protoSPACE
What is protoSPACE?
Kas Oosterhuis, October 2009
A Brief History of protoSPACE
The concept of protoSPACE was introduced during my second term [2003, 2005, 2005] as professor from practice at the Faculty of Architecture at the TU Delft. ProtoSPACE was designed to become a vehicle for multidisciplinary and collaborative design in real time. Why multi disciplinary? From my non standard architecture practice ONL in Rotterdam I observed that the experts involved in a design process have the tendency to take the work home and transfer it to the people who are actually do it. This representative management system is not efficient, many details get lost in translation. And it takes weeks or even months before the designer has a proper feedback from the engineers, or from the Client. There is an alternative: invite hands-on people to the table of experts, let them connect their data, let them bring their laptops into the meetings. An ideal situation is when the one who can decide is the hand-on him or herself. Collaborative design and engineering in real time [CDEinRT] is not unlike a dialogue between people, but now executed through programmes and databases. The edialogue is not a substitute for the dialogue, but an augmentation of the decision space, which has obvious advantages: speed, completeness, integrity of data, accuracy, adequacy, efficiency, and abopve all. It inpeoves the social and emotive connection to the project. This is what protoSPACE is about, this is the promise, which we have taken on to realize in a step by step strategy.
ProtoSPACE 1
Step 1 has been the installment of protoSPACE 1 as from 2004 inside the walls of the old BK, the late sixties structure that eventually burnt down in 2008. We installed an interaction zone in front of two large screens, connected as to create a panoramic view into the virtual worlds, top get the players embedded into their interactive design worlds. Hyperbody has been experimenting from the beginning in the year 2000 with game development software as the controller of the interaction between designers and design environments. With the professional and lucid of sensor specialist Bert Bongers, now Associate professor at the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, we managed to set up a variety of meaningful interaction scenes: RFID tags to identify the user who is at play, pressure sensors to map user commands to the players feet, video tracking to define the position of the players in the interaction field, infrared sensors to turning functionalities on and off, voice recognition to swap from one scene to the other, rotation sensors to enhance hand movements in space. We jumped into soldering and having fun with the fact that it worked. And more and more we became aware of the necessity to create a meaningful interaction, it certainly is not enough that it works. Hans Hubers started his PHD on collaborative design, and Nimish Biloria began his PHD on interactive corporate environments, while Henriette Bier started her PHD on real time design interaction in the 3d lay-out of functional requirements. All three have finished their PHD tracks successfully and are still at Hyperbody as members of the daily Hyperbody management staff, managing game technology [HH], coordination of a full masters track [HB] and the computation and performance research portfolio [NB], teaming up with the Building Technology department.
ProtoSPACE 2
My third term involved the building of the iWEB, revitalized as the second life of the Web of North-Holland pavilion, including the installment of protoSPACE version 2. We installed 5 screens covering 360 degrees panorama, we had a serious 19inch rack with the computers and the servers. ProtoSPACE 2 was inaugurated in March 2008, embarking on a practical and visionary future for experiencing interactive architecture. We were able to invest 120.000 EUR in the protoSPACE environment. We were happy to have Marcos Novak as our special long-distance guest, sharing an interactive trajectoyr through his scanned 3d brains. The future was looking bright, finally we got our own lab, with all the functionalities we needed for taking further steps ahead. And then, in May 2008, there was the big devastating fire, the whole faculty burned down to a total loss, nothing could be saved, or was allowed to be saved, except for the chair collection. Our iWEB was placed at a distance of over 50m from the burning faculty, and small wonder, it was not touched by the fire at all. Despite the mourning over the loss of the faculty we were satisfied to see the iWEB and protoSPACE saved. But then a cruel reality took over. The site was claimed by the rescue team and no-one was allowed to enter the fenced disaster area. It was declared a no go area. The rescue team cut off the iWEB from the electricity grid, and as a consequence the roof of the iWEB collapsed. We acted immediately and placed a generator to keep the inflatable roof under pressure. But as soon as the officials found out we were denied further access to the area. The official reason: too dangerous to enter the disaster site. But the iWEB was at safe distance, even if the concrete structure of the faculty would spontaneously collapse, nothing would happen to the iWEB. But no chance, we were not allowed to enter, they even labeled us as terrorists because we had dared to enter the forbidden site. How absurd. So we lost the iWEB and protoSPACE 2 in tragedy, almost as if the decision makers did not want anything to be rescued, as if it had not been fair to the other people who had lost all their valuable books and memoralia. Up to date [I am writing this October 2009] the iWEB is still in the same deplorable state, waiting for insurance money and for further decision about its possible future.
