Design Science through Architectural Experiments

Design Science through
Architectural Experiments
BO STJERNE THOMSEN
M.Sc.Eng. in Arch. & Design, PhD Cand.
Department of Architecture & Design, Aalborg University
DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark
TEL: +45 99 40 71 69
bsth@aod.aau.dk
Abstract
Two important characteristics are differentiating architecture from science. You can’t create
architecture from science, but architecture can create the worlds and imagination for the
future of scientific discoveries. Architecture has the ability to be more aware and to question
the traditional conventions about society and space, and instead of proclaiming the
conventional approaches to science where technological development or societal initiatives
are driving the science agenda, the following paper illustrates the ability for architecture to
create worlds of inclusion to shape a new science.
For a long time science and the technological development has determined the way
architects design spaces and interactions by focusing on the traditional disciplinary
boundaries of science as a starting point for new research questions. However realizing that
the scientific problems of today are far more complex and the world more multicultural, we
can discuss the science of tomorrow with far more relieving results by proclaiming a
performative design agenda.
The paper discusses the design development of the NoRA project for the 10th International
Architecture Biennale in Venice with other projects and describes the potential of setting an
urban research agenda through performative experiments bringing together a broader field
of actors. Using actor-network theory, complexity science and the current development
within pervasive communication technologies, the paper extends the architectural research
agenda into a more experimental setting allowing for a more open and stimulating design
approach as a basis for science questions.
Performative environments are architectural experiments that interact with the local actors
and redefine the relationships in the urban settings to perform a collective social
environment. In this way the performative approach crosses social and technological
networks arguing for a more practice-related and interdisciplinary approach to a new
scientific agenda for architecture and public spaces.
Design Science Through Architectural Experiments 1(11)

Architecture & Science
The paper looks at the obvious relationships
between architecture and science from a different
perspective. Traditionally the scientific
investigations have provided the inspiration for
new kinds of architecture and building
technologies, but now the fields of architecture
and science become increasingly dependent on
each other when entering a society affected by
more complex relationships and blurring
boundaries. There are examples that architecture
has provided the imagery as representation and a
source of inspiration for science when creating the
icons for technological challenges (Jencks 2005).
However most significant has been the eager to
incorporate of the recent scientific developments
and method in the architectural context.
Cosgrove (2003) has pointed out how Vitruvius’
concern for architecture as science required
architects to pay close attention to fields as
astronomy, astrology, geography and with the
human body as the center measurement of the
world machine; an approach that reached far into
modernism as basis for the functional optimization
of architectural typologies. In contemporary
architecture Picon (2003) has described how
scientific images and metaphors have been used
within the architectural discipline already from the
biological sciences of the nineteenth century and
in the modern movement from the e.g. Einstein’s
theory of relativity. According to Picon some of
these references have been more or less
superficial, but nevertheless it is important to
emphasize that science and architecture meet
when they both contribute to the cultural
construction of perception (Picon 2003: 295), and
“science appears as the productive tension
between theory and experiment or… between
abstract knowledge and practice.” (Picon 2003:
300).
In a similar way Lenoir and Alt (2003) looks at
how contemporary architecture is affected by new
computational tools within bioinformatics and in a
way creating post-architects acting through
electronic media: “A number of architects have
been similarly affected by engagement with
computers, and they have looked to computational
biology for metaphors to articulate the new
directions in which they want to take architectural
practice.” (Lenoir and Alt 2003: 326)
Eisenman has described that all other cultural
practices have been through a transformation with
electronic media, but architecture has still
maintained largely unchanged (Lenoir and Alt
2003: 327), and we need to look at spaces that
induce an affect within the subject and doesn’t
operate according to a knowable or predictable
logic.
Bouman (2005) points to a new dynamic
architecture with a focus on experiments where
the architectural products are more liquid and
animated and proclaiming that “we will see more
and more architects realizing spatialised
moments, through staging narratives, through
event designing, working with effects and
emotions” (Bouman 2005: 22).
The above emphasizes the aspects of architecture
and science to be more collaborative as a
productive tension and common contribution to
development and to focus on the perception and
sensorial experiences of space as part of creating
common worlds. These issues are treated as part
of incorporating digital technologies into the
creation of the architectural experience and not
only as part of a fixed representation.
