Readings-JoseLuisGarciadelCastillo

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 * Responsive Environments and Artifacts: DISAPPEARANCE - Readings **
 * Reading: **The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask, by Usman Haque.
 * Discussion Mediator: **Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo jgarciad@gsd.harvard.edu


 * Reading Summary: **

This article is focused on Gordon Pask, a psycologist highly acclaimed because of his contributions to the field of cybernetics, and his influence on architectural design, by reviewing his background, explaining his core theories, illustrating his ideas through a series of artifacts he constructed and experiments he conducted, and their application in the world of architectural design.

Gordon Pask was an early pioneer in the development of cybernetics, defined as the study of control and communication in goal-driven systems of animals and machines, formulating theories, designing experiments and prototypes, and documenting his research. Of particular interest is his relation with architecture, which is drawing increasing attention in recent times, but which dates back to the 1960s, with his collaborations undertaken at the Architectural Association and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT (later to become the Media Lab).

Pask's Conversation Theory is nowadays increasingly relevant for various aspects. On one side, it suggests that humans, devices and their shared environment should engage in a mutually constructive relationship, learning from each other, and none of them being restrictive or autocratic. Through some prototypes, he also demonstrates how interactive systems can be generated where machines develop unique interaction profiles with each human participant, enforcing the creative-productive role of the participant, and the idea that interpretation and context are necessary elements in communication.

The author suggests four particular projects in Pask's career as key in the understanding of how to create richer, more engaging and stimulating interactive environments. First of them is the MusiColour Machine. This device was designed as a performance system of coloured lights that responded to audio input from an human source. The innovation of this device would be the lack of direct correspondance between this input and the output lighting, creating unique non-random patterns with each iteration, up to a point where the machine would get 'bored' if the input became too monotonous, and would search for a new range of frequencies to respond to, becaming an active player in the engagement with the human performers, almost as another performer itself. Pask designed a system that aspired to provide enough variety to keep a person interested, while keeping it from becoming too random to appear nonsensical.

The Self-Adaptative Keyboard Instructor was a device designed to teach people how to increase speed and accuracy typing with a 12-key keyboard. SAKI seeks to mimic the relationship between a teacher and a student by adapting to the student's need through the modulation of three variables: tracking problem difficulty based on student's response time, decreasing maximum allowed response time based on previous success, and delaying the display of cues on the same principle. As a result, while all students start at the same point, the machine's behaviour would evolve in different directions depending on student's performance, creating a closed loop of constant feedback and reciprocal adaptation.

Also of great relevance is his research with chemical computers, consisting of assemblages constructed electrochemically. The aim here was to emulate biological neural networks in their lack of specificity: evolving behaviours instead of training them. He conducted some experiments with powered electrodes in alcohol solutions of metallic ions, exposing it to external inputs -such as sound- and rewarding the system with more ions when certain output criteria was met. The result were systems that dynamically adapted and evolved into complex and succesful structures, and could dynamically grow new types of sensivity when changing the input criteria. This experiment was outlining one of his biggest interests: the advantages of underspecified goals in systems, as opposed to completely designed systems, which are strictly limited to the designers predictions, and which are therefore closed to novelty. A huge statement against deterministic, directly causal systems.

And finally, his 1968 ICA installation Colloquy of Mobiles conforms a constructed embodiment of the Conversation Theory. This assemblage consisted of an array of light emmiters, mirrors and sensors that kept oscillating in space, until a sensor percieved the incidence of light, in which case movement would cease for a period of time, and then the system would start moving again, searching for new equilibrium states. The point here was that this system of sensors/actuators could be an autonomous environment by itself, but was also open to interaction by external agents such as humans, equipped with handheld torches and mirrors, allowing for the human to be able to decide the level of control and engagement with the system he chose to perform.

Finally, the author derives some implications of Pask's theories into 21st century and supports the idea that Paskian systems are a more intelligent approach in designing interactive environments, and ultimately, architecture. He claims that linear-causality systems are problematic in complex environments, and states that true Paskian systems provide methods to negotiate spatial perceptions and conditions between machine and users. Moreover, architectural systems under Pask's approach should have the user lead the role in configuring and evolving the space he inhabits, or even further, should be designed to be further designed by the active agents, this is, developing ways in which people themselves can engage and be responsible for the spaces they inhabit.

I consider the article to be an interesting source of knowledge and relatively clear in introducing the theme of cybernetics, Pask's theories and its possible application in the framework of design. Nevertheless, I find it a bit unstructured in the way it presents the ideas, and very vague in picturing the relationship between cybernetic/Paskian postulates and its application in architecture. It remains highly theoretical and imprecise in terms of the architectural implications of the examples illustrated, with most of the practical examples related to the field of environmental control -temperature, sun exposure, lighting...-, which is a bit dissapointing for an article named 'The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask'.


 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Questions and Challenges: **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">How can Paskian architecture go deeper than simply sensing its environment?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">How would a building be if it behaved like each of the four machines?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">What is the Paskian algorithm of architecture?


 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">Documentation of Class Discussions and Responses to Questions and Challenges: **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">The conversation started refering to Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles machine as an environment with the possibility of designing itself, and linking it to the book 'Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things', by Jane Bennet, where the author discuss on the notion of what would happen if objects were expected to have its own life, regardless of whether if they are technologically enhanced or not. Life in this sense would be understood as the property of 'agency', further away from the animation agents may infuse on it, but actual agency in itself.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Attention was then drawn on how we usually project antropomorphism into inanimate objects, and into the concept of the expectations we grow from them, and our perception of success/failure based on the fulfillment of these. A relation between expectations and Pask's underspecified-goal systems was stablished, in that when designing a system whose inputs are dynamically shitfing, the outcome of the system's evolution tends to exceed the designer's expectations. Links to Nicholas Negroponte's 'Soft Architecture Machines' and Siggi Orn's work at the Personal Robots Group at MIT were also raised.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Conversation ended up with some thoughts on how newness perceived in a technological achievement was an unsatisfying approach due to the quick outdate of technology itself, but on rather how newness could have to do with the novelty in the application, manipulation or interpretation of technology itself, with the Brooklyn bridge as an example of non-outdated technical novelty. The user is the agent who gives meaning to things, and the way we see or animate things is what lasts in the end...