Earlier this summer the Interactive Architecture Workshop aka Unit 14 of the Bartlett School of Architecture which I’m part of, were given a grant by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ) to undertake a project devised by Unit 14 tutor Professor Stephen Gage called ‘Making an Ecology’. 

video

A group of 8-10 year old inner city children at Betty Layward School joined the development of ‘Making an Ecology’ which aimed to teach them that it is possible to create objects that live in the physical world and interact with each other thus producing an ecology, where people are the intruders. For the interactive architecture students the project aimed to enable them to understand how sensing, activation and feedback systems can be used to create a time-based architecture, and how the role of design, especially the choreography of moving objects, is crucial to this.

Making an Ecology culminated in an installation comprising an interactive agent based floor projection, derived from the workshop recordings and developed by Research Assistant Andrew Huntington , and a floor sensing system which I created.

Below are some images of the drawings by the children who were asked to invent stories about their invented characters in storyboard form. These were then enacted by the children themselves. The performance was then filmed and used by Andrew Huntington to help him create the interactive animations.