Ubiquitous Computing and Architecture
Task: The three pieces we’ve read this week deal with how buildings, or technology, or a city relate to people and vice versa. Choose one (or more) models to think through how a person might relate to something that an interaction designer might create.
As a part of this week’s assignment, we looked at how other disciplines such as architecture and computing influence interaction design. While readings the articles assigned to us, I noticed a very interesting similarity between the two concepts:
In his article ‘How buildings learn’, Brand states that ‘People and their dwellings were indistinguishable: domes referred not only to the walls but also to the people within them. Evidence for this is found in inscriptions and texts, and in which the word refers now to one, now to the other, but most often to both at once, to the house and it’s residents envisioned as an indivisible whole.’
What instantly jumped out to me was how similar this was to Ubiquitous computing, where Weiser writes about ‘conceiving a new way of thinking about computers, one that takes into account the human world and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.’
Smart homes are an example of ubiquitous computing at its finest. The whole concept focuses on moving away from traditional screen based devices such as computers and televisions, and instead incorporating technology in the spaces around us, such that we use it without even realising it. As soon as you near your house, the house detects your location and sets the air conditioners and lights to your preferred settings. Soft music starts playing in the living room, while the food you had prepped earlier gets heated up in the microwave, ready to be eaten. The water in your bathtub heats to the perfect lukewarm temperature, helping your fit in a quick bath right before bed, where your sheets have already been fluffed up and warmed.
In order to create seamless experiences, we must understands concepts of how buildings ‘grow’ organically around us, changing with time and use over the centuries. While 20 years ago an architect alone designed a house, interaction designers are now going to have an increasingly important role defining all of the ways users will interact with houses of the future.

Image credit: https://towardsdatascience.com