As from Picon (2003) it is important to extend
these architectural tools further than just hauling a
process as an event and focus more on the
sensorial experiences and as from Nelson
Goodman understand how both architecture and
science contributes in the ‘ making’ of worlds and
moving definitions that are always historically
determined.
New digital technologies
Many of the new aspects of architecture and
science are based in a new understanding of
electronic media and digital technologies as they
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are increasingly integrated in our everyday-life.
Within architecture the tools that are created
mainly for optimization purposes and virtual
domains are now acting as boundary objects
connecting our social worlds with physical
mobility, when feedback processes between
environment and actor are opened up for
influence.
Starting from the age of electronics with the
cybernetics movement and information theory
these technologies are now spreading into fields of
mobile, ubiquitous or pervasive computing, which
are embedded and put into circulation in larger
systems with behavior similar to self-organization.
Most importantly these systems are now getting
increasingly pervasive embedded into architecture
(McCullough 2004) and attached to mobile
networks thus creating larger networks of
communicating objects.
Usman Haque is experimenting with these
technologies as part of larger collectively
constructed environments where people and
objects collaboratively create social domains as in
the projects Sky Ear and Open Burble. These
systems are following from the development of
interactive technologies and as a difference to
standard reactive systems, input and output are
dynamically constructed.
“We can consider instead architectural systems
in which the occupant takes prime role in
configuring the space he/she inhabits, a bottom-up
approach which would result in a more productive
relationship to our spaces and to each other.”
(Haque 2007: 61)
Haque bases this conception on cybernetics and
the experiments by e.g. Gordon Pask and Cedric
Price in the 60’s as part of an ‘underspecified
architecture’ as computer systems begin to evolve
on their own. Oosterhuis and the Hyperbody
group are working additionally on extending the
field of interactive environments not only as part
of the realized architecture but focusing on a
process-driven architecture (Jaskiewicz 2007)
with the development of new interactive software
that incorporates the complex socio-technical
networks of architecture.
“Interactive Architecture (iA) is NOT simply
architecture that is responsive or adaptive to
changing circumstances. On the contrary, iA is
based on the concept of bi-directional
communication, which requires two active
parties.” (Oosterhuis 2007: 4) This aligns well
with the definitions from McCullough that
technologies only are interactive when
‘technology makes deliberative and variable
response to each in a series of exchanges’
(McCullough 2004: 20)
These interactive technologies have existed for a
long time as part of sensors, processors and
actuators that are binding individual responses to
collective outputs whether in art installations or
larger building facades. However these
technologies are getting increasingly individual
and location-based with the introduction of more
sophisticated mobile technologies at the same time
as they are connected to larger more sophisticated
networks. These connections appear from
concepts as the Soft Urbanism model (Sikiaridi &
Vogelaar 2006) or WikiCity projects
(http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity/). In these
projects the understanding of realtime
technologies create an ability to work with largescale
complex models and to significy individual
presence and participation in space, and
additionally the potential for the architectural
environment to become open for interaction, and
not as a static pre-determined spaces.
These interaction technologies also involve closer
relationships within the elements of the design
process and realization as well as the potential for
meaningful connections to emerge from real-time
access. When accessing architecture through these
new technologies it is a way through which we
‘create meaning, construct knowledge and make
sense of our surroundings’ (Mitchell 2003: 120),
and interactive architecture can (also) through
Design Science Through Architectural Experiments 3(11)

these technologies act as a social infrastructure
(McCullough 2002: 4). This is where the
beginning potential of a networked, interactive
architecture begin to make sense as part of urban
development and experiments, and the notion to
bring into account to understand these emergent
effects of multi-interaction real-time urban
environments are described as ‘performative
environments’.
Performativity
Performative environments contain the ability for
an environment to act with its surroundings with
both humans and non-humans as actors focusing
on the collective outcome of these feedback
processes.
