In the wake of the dot com bust and the dawn of a new millennium, the dichotomy between digital and analog space is being eroded by the emergence of new technologies positing more subtle integrations of the two. Recently, the UN released a report predicting an “Internet of things”, where the “users” of the Internet will be counted in billions and where humans may become the minority as generators and receivers of information. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, sensors, actuators, robotics and nanotechnology are in the process of making processing power increasingly available in smaller and smaller packages so that networked computing dissolves into the material fabric of the world around us.

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been researching ways of embedding computational intelligence into the built environment. Researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) began to look beyond the model of personal computing, which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention, to one of “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing that “takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.” In 1991, Scientific American published an article by Mark Weiser titled “The Computer for the 21st Century,” calling for computational devices to become “invisible” and shifting the focus away from solitary, immersive, virtual environments to a socially integrated context. This shift involves a new model for human interaction with computers that takes into account the spatial contingencies of everyday life. Almost presciently, this shift was predicated on the development of tiny, inexpensive microprocessors and the proliferation of wireless networks, which are today, in fact, ubiquitous.

Current research in ubiquitous/pervasive computing incorporates a fairly wide range of mobile, wearable, networked, distributed and context-aware applications. The idea of embedded computing has led to devices able to sense changes in their environment and to adapt and act based on these changes in relation to a user’s needs and preferences. Some conventional examples of this type of behavior include GPS-equipped automobiles that give interactive driving directions and RFID-based package tracking systems that allow senders, receivers and shippers to automatically track a package’s location through all stages of the shipping cycle.

Curiously, architects have been largely absent from this discussion and technologists have been limited to designing technologies that take existing architectural topographies as a given context to be automated or otherwise augmented. While we have witnessed the programmatic transformations that mobile computing and wireless networks have brought about in terms of the workplace, very little is happening in terms of a deeper consideration of what technologies such as ad-hoc sensor networks or location-based services might enable in terms of new spatial arrangements and programmatic mixtures in architecture. Further, as these technologies spawn spatial practices organized increasingly along vectors that intersect virtual and actual environments, they revitalize an interest in questions regarding how we locate and orient ourselves within, navigate through, and otherwise inhabit contemporary environments. If one maps the historical dialogue between architecture and technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, television and Internet, it becomes clear that the opportunities (and dilemmas) of an interplay between ubiquitous/pervasive technology and architecture remain to be explored and articulated.

While 20th century notions of cyberspace promised to unlock us from the limitations of body, gravity, material, geographic and social constraints, contemporary technologically mediated space flows in and out of everyday embodied activities constantly negotiated between virtual and actual domains. Nowhere is this more evident than in the so-called non-places of airports, shopping malls, supermarkets, highways, hotels, banks, and call centers. In these transient sites, time is experienced both as duration and as transaction history, sense perception is distributed to the surrounding environment, and issues of identity, location, and mobility are recast in terms of profiles and access privileges.

This studio will explore the creative opportunities (and dilemmas) of these emerging spatial conditions, in search of new sites of practice and working methods for architectural investigation.