What is a Wireless Environment?

(left of the drawing) FIXED - LINEAR/PREMEDITATED:

You commit to doing one thing until the transaction is complete. You cannot change things or commit to exchanges during the course of this transaction;- information is only exchanged at the end of the transaction. You are fixed to one space as long as you are performing the function/task at hand (waiting for a call, phone conversation via landline). Fixed spaces and preconceived encounters is preferred to over instant status checks, (an agreed waiting time and space set hours ahead, a tendency to wait for a phone call) with a hope that the details and steps are agreed to and events do not go astray.

(right of the drawing) METAMORPHOSIS - ON-THE-FLY/SPONTANEOUS:

Your network changes in response to your changing of actions. You have access to live feeds and instantaneous capacities to receive and transmit updates on your current status. You can act on the “spur of the moment.” You may not decide to meet a person until the very last minute; if you do you may not decide where specifically to meet him/her until your intended/random destination is reached. If you need an update on something you can instantly send the signal to receive the relevant information, with a peace in mind.

A task can occur no-where and everywhere due to portability (drifting across different rooms with a cordless telecommunications device, mobile phone space? Laptop space?).

Empathy Exercise: Understanding Wireless Living by removing Wireless Living

Objectives:

Describe the outcomes of living (under normal routines) that is suddenly removed from Portable/Network Technology.

Controls:

- No no electronic tags (ATM Card, Swipe Card)

- No wireless or WWW connections

o No Internet

o No Wireless Access or LAN

- No Portable Electronic Devices

o No MP3, Laptops, etc.

o Exception: Digital Camera as a recording device.

- No Broadcasting Electronics

o No TV, Radio

- Lilimit Telecommunications to Landline – Incoming Calls Only.

o No Mobile Phones.

Exercise Limit: Three (3) Days/Nights.

Data:

Day 1

Day2

Day3

Project Proposal: Mobility and the Wireless Office Culture.

"In the age of information, it is information itself that becomes environmental."

- Marshall McLuhan

"We are becoming less like Saint Jerome, immobilized in his study among his accumulated possessions, less like Dilbert stuck at his computer in his cubicle, and more like cyborg foragers navigating through electronically mediated resource fields. We are relying less upon things (or people) being at fixed locations, or available on regular schedules, and more upon electronic tracking and navigation to locate what we want and take us to it. Our mental maps of buildings and cities are becoming less static records of fixed features and more dynamic representations of current conditions."

- William Mitchell, Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city.

The issue between contemporary developments in information technology and its possible implications in architecture/urban design would form the investigation inquiry in this project proposal for the final year.

Specific attention would be given to the cultural implications of wireless networked technology (WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth) and portable devices (netbooks, iPhones, Blackberry). An investigation into the concept of network (spatial or organisational?), would be formed via the use of Geospatial Information Systems and less conventional methods such as web-crawling and spidering. There is a possibility of re-imagining architecture in a digitally assisted augmented state, separate from cartesian rules of functional proximity and hierarchy.