Heat
The first assignment in our Interactive Architecture class was to make a quick simple project, using the basic hardware we had access to, that addressed the theme of passage. I made an extremely simple detector that fired whenever a door was used. However, I then transformed and displayed that simple information in a unique, non-disruptive and informative way: as the “heat” of the door.
Rather than implementing some system where the the door react instantly and noticeably to being used, the door instead will slowly “heat” up, and the heat of the door indicated by the colour of the lighted bar that sits around the frame. If the door sits unused, it will “cool” back down.
Because the concept of heat is a well established one in the minds of the inhabitants, the uptake of that information does not require a lot of processing on the part of the inhabitants brains. So, door heat becomes ambient information: it’s in the environment, but doesn’t require ones’ full attention to be aware of it.
And because people are familiar with the concept of heat and its properties at a very innate level, the information immediately relevant. For example, you know that if you pull an iron poker and from a fire, and it’s only a bit warm, it couldn’t have been in the fire for very long. Similarly, if you come upon a door which has a heavy stream of people going through it, and it’s still “cool”, you’d know that the people must have arrived quite suddenly, most likely due to a common cause.
The system can be enhanced in interesting ways if we don’t mind making it a bit impractical for the sake of experimentation. For example, making the doors close when the passage “overheats” would make a series of passages act as an emergent behaviour-based traffic levelling system. Each agent in the systems- both the doors and the people- would act only in their own self interest, but overall the system would help distribute traffic evenly over a series of passages.
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