Living Architecture Spring 2009 Columbia

The Level of Engagement:

The prototype registers the level of interest in a certain topic within a community of people. Information about an issue is disseminated in a sequenced scheme. Every part of the story is site specific but is registered elsewhere, as part of the prototype output component. A motion sensor is triggered by people approaching the point of interest. It then activates a lever on the prototype which causes water that is held thinly leveled above to tip over. The tipped water is funneled down a drape of vinyl to another troth which holds a map. This map gets distorted with every added droplet and thereby creates another layer of information, that the piece of information related to it was approached so many times.

All this is the story recounts the trajectory of information. The interface is the prototype itself. If a person triggered a part of it that drenched one map, he will get more information from the graphic of the original map and the new one he helped create. Subsequently, he will be availed to other maps and will search out the next bit of information to give him the back story to that graphic, as well. The system of information and display at the architectural scale buttress each other out to produce a meter of involvement. Kinetic responsive architecture is thereby testing and proving its own effectiveness by relating it to people's sequential sense of curiosity, constantly alternating between graphic and narrative, which are both changing with the very expression of curiosity.