#42 intelligence
CJSW
The late industrial designer Bill Moggridge remarked that “It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed.” Bill’s GRiD Compass Computer, considered the world’s first laptop, is included in a show called Beautiful Users. The exhibition, at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and curated by Ellen Lupton, identifies the lineage of user-friendly design. What started with military engineer research, industrial designers Henry Dreyfuss, Niels Different, and Alvin R. Tilley brought the computation of the human body to product design after World War II. The exhibition reveals process, influences, and even a move to incorporate the direct participation of users into the design. Show catalog here.
Architects Simon Kim and Mariana Ibañez of IK Studio take another approach to intelligence, exploring the embodied intelligence in surface and form to realize an augmented architecture. Stable geometries might instead adapt to need, to a site, and to the environment. The POLYhouse is designed as a series of modular chains that can be linked together to create a courtyard or even a tower. In the process, buildings that move on demand might be possible. An early collaboration with Carbon Dance explores cybernetics and movement in the creation of a responsive environment.
In the book, Paradigms in Computing, Ibañez explores architecture through the lens of computing, wondering how architecture might move beyond the boundaries of buildings and cities.
image credits: 1/ APOC park interior, photo by Borris Castellanos for IK Studio. 2/Leveraged Freedom Chair Prime Prototype, photo courtesy of Cooper Hewitt. 3/ The Measure of Man, photo courtesy of Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. 4/ Modarch Urban Mat Configuration, courtesy of IK Studio.