ProtoSPACE 3
End of 2008 all faculty departments moved into a quickly renovated old administrative building much closer to the city of Delft, kilometers away from the iWEB, which caused us to decide that keeping protoSPACE in the iWEB was no longer an option. So we came up with an emergency plan to establish a temporary protoSPACE 3 inside the walls of the new old faculty. Getting this plan approved did indeed take another year. A whole year with no protoSPACE, devastating for the continuity of Hyperbody research program. So in this way we had our share in the suffering from the fire with the other departments. We used this period to focus more on education and we doubled the numbers of master students from 30 to 60. As if protoSPACE had not been crucial to Hyperbody. Forced by unfortunate circumstances we wer slowly drifting away from the innovative interactive and collaborative protoSPACE agenda. It is not exaggerated to state that Hyperbody flourished in crisis. But we had to find our way back to the interaction agenda. We started a hands-on MSc2 track, coordinated by Chris Kievid, to redesign a new building for the protoSPACE lab. The intriguing results will be used for the development of this born-again laboratory for collaborative design and engineering, with a stronger emphasis on interfacultary ad multidisciplinary research then was achieved within the all too short life of the previous version.
Taking advantage of the de facto situation, the temporary protoSPACE 3 installment in the 150m2 Zaal D of BK City [which is the name the displaced faculty was given], I requested my management team to establish strong links between the Minor [collaboration with Industrial Design], Msc1, Msc2, Msc3 and Msc4 tracks and the protoSPACE environment. And to establish strong meaningful links between the research portfolio Computation and Performance and the protoSPACE environment. Festo and Philips are involved as our research partners. We established connection with the Delft Science Center to permanently exhibit interactive installation for a bigger public as from 2010.
protoSPACE 4
ProtoSPACE 4 is now in the design process, soon to be presented to the Board of the TU Delft,schedueld to be placed between BK City and Delft Science Center, in a park-like setting. ProtoSPACE 4 is intended to become an icon for innovation, as a showpiece for the TU Delft. It will be Hyperbody task to fulfill these self-imposed huge expectations. After the pitfalls of the development of the earlier protoSPACEs, interactive architecture and collaborative design and engineering are bound to acquire their pole position in the international discourse on architecture, hopefully ackowledged for its inevitability in architectural education, research and practice.
ProtoSPACE 4 as a demonstrator of proactive architecture
A representative part of protoSPACE 4 will made using rapid protyping techniques. Approximately 20 components will be assembled as to form a part of a structural shell. Each component has embeded functionalities like ventialtion, daylight, interior light, interactive furniture, mobile interaction units [protoCELLs], LED screens, heating / cooling heatexchange units. All functionalities are distributed among the whole enveloping surface, in changing densities. For example a dense group of LED screens will act as the information field, a higher density of interactive furniture will be the hands-on working field. Each swarm of components with a certain functionalitywill interact with the other swarms. The users, who are known to the protoSPACE intelligence system, are another swarm interacting with the distributed devices. In essence each component has embedded intelligence and communicates information to other components, either directly or via a database. The smart protoSPACE 4 building does not wait for instructions from the users, it will be activily sensing its environment and will be actively retrieving data from other smeart devices, and from relevant websites. ProtoSPACE 4 will act unsollicited. ProtoSPACE 4 as I imagine it will become a demonstrator of proactive architecture.
