Digital Architecture: Material/Immaterial

It has revolved around to taking part in embedding the digital immaterial into physical material. Architecture and physical space is somewhere which I haven’t ventured to much in my studies, but have been presented with the perfect opportunity to dabble around. Presented with an area of Plymouth called Devonport, we have been presented with a pretty open brief on aiding the reconstruction of a community which has been deprived of attention for so long.

All of the research activities in this module are group-work, and our lecturer has taken the task of mixing together students from the 2nd/3rd year of Architecture in with our Digital Art class. This allows the groups from previously being made up from similar knowledge backgrounds to completely change the group dynamics, bringing in new ideas from previously unexplored views.

This completely changes the group dynamics from previous tasks, presenting a completely different viewpoint. Hopefully this will lead onto doing something a bit different and adventurous from usual, allowing us to weave what was previously just immaterial into material.

As mixing of classes is a rarity for our group, the first session consisted of taking part in a team-building exercise easing the Architecture students into the idea of Internet of Things, where we embedded digital information into the environment.

Such technologies which allows this are in the form of Apps on smartphones. The App of choice for us to initially use was Stickybits which unfortunately was having server issues and disabled us from using it entirely. Fortunately competition thrives in this world and a semi similar service (in technical terms) called Tales of Things was the backup App, where you can tag an object with a QR code and attach a personal story with media to the object.

I am glad our group really got on well and stuck in with the activity, which was to devise up a monster, and hide it somewhere on campus. It turns out things haven’t changed from the usual really, we take a standard task and somehow go slightly over the top with it. It seems that it was miscommunicated that we were only to do one monster, not three, but still we continued on to create a narrative and story behind discovering our monster for an unlucky group.

Later on this week we have an opportunity to discuss ideas with one another, I really look forward to seeing what the Architecture students can bring to the table. After all, I am fed up of my ideas!