How do i take these ideas of dynamic information and social technology into a brief and realise this into a project. This is something that needs some urgent dwelling into. At one point in experiment 3 a quick attempt of trying to architecturalize the concepts in experiment 1 and 2 proved insufficient, as trying to force four walls into something that cant be described by four walls is a challenging paradox, and a huge risk in the project.

My initial idea of a wireless and remotely activated office/work/play culture has now turned into an evaluation on information as reflected in networking. As a result, simply designing a 'wireless workplace' in the general sense (you can do your work wherever) does not do the research much justice. It was pointed out that 'Viral Places' are not simply about the geographic location but what happens in those co-ordinates that are shared and reflected upon in a social networked society, by people in turn existing in multiple geographic locations. Geographic location is irrelevant. The question is now how can you bring architecture into places and situations that dont want to be in one place?

The break is a good time to burn through some more various blogs out there and some readings. Also there needs to be more filtering of those experiment outcomes, with some to be discarded and some carried forward, and packaged to be more succinct rather than generalised. Either focus on dynamic information, or social media, but not both. Most importantly what the final outcome at the end of next semester is going to be; do i pursue in designing something in a location, to be viewed in plans, elevations, sections, models, renderings? Or maybe reduce the physical scope of the product; can say an installation in a foyer space, a short film, a short animation?

Final Marketing and Research Matrix

See below for the final revised Research Matrix and 4 marketing images (the fifth one has already been included in this blog).

Also included below are 4 of the 5 marketing images related to the Experiments. 

Information (Ubiquitous) - Research Documentation

And see below for the documentation on the final experiment. Please be patient with this as there are tons of externally linked videos that flash has to load up on every page.

//Encountering difficulties uploading the flash file to my FTP, will have a go again later today//

Information (Ubiquitous) - Results

Professional Practice callings meant im posting this one week late than expected, but here they are.

Above: Prototype 01 for spatialising information environments - User responsive AR.

Above: Prototype 02 for spatialising information environments - Remote Feeds (visual).

TURNING POINT: Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitous).

Having rigged a series of ActionScripts in Flash to enable multiple camera feeds into FLARToolkit, it occurred to me to revisit my blog, particularly focusing on the literature surrounding the definition of my problem space.


Previously i have been quoting the idea of a read-write environment with vague allusions to the Klein Bottle and Escher's hands drawing. I previously argued that these two examples reflect an environment that can describe a metamorphic concept of space and place, that one change results in another which consequently alters the former ad-infinitum. This metamorphosis occurs, as i had argued, because of the recency and updatability of information that is overlaid onto our habitat. 

Escher, Drawing Hands

Klein Bottle

What was not envisaged was that the pilots in augmented reality can reflect a literal construction of metamorphic space;- assemblies where space turns upon itself much like the Klein Bottle. What if stairs can literally turn into itself once you reach a platform, alike Escher's stairs? What if reflection were distorted (a front view presented as a side view etc)? What if reflection was a reflection of a reflection, like standing in an enclosed mirrored box? See below for new pilot on the Moebius Effect.

Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitious). Pilot Testings.

Here are a series of short pilot testing of the ideas and concepts presented in the literature view previously.

Experiment 03 - In-Formation(Ubiquitious). Literature Review

A brief literature review of the ideas and concepts behind experiment 03 regarding augmented reality and information space. Experiment results and demonstrations will come soon.


Literature Reviewed:


- Steven Spielberg, 2002 - Minority Report
- Mamoru Oshii, 1995 - Ghost in the Shell
- Keichii Matsuda, 2009 - augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

Submission 02 Documentation

Update on The Research Matrix

Still 01 - Synopsis of Methodology

Still 02 - Experiment 01: Information (Collective) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart. 

Still  03 - Experiment 02: Information (Negotiated/Discursive) - Click (HERE) to be forwarded to the full resolution version stored in Deviantart. 

Experiment 02 - Information(Negotiated/Discursive).

Check out below video and stills for the main results of my experiment (in response to the questions raised in my previous post) concerning aggregated read-write representation of places as seen through social media. Main documentation of these images and experiments will be presented in the next post.

Brief Overview: - This experiment explores the virtual representation of geographic places by feeding a mash-up of Social Media API feeds into a Geographic Information System via Yahoo Pipes. Density maps are created based on the rating that each entry (point) received from its peers. This experiment led to the identification of "Viral Places";- features that are not physically/visibly centered but have achieved the same popularity in density in terms of its representation in social media environments.

Neo-Geography, Datascapes and 'The Public Sphere'

"How can we understand the city in times of globalisation and explosion of scale? Do we lose control in these quantities or can we file its components and manipulate them? Let us imagine a city that is only based upon data. A city, that wants to be described only by information. A city, that doesn't know any topography, no context, purely huge, only data..."

'Metacity/Datatown', MVRDV, 1999 (film).

The Personal - 'Mapping the Credit Crunch' - BBC Radio 4. Maptube Engine.

The Absurd - 'Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices, 2007' - Maptube Engine.

"Geography is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance and one that is becoming known as 'Neogeography'...a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and/or/ artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques."

Hudson.Smith et.al (2008). The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), London.

In the discussion of a public sphere, Alan Mckee (2006) debunks the Modernist notion of the term 'public sphere' as a singular, progressive, and consolidated representation of a common culture/interest among all people. Commonality, according to the modernist doctrine, is the glue holding the elements of the public sphere together. 

