Experimental Research Lab: Synthetic Landscapes ©

Faculty: Brian Lonsway

Course Timeline: Semester-long, commencing August 2003, ending December 2003

Number of Credit Hours: 2 RPI; 4 FIU; Var, UNIACC

Brief explanation of where the studio falls within the curriculum sequence: Studio 7 [UNIACC] and Studio 5 [FIU] fall within an undergraduate student's third or fourth years. Experimental Research Lab is a mixed graduate and undergraduate course which students take at various points in their academic career. For undergraduate students, this is typically in their fourth or fifth years. For graduate students, it varies widely.

Pre-requisites to the studio: In both UNIACC's and FIU's cases, the studios follow an "incrementally requisite" structure, where subsequent studios require the successful completion of studios of a lower number. In other words, "Studio 5" requires "Studio 4" which in turn requires "Studio 3," etc. Experimental Research Lab has no formal prerequisites, but does request that students have experience in computer-aided design, computer programming, or hardware engineering.

Approximate Number of Students: 10

Pedagogic Framework

The collaboration will entail the development of one built project in Santiago, a larger-scale design (unbuilt) project of which the built part is a component, and a series of networked, computational prototype objects which will be deployed on site for public interaction.

Students at FIU will assume primary responsibility for the design of the unbuilt project, students at UNIACC, the design and construction of the built project, and students at Rensselaer, the design of implementation of the prototype objects.

The design is construed as one large project that everyone is participating in, each with his or her special foci, but with the large project in mind. Studios and classes generally meet on their idiosyncratic schedules, but there will be one live on-line meeting weekly with all students and faculty on Tuesdays from 2 until 4 PM, EST. Project deadlines will be arranged around these weekly meeting times. There will be three major presentations during the course of the term, with external discussants (including municipality staff and clients from Santiago) included via the internet.

We are seeking financial support from our schools and external sources to afford field trips for those involved at Rensselaer and FUI to Santiago at one point during the term.

Project Overview

The project will involve design collaborations in Architecture, Product Design, and Computer Science between the academic programs of the three schools involved and city and local authorities in Santiago, Chile to site, plan, design, and build a venue for public assembly, performance, and internet access. This urban intervention is intended to provide a point of attraction and coalescence for an area of Santiago, which is being economically depleted, by suburban development, urban flight, and poor development decision-making. While we are not proposing that a single urban pavilion can change these trends, we do believe in the potential of such a project to civically renew interest in a neglected urban area, and to pedagogically serve as a design challenge for considering an unpredictably inclusive public in the context of an important social program.

Core Objectives

1. To develop a socially responsible program which fosters public participation in neglected urban areas.
2. To introduce students from different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds to each other via a multi-disciplinary collaborative design project.
3. To advance the understanding of the creative impacts of technology-enabled design collaboration on community-based urban revitalization efforts.
4. To examine the potentials and limitations of technology-enabled collaboration for internationally, intellectually, and socially inclusive participation

Clients and/or user consultants involved

The studio diversity is enhanced by the nature of the collaboration: two public universities, in Miami and Santiago, are working together with a private technical university to engage a local public population and municipality in Santiago to reclaim a vacant site for public gathering. By combining this diverse expertise -- of professional faculty, of diverse student bodies, of local public interests -- we aspire both to accomplish a universal design environment both on-site and within the educational environment. Students from many different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds will be interacting online with clients (physically remote to some of the students) to realize a design.

In addition, there is a 'behind-the-scenes' collaboration which is part of the Americas Path (AMPATH) initiative -- to provide publicly available global internet access through a creative public intervention. AMPATH, over the past four years with over $25,000,000, has achieved the high-speed network connection of three national research networks (Argentina, Chile, and Brazil), with four additional to come this upcoming year. We are working with RETINA, the national network agency of Chile, to commit to this project the resources required to wire a public site of Internet2 connectivity. This will continue the social program of AMPATH -- to provide high-speed network support to overlooked places currently off of the global pipeline.

Approach to the Proposed Studio Process and Content

This design project is a component of a larger design/research project focused on the construction of a networked community development infrastructure -- part physical, part computational -- which integrates local and international expertise via a networked immersive environment to build public performance centers and conduct multi-sited performances between the US and South and Central America. It builds upon the collaborators' experiences in remote design collaboration, community design, internet-based performance, architectural acoustics, image processing, and architectural design with the following participants.

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Synthetic Space Environment in Troy, NY. The SSE brings accurate real-time acoustic environment simulation, multiple-camera view synthesis, and physical environmental interfaces into a black-box performance space to allow multiple performers in multiple geographic locations to perform in a single virtually constructed performance environment. Its major research initiative is the creative "coupling" of immersive visual simulation and immersive acoustic simulation to make geographically separate and physically idiosyncratic performance environments appear to be architecturally connected.
• Florida International University's AMPATH Network and Internet Studio Initiative. The Internet Studio Network was initiated by Alfredo Andia and is based on the Americas Path Project (AMPATH) initiative of Florida International University (FIU). The AMPATH Network was developed by FIU with a grant of over $25,000,000 US (by the National Science Foundation, Global Crossing, Cisco, and TerraMark) to connect all National University Networks in Latin America via the high-speed Internet. Today, the AMPATH network has successfully connected the national university networks of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil to the FIU Internet2 POP server and plans to connect to 4 more countries in the next year. The iStudio initiative has used this network four the past four years to support semester-long collaborations between FIU and ten schools of architecture and design in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
• The University of Art, Science, and Communication’s Department of Architecture in Santiago de Chile, and the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires. These schools have been key participants in the iStudio initiative, and will be the local contacts for the sites of deployment in South America. The studio described in this application is part of the first phase, working on prototypes in Santiago with UNIACC. Future studios will involve the faculty at the University of Buenos Aires.
• Espacio K and ARQmediaLab in Santiago de Chile. Both of these exhibition spaces have agreed to host exhibitions and/or documentation of the project in Santiago during its development and after its completion.
• EUNA (Buenos Aires) and RETINA (Santiago) National University Network Agencies. The national agencies have been the points of contact between AMPATH administration and the points of connection. They have agreed to investigate the potential of providing free access points in the built projects for public access.

