F R OM S I LI C O N T O S O LI D I T Y : AN I N V E S T I G AT I O N O F P L AC E D E S I GN --------------------------------------------------------------------------Avon Huxor, Joey Julien and Jorge Gil from okupi info@okupi.com www.okupi.com January 2001
There exists a new awareness concerned with the design of place, sites in which space and meaning are brought together. Applying ideas from architecture and planning to inform the design of network technologies that co-ordinate the encounter between people and people, and people and content. This is particularly important in the emerging environment in which access to the virtual becomes possible in almost any physical space; through mobile devices, interactive TV and smart rooms. The opportunities for the virtual and the physical worlds to interweave become manifold. Physical places open to virtual space the same way virtual places can enrich physical space. It is known from studies of users that the Internet is perceived as a set of places that one visits. The sites act as buildings, the pages as rooms; each populated by its owners and visitors. The terminology used by the web community is not just a convenience but one deeply rooted in the spatial understanding that we all bring to particular forms of media interaction. The concept of place is present in our perception of the medium. The terminology people use to refer to virtual space is rooted on the navigation/interaction we have with the physical world. That experience is translated to interactions in the virtual. These spaces are interfaces that promote our on-line activities. Rising from the New Flatness For most of us, our experiences of the visual representation of the virtual realm, are rooted in the technological apparatus of the flat monitor. This is not a bad thing, but we should be very careful, for what we are witnessing relies on the same illusionary devices that are said to have fooled the first audiences of the Lumiere brother’s The Arrival of a Train at the Station into running out of the cinema in order to escape being hit. This brings with it the interesting notion of how we tend to apply familiar rule sets to unfamiliar situations and it is important to question what this means for architecture to avoid falling into the same trap - why does the flat projection screen have to rely on a Cartesian ontology in order to give us any meaning? Much like the planar viewscreen of a computer generated virtual world, an essential paradox for painting is how to give the illusion of depth on a flat canvas. This challenge was met by the Cubists at the beginning of the last century by depicting multiple viewpoints of objects onto a single picture plane
in an attempt to capture them although projected from the mind's eye - a cohesion of simultaneous impressions - and perhaps reflecting a more real representation. We owe the fundamental basis for all graphical imaging using computers to French philosopher René Decartes who arrived at an abstract mathematical system that used geometry and algebra within a co-ordinate system to project three-dimensional perspectives onto two-dimensional planes. There are several layers of illusion at work whenever we experience a virtual space within a computer. Primarily, we are concerned with the imitative processes that are the Holy Grail of most computer games and CGI animations. Since the computer has no conception of the nature of space, it is bound by these spatial metaphors and codified rule systems contained within its programming. But software is just that - soft. Malleable and deformable. Plastic in its intention and waiting to be formed. The deception and illusionary aspects of presenting images to our eyes that give us coherent perspective-based depth cues and foreshortening, are only superseded by the fact that the physical space is truly only the thickness of the memory chip. The ephemeral relationship that the microchip has with the information written on it - carved out of intricate patterns of silicon - is one of an immensely compactified book. Its contents liquid, non-permanent and erasable. What effect does this loss of inscription has on new forms of architecture? This liquidity of the physical architecture of the computer, created on the fringes of developmental technology, makes it siteless. The information written onto its surface is temporary and ephemeral. It is enough to recognize the fact that our cognitive conception of a space, physical or virtual, is a valid manifestation of architectural principles and that a necessary feedback loop can be set up between existing architectural knowledge and the results gleamed from its application into the digital domain. Architects arriving at this point of departure need to detune their acquired knowledge, stripping out the frequencies of real-world constraints and retune them within the expanded framework that is currently being established by the ephemeral nature of the CPU. Fleshing Out the Spatial Skeleton Architecture is an art of space design geared towards the creation of places by charging space with meaning and/or planting seeds for that meaning to grow. This infusion of meaning can be gleamed from an exploration of the space’s identity deriving from the site, the client, the users or a design brief - it produces a narrative that takes the user through an engaging experience. Meaning is also something that builds up over time from the community that forms around a certain site. Places have meaningful content that provides them with an identifiable name. They serve a community, being attractors of people’s desires.
Space = non-place It would not be overly cautious to draw parallels between the supermodernist Marc Augé's definition of a non-place and the space of virtual environments. The non-place is a space of anonymity, of movement and constant renewal where time leaves no traces. Indviduals using this space do not empathise with it in any way. In the physical world it is usually associated with large public spaces such as airports, train stations, shopping malls and car parks. Or they are spaces of mobility, the in-between spaces of connection: motorways, tunnels or public transportation. Cyberspace can be perceived as a vast non-place. There are search engines, portals and resource lists on specific subjects, large sites where thousands of anonymous users visit constantly, unaware of each other. Also, on the internet, we spend most of the time travelling because the sites constantly transport you from one item to the next and then the next via hyperlinks. Often we end up in simple repositories of information or commercial sites that we leave as soon as we have performed a desired transaction. All of these spaces form an immense and abstract web, a complex structure that we cannot comprehend, thus remaining an invisible cartography. Although we spend our time there it remains anonymous to us, eventually associated with a brand, an icon or an activity. And others that populate these spaces are often autonomous software agents performing a particular search or transaction on behalf of absent users. Space + Content In virtual space the informational content has the role of a grounding site on which one builds up the space. Like the traditional human constructions that use the available materials, virtual architecture can use this information from the site to determine its technology, defining structure and shape - content becomes context. And in the future, new building materials will emerge with the increased understanding of how to apply transformations to this digital matter. Content is therefore an important element for the creation of virtual places. The meaning that enriches a space does not just rise from a void interaction with the user, like with the TV walls of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 45 (the sole purpose of the programs was the interaction with a focus on automatic action/reaction failing to provide any content - in that case the private sphere of the personal place was devoid of any meaning becoming a sterile media space). The meaning in virtual places must rise from a narrative surrounding the content, which becomes the private history of the place defining its identity. To some extent this identity is similar to the narratives of classic movies by Walt Disney, TV shows like Star Trek or EastEnders, video games such as Zelda and role playing games. These narratives build up a personal history creating a sense of place and belonging in relation to these mediated loci and personae. The later examples have an extra level of engagement in comparison to other media through their interactive nature. It is our own
personal experience that builds up our memory of the place and there is a real participation in the content of the virtual medium. Space + Community Cyberspace can offer a sense of place by the fact that it promotes the emergence of communities. In virtual environments, groups of individuals not necessarily sharing physical proximity, but who have a common interest, are able to create social networks. The community grows around this shared experience, where events eventually turning into memories. Therefore, the existence of the group will charge the virtual meeting space with a specific meaning. It becomes an identifiable place for this community: identifiable by those who belong to it and outsiders who visit it. It is a collective identity builtup from collective memory just like in physical neighbourhoods. This identity, so important for the nature of place, is strengthened by our participatory role. The community stimulates prosumerism - consumers becoming producers of material that feeds back into the system; we do not simply subscribe to the consumerist phallacy of the mall by passively scrolling through settings carefully constructed to seduce our user profile. Towards a Ubiquity of Place When designing virtual environments it is not only important to focus on the creation of place, but also to consider how their nature informs and is informed by the physical space of our actual existence. This relationship between the virtual world and the physical one is often seen as competitive. This view is superseded by one in which each mode of engagement: the physical and the virtual, is given due respect for its own strengths - and the presence of one mode can overcome the weaknesses of the other. What becomes important is a coherent design approach that acknowledges both the physical and virtual places that the user inhabits, aiming to create a unified experience.