How does an individual learn the cycles of her surroundings?

This project seeks to understand how individuals can become more aware of their surroundings and gain a better understanding of place.


Mobile Culture

As our culture becomes increasingly mobile, it becomes difficult for people to root themselves and understand their place. Place entails an individual’s interpretation of both culture and environment. This study attempts to engender an understanding of place by revealing and inviting interaction with climate. Allowing an individual to manipulate the boundary between interior and exterior spaces creates opportunities for observation of both the smaller cycles of the day and the larger cycles of the seasons, in turn fostering greater understanding of one’s environment.


Extensions Of The Body

The built environment can become an extension of the body and prompt individuals to understand and participate in their surroundings. In The Hand, Frank R. Wilson discusses how the hand provides information and connects the brain to extensions of the body:
Cranes and backhoes work on exactly the same principle, substituting a human operator for the brain, motors for muscles, and cable (or hydraulics and pistons) for tendons. With experience, the operator eventually “incorporates” all of this machinery and begins to treat the machine’s bucket as if it were a spoon in his hand and he were doing nothing more complicated than eating his breakfast cereal. With a puppeteer, of course, there are no motors to assist with the lifting. From a control perspective, crane operators and marionettes confront many of the same challenges, despite striking differences in appearance (and scale) of the theaters in which they work. The crane operator, as we have seen “becomes one”with his machine; it is the same for the puppeteer.1
The senses are also essential to this information matrix. In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa discusses the need to make use all of the senses to understand one’s place. He discusses how the eyes want to collaborate with other senses, in an extension of touch. “The senses not only mediate information for the judgment of the intellect, they are also channels which ignite the imagination and articulate sensory thought.”2 Therefore, using multiple senses of the body allows for a more complete understanding of the cycles of the environment.

Communication

As occupants the manipulate multi-layered panels to meet their needs, the façade changes constantly. This series of interventions performed by several individuals communicates to the public both an expression of community and an illustration of the wind at play.

Technology

A solution was sought that would allow minute adjustments of the environment without constant adjustment by the individual. Microcontrollers fit the constraints imposed by the project well, due to their small size and low energy use. More importantly, they can be programmed to handle a variety of inputs, such as wind intensity and direction, and, in turn, activate a series of outputs, such as turning on a motor to close the window.

Studies

Initial studies categorized climate into into three sections: water (rain and moisture), light (including qualities of clouds and seasons), and wind (how air movement changes throughout the day and seasons). Because wind cannot as easily be sensed through the dominant modes of sight and hearing, it was chosen as the focus for the project.

The primary goal was to look at how wind changes over time. To understand this, a microcontroller and a combination of found materials, such as a mouse, drill battery, and several servomotors were used to create a working mock-up. To heighten the visibility of the wind, colorful shade fabric formed the panel bodies. The panels were set up to act like weather vanes pointing in the wind’s direction, allowing wind to pass through the structure. The system could also be set up to close the panels during extreme winds or to open only on warm days.

The mock-up became a window in space, allowing passers-by to understand the changing wind patterns. Additionally, some viewers interacted with the panels, adjusting them to suit their wishes. It was apparent that as individuals became more aware of the wind patterns, they also had more interest in their environment.

Concluding Thoughts

With the public installation of the system, new ideas began to unfold, and new questions arose: the built system controlled each panel individually, but how effective was this decentralized approach at the scale of the whole building? Would it be possible for the microcontrollers to communicate with one another? How could the system be centralized but also allow individual control? Centralization of a system might allow an entire building to take advantage of calm, warm breezes that could cool the building, while at other times it could close itself to cold or extreme winds. A natural ventilation system could be created in which panels on the bottom of the cool side of the building could open to let breezes in, while panels at the top of the warm side could open to release those air currents. Within this larger system, the addition of a handle could provide a tactile interface, and allow an occupant to adjust the panel to her needs. This leads to the next set of questions, which are, as of yet, unanswered. Does the microcontroller take away too much control from the hand? If the hand isn’t constantly adjusting the panel, how will the panel become an extension of the body? How does the manual system overlap the digital?

Endnotes
1 Frank R. Wilson. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Pantheon Books (1998), 89.
2 Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley & Sons (2005), 29-31.