The Construction/Deconstruction of Ambient

Antonio Rizzo University of Siena rizzo@unisi.it Job Rutgers Philips Design Eindhoven job.rutgers@philips.com

Many of our neighbours and relatives spend their free time in re-working their own environments: at home, in the garden, in the garage, in the by-the-sea house. They love bricolage, from stonewalls to water pumps, from furniture to landscape, from painting to lighting. At the same time they are helpless with most of the digital technology, they are helpless not in the sense that they cannot use computers but in the sense that they cannot include them in their bricolage activity. The best we saw was a neighbour that came out with a little aquarium from a Mac Se! But there is more. In a successful book How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built Stewart Brand notes how most architects spend most of their time in re-working or extending existing buildings, rather than creating new ones from scratch (try to be an architect in Tuscany!), but the subject of how buildings change, transform, adapt, is ignored by many architectural schools and theorists. By looking at examples (big and small, ancient and modern), Brand teases out patterns of re-use and change, and convincingly argues that since buildings are going to be modified many times, they should be designed with unanticipated future changes in mind.

1986 1992 Every house is a biography house (from Brand, 1994) Houses, respond to families' tastes, ideas, annoyance and growth; and institutional buildings change with expensive reluctance and delay; while commercial structures have to adapt quickly because of intense competitive pressures. Brand proposes that buildings are most useful to their occupants and neighbors when they adapt. He assures that change will happen and that the only enduring monuments are those that can transform with time.

21 June 1991

23 August 1991

21 March 1992 22 October 1992 Monthly photo-study (from Brand, 1994) It seems clear that if we really want ambient intelligence to have a successful impact on the life of inhabitants and architects we have to consider an important property of the environment in interaction with the behavior of their inhabitants: the Construction Deconstruction property. In an extreme form we can state that this is a property of all successful, long lasting, adapting environments. At the same time it seems that the Construction Deconstruction is not a property of most digital technologies and many of the proposed solutions for ambient intelligence run the risk to make this drawback even more acute. We faced the Construction Deconstruction issue in the design of POGO world. In introducing IT in the primary school environment for supporting the development of narrative competence in children we acknowledged the paramount need to be able to produce a seamless world between existing and new tools, structures, spaces. This would allow children and teachers to go on with their continuous modification and transformation of their learning environment. The POGO environment can be thought of as a story world, accessible through a number of interactive physical tools distributed in the environment. The active tools are the main interface to the narrative process. The functionality of the tools spans many areas, from gestural (live performances), visual (manipulation of images and drawings) and aural (sounds and atmospheres), to manipulative (physical feedback, kinematics) and material (surface and texture, weight etc.). The system has a number of tools that support the process we call situated editing. Raw non-digital media elements (e.g. drawings, sounds) can be converted into digital assets using tools for rich asset creation. These

digital assets are stored on physical media carriers and can be used in tools that support story telling. With these tools assets come alive on projection screens, sound systems, paper cardboard, paper sticks etc. The POGO world is described in detail elsewhere (Rizzo et al. 2003) here we want to focus just on two key aspects: I) POGO world was built with the idea to allow composition/recomposition with existing tools, and to promote construction/deconstruction of new tools produced by the children and teachers II) The development of prototypes was oriented by the same approach: the tools were built by a strategy named Smart Shopping: deconstructing existing hardware and software tools (joystick, console, screen, cameras, memory-card, rfid, editing software, file management systems) and constructing POGO tools

POGO from mock-up

to Prototypes More into details: I) The POGO world does not replace any of the current tools that the teachers successfully use in their teaching practice, instead it empowers these tools and integrates them with new opportunities. This is the composition/decomposition properties (examples are the use of well established tool, spaces and structures as digital memory carries, or digital editing tools). The construction/deconstruction property allows a rich sensorial interaction where physical and virtual elements of childrens reality can be explored, analysed, decomposed, and recombined in new ways. The existing objects or

the new one produced working with the different POGO tools can be edited in real time. What a child builds or brings as a part of the personal experience can be combined with the products of other children in a continuous negotiation process where the evolution of transformations of the objects is recorded and the movement along this process of meaning construction can be used as a way to understand the others points of view. Moreover the physical objects that are produced in this iterative and combinatory activity remain live features of the process and can be used as the physical address for the articulated production of future creative activity. POGO presents a new type of system, an open system. It is a kind of personality, capable of intelligent responses but first of all it molds accordingly to the evolving aims and educational practices. POGO reacts to the user and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. It is open to change. And, while at the moment it supports children in building stories together, POGO offers many avenues of exploration. It proposes new ways of looking at interaction design, of handling knowledge management systems, of enhancing electronic learning for children of all ages. It points into new directions for collaborative working in the office and collaborative, creative activities in the home. II) In designing the POGO environment we tried to apply the construction/deconstruction property to the production of the prototypes, We explored what type of joystick, console, screen, camera, tag system, reader, could be deconstructed to easy reconstruction in the prototypes and to afford further construction/reconstruction in the class by children and teachers. This was an exercise difficult to overestimate for its heuristic power for building an environment that support the construction/deconstruction property. It clearly showed the limits of current technology to afford deconstruction/construction it provided unexpected hints oh how habilitate the construction/deconstruction property. References Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What happens after theyre built. New York: Penguin Book Rizzo, A., Marti, P., Decortis F., Rutgers, J., and Thursfield P. (2003). Building Narrative Experiences for Children through Real Time Media Manipulation: POGOworld In. Mark A. Blythe, Andrew F. Monk, Kees Overbeeke and Peter C. Wright (eds.), Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment. Nederland: Kluwer Academic Publishers.