In reality, the fragmentation that have always existed in the public sphere are becoming more visible to each other; - beginning from the extension of voting rights to the rise of broadcast culture. What is once the homogeneous 'official public sphere' is now challenged by distinct interpretation of places based on personal and affiliated memory. If we discuss the issue of heritage in this light, we may ask what is important to people;- is it an iconic monumental building of 'cultural' significance, scribed by years of official documents and media as an object of historic relevance? Or is it a visually indistinct, un-noticeable, perhaps run-down building that is associated with an aggregate of intimate memories and experiences concerning the neighborhood in question?

Left: Place (official, iconic, civic, progressive) - Customs House Library, Circular Quay. 

Right: Place (fragmented, memonic, negotiated) - Former Community Language School, Auburn.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of information we now consume digitally is user created, and the distinction between the professional and the amateur in broadcast culture is increasingly blurred thanks to the availability of content making and airing tools/techniques at little or no cost. Broadcasting has been transformed from a read-only to a read-write culture. What kind of representation of geography can we draw in light of this, keeping in mind on one hand the rise of user generated information and on the other the imperative to account for an indeterminate, fragmented, and negotiated nature of a 'public sphere.'

How can collective information contribute to a "bottom-up" approach in identifying a site/brief?

Preamble:

Formerly, an approach to the design process involved having both the program and site as predetermined criteria. We are given a site to work on and the function that it is to be, and if we weren't given those we tell ourselves firstly that we want to build an X on a place Y. We then examine everything that place Y has on offer for a building X, or anything surprising that building X can offer to Y. Either case, we have made the prejudgment that building X is the best thing that could go on place Y or vice versa. We practice as a god-mode architect who says that "i want to build this building that would fit onto this site, believe me it would." 

What if we leave either the site or the program as indeterminate factors? What if we know what we want to build, but lets leave the site out to the jury, especially if we are looking at a large scale building X that would have a significant impact to site Y. Rather than holding copious amounts of "community interaction sessions" with a few places the designers have in mind, what if we can tap into the vast and varying quantities of related information on the internet and translate those into a brief or identify a site?

Introduction:

“Web environments can be pictured as data bases that can be provided as a central service or can be built from the bottom up in decentralised fashion. To an extent this reflects our division between designers and users with central systems having designers in distinctly different roles from users.”

“The extent to which users and/or designers can create derivative products from the data no matter how it is created is part of the functionality of the system. This can range from entirely preconceived ways of manipulating the data in the search for patterns or networks to loose sets of rules that users and designers can invoke in creating searches for new kinds of patterns that are not predetermined.”

Hudson-Smith Et.al. Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web2.0 through Crowdsourcing. UCL Working Paper Series 143 (8). London: CASA

This experiment follows on from the initial project proposal of an live/work/play office precinct situated at Civic Place, Parramatta. The experiment would test the proposal of Parramatta as the best suited place for commerce oriented redevelopment by combining current market data related to "commerce oriented development." Three sets of information, (the employment market conditions, the commercial real estate market conditions, and the housing real estate conditions) have been scrutinized in order to arrive at a place for commercial oriented development at the LGA scale. In preference to real-time and flexible information, the experiment shyed away from "official data" arrived by sources such as census data or RPData as they tended to be skewed, outdated, or generalised.

  

Assumptions/Challenges:

High expectations of the data turning in favor of Parramatta LGA was anticipated as it is heavily backed by current metropolitan strategies as a key performance area for commercial redevelopment. It was also expected that market data would be easily obtainable in legible forms, that is, the data would immediately present us with a title, a figure of density and a time factor. These data were assumed to be obtainable in RSS format.

The outcome was that a significant portion of these data were skewed to highlight some areas, for example, premium listings where sellers paid extra to duplicate their advertisement were evident in expensive areas such as Sydney and North Sydney. To maintain the information asymmetry between buyers and real estate agents, many of the data were not available on RSS feeds, and the methodology was amended in order to strip out website data and reconvert them into useful RSS feeds.

Methodology:

Website information from various employment and real estate agencies were fed into Yahoo Pipes. A technique known as "mashup" was used to unpack and recombine the data into relevant formats, namely the location the intensity and a brief textual or pictorial description. These were then converted into RSS feeds which were able to be cut and organised into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then translated into ArcGIS for analysis. 

An examination into the general descriptive content of each LGA area when converted into RSS was done to determine the specific market climate for each area. For example, whether the area was compact and centralising where the advertisements showed an abundance of new, compact properties or whether the area was dispersed, decentralised where the advertisement showed an abundance of detached homes, old warehouses, etc.

Results:

The data was recombined and evaluated. Parramatta LGA was third as the most suited place to build an office complex. After Sydney City, the experiment identified Blacktown as a more suitable candidate for an office complex based on economic criteria. The experiment was affected by the quality of the data by the way that the broadcasters tended to hide information on pricing and size (residential), and also by the way that the data is deliberately skewed to make certain items more prominent than others.   

    

Experiment 1.1 - 1.3 - Still representation of dynamic information

Experiment 1.1 - Animating

Experiment 1.2 - Remove/Bend

Experiment 1.2 - Extrude/Pipe

Research Matrix Released

Click on the image below to be redirected to the research matrix titled 'The In-visible Envelope' hosted on an deviantart account. Meanwhile i will need to scout for some internet space this is getting too unorganised.