There are two main areas of creative research of the project, the first of which is one of the foci of the collaborative studio described herein. First, it seeks to form a better understanding of the impact that technology-enabled design collaboration and cross-cultural artistic performance may have on community-based urban revitalization efforts. And second, it seeks to advance fundamental scientific knowledge in computer vision and acoustical simulation to compliment the technical resources available to Internet performance artists and architectural or urban designers.

By developing a long-term application area for the Synthetic Space Environment in collaboration with the iStudio consortium via interdisciplinary design studio collaboration, we see the opportunity to engage diverse creative expertise from around the world in productions that address the role of technology, architecture, and performance in community revitalization. For this to happen, we believe that the advances in knowledge must happen in tandem: knowledge of community desires and resources will inform the scientific development of the technological environment, and an evolving knowledge of the technological apparatus will facilitate potential remote engagements to help inform community decision-making in the long-term.

The applicants will work in architectural design collaborations between their respective academic programs and city and local authorities to site, plan, design, and build public venues, which can host performances and other public activities. Simultaneously, the collaborators will conceptualize and develop computer-based interactive systems (public interfaces, mobile robots, environmentally responsive systems, etc.) to be prototyped and unveiled at public events. These urban interventions are intended to provide points of attraction and coalescence for areas of cities being economically depleted by suburban development, urban flight, or poor development decision-making. Much like many urban areas throughout North America, which have been depleted by suburban expansion, cities throughout South and Central America are experiencing a waning of the exciting pedestrian life upon which they have relied for centuries. The increase in automotive transport, the concomitant increase in air pollution, and the environmental destruction caused by the construction of exurban shopping centers and other "regional attractors" are causing serious developmental problems for Latin American downtowns. While we are not proposing that a few urban pavilions and computational devices can change this trend, we do believe in the potential of thoughtful design interventions and public events to renew interest in an area.

While the FIU- AMPATH initiative has allowed high-bandwidth network technology to reach the servers of national university networks, the "last mile" -- the connection between those centers and the universities themselves -- is still poorly developed. Because of this, most architectural, designer, and artist communities have no access to the network. Building upon and extending the technological research base of the SSE, and extending the reach of the AMPATH network, this studio project and the larger design/research project see to bring the benefits of an international, experientially immersive network to these communities. South American artists, designers and architects will be brought together to create a potentially empowered community online that can utilize the technology as a medium of expression and contact in the public sphere. The result will be a collaborative system tied to local contexts and at the same time amorphously able to engage multiple international contexts in a collaborative discursive space.

Response to Reviewer’s Questions

1. Assure that there is a process to incorporate a human-centered diversity agenda within this remarkable international technological effort.

   The focus on diverse individual and collective contribution will be an essential aspect of the collaboration in terms of our teaching methods, academic requirements, and community investments. The project is built around open collaborative design between diverse constituencies, including the multiple student bodies, the faculty, and the community and municipality groups. The students will be explicitly required to engage with the other constituencies either through the online collaboration process (for students in the USA) or through direct engagement (for those in Chile).

   It is also important to note that the proposed technological development is seen as a means to accomplish greater human-centered interaction and foster greater diversity in this interaction rather than as an end in itself. Our primary agenda is to keep the collaborators rather than the collaborative system front and center.

2. Assure that the sub-groups within the planning and design sites are represented: these include children, elderly people, people with disabilities of all ages, socially disadvantaged people.

   We assure that, to the greatest extent possible, all groups participating in the design sites will be acknowledged and embraced in the design considerations. We see two significant opportunities for this: the use of the design interventions in the site in Santiago to encourage greater accessibility for people who are physically disabled, and the use of the computational devices to encourage greater accessibility for those with sensory disabilities. These will work together with an online website to increase general accessibility to the site for those unable (for financial or physical reasons) to attend the site in Santiago. We will work to promote the website at locations with public internet-connected computers to encourage a wider online interaction among the non-computer-owning public.

3. Assure that the users of the product – the urban pavilion – are involved with the critique process.

   As the “product” will consist of a physical pavilion, an unbuilt design proposal, and three networked computational devices, we see the "site" as a virtual composite of these five elements. To this extent, we assure that all users -- site visitors and municipality leaders in Vitacura, Santiago; online 'visitors' to the evolving architectural design proposals; and web users interacting with the computational devices -- will be involved in the critique process. We will host public reviews -- with in-person and online reviewers of the projects at the mid-term and final.

4. Assure that the student’s evaluations of the collaborative process are documented as well.

   We assure that all student input and evaluation of the process will be well documented. Ongoing identified evaluations will be collected online through a type of software called a "forum" application, which allows for open communication between project participants, and stores all electronic posts in an easily viewable database. Nearing the end of the collaboration, we will explicitly solicit anonymous evaluations of the process from students and collect these in electronic form.

For more information, contact Brian Lonsway at lonsway@rpi.edu.

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Citation: Lonsway, Brian (2003). Experimental Research Lab: Synthetic Landscapes ©. Retrieved (Enter date here), from Universal Design Education Online web site: http://www.udeducation.org/teach/asj/lonsway.asp

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