'Performative Ecologies' examines the potential of responsive environments to engage in gestural and performative forms of non-verbal communication and conversation. This explorative project based over a series of iterative installations considers how architecture could enter into a dialog with its inhabitants and surrounding built environment. How can we, with the aid of increasingly cheap and powerful responsive technologies, build an architecture capable of Interacting with rather than Reacting to, human and wider environmental activity?

Rather than pre-choreograph the actions of an interactive architecture, Performative Ecologies explores the role of the architect as a designer and builder of frameworks, rather than predefined events, in which responsive adaptive environments are able to not just react, but also propose. Often, through trial and error, these environments can suggest new gestural and spatial interactions and evolve their own expressive qualities while negotiating these actions with human inhabitants and other architectural systems.

These approaches to interactive design I believe hold exciting potential to generate interactions beyond the preconcieved visions of the original designers, and create systems able to evolve to changing contexts over the lifetime of an architecture. In my continuing investigation of approaches to building physically reconfigurable architecture, the final installation (Image Right) looks at how, with relatively simply computational systems, it is possible to build environments able to discover for themselves, ways of attracting and keeping the attention of its inhabitants. Through similar forms of adaptive learning, the wider implications for an interactive architecture suggest how our built environment could learn to provide more effective functional services such as environment control or security, beyond the preconceived visions of the original designers.

Video of Development of
Performative Ecologies 25Mb

describes the process of this inquiry split into 2 stages.

1. 'Signallers' - Developing Performative & Adaptive Objects (Initially a simple reactive system which later explored some adaptive techniques)

2. 'Dancers' - Constructing Ecologies of Interactive Agents (multiple autonomous kinetic machines capable of learning, communicating and conversing with humans and each other)