The central aspect of performativity originates
from the ‘speech acts’ of Austin (Austin 1990), as
when words ‘do’ something and meaning is
constituted through an act or practice. McKenzie
has tried to generalize performativity aspects
(McKenzie 2001) within organization, technology
and cultural performance following from the
performative acts of e.g. Butler (1993) and
Fischer-Lichte (2005) as well as reaching all the
way to performativity as a way to legitimate
knowledge (Lyotard 1991). These many aspects
deals with the overall concepts of the emergent
effects of interactions in complex systems as in a
society influenced by an increased amount of
circulating information and cross-cultural inputs.
In this regards an understanding of the complex
feedback mechanisms that are in place when
minds, bodies and objects intersect.
Because of the large variety of aspects within
performativity there might be a lack of clarity in
the conceptual framework for working with it as a
method, which is important to keep in mind not to
fall into the trap of referring only to the
performative studies within performance, even
that there are similarities. Diebner notes these
similarities between performance and
performativity as a ‘focus on “constitution”
instead of “ontological given” or “presence”
instead of “representation”.’ (Diebner 2006: 21)
When actors are involved in a performative
relationship they are participating in creating the
reality that it describes (Callon 2006) and thus the
performative act brings something forward that
does not exists elsewhere (Fischer-Lichte 2005:
27).
Within the architectural domain Leatherbarrow
has described the ‘unscripted performance’ of
architecture as the way how architecture acts or
what the building does (Leatherbarrow 2005).
This considers how architectural performance
carries internal definitions or a pre-predicated
existence, and from the understanding of
architecture as an object that happens to us as an
event and denotes something to us from the past.
Considering these immanent characteristics of
architecture is a way to work with architecture as
an actor with effects on the environment and our
experience of it. However if we extend this notion
of architecture as object, considering the
developments in interactive architecture, we now
reach to an understanding of architecture not only
as performance, or a stage for our events, but as an
actor through new technologies.
Actor Network Theory (ANT) with e.g. Bruno
Latour, Michel Callon and John Law has worked
on what could be announced as a performative
theory useful for understanding the relationships
between actors, urban environments and digital
networks. Here ‘entities take their form and
acquire their attributes as a result of their
relations with other entities.’ (Law 1999, 3) and it
can be a way to describe how these new
relationships with the city are shaping a public
consciousness when “the sense of belonging has
entered a crisis” (Latour 2005b: 7). Identity is
considered as emerging from an ensemble of
relations between different places and objects in
the public sphere (Abbas 2005: 93) in the same
way as complexity science describes how
collective patterns are emerging ‘spontaneously’
through interactions (Urry 2003: 24). The
performative logic implies that entities are shaped
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y the relationship with other entities and to
engage truly with architecture and science, we
need to establish the experiments and new
platforms for a new science to arise.
Thus the above integration of mobile, integrated
and networked technologies are understood as
performative environments focusing on the
emergent effects of crossing social and
technological networks as a basis for an
architecture that stands out as dynamic and open,
facilitating self-organizing communicative
environments for an organized complexity
between flows of local interactions and network
behaviour. This architecture based on the
experimental approach can retain both variation
and recognisability in changing social
constellations at same time as acknowledging
space as the product of interrelations and always
under construction.
Design Science and Experiments
Following naturally from performativity the
experiment in architecture and science becomes a
mediator for cultural development as a connector
between two different approaches.
“A practitioner does not need an explicit
definition of design, and a theorist may never
arrive at one. People who haggle endlessly over
the meaning of design actually may not be seeking
a unified science at all. Instead, the idea of design
benefits from constant negotiation.” (McCullough
2004: 147)
Understanding performativity in relation to
science brings up the central problem of
understanding science as separated from practice.
How science can be separated from the fields of
production and how the researcher on the one
hand can do meaningful studies of complex social
patterns from a laboratory or in texts and on the
other hand how to separate the researcher from the
field of study if investigating a practice.
Schaffer has described the problem of deciding on
who the experts and important scientists are in
each matter as a problem of trust, and the public
experiment as a heterogeneous enterprise in
asserting the experiment (Schaffer 2006: 298).
Centuries back public experiments was used as
assays for spectacular events where the success
were evaluated by the involved assembly, and
“assay work mattered in public culture because
its artful judgements systematically played crucial
roles in securing early modern world pictures”
(Schaffer 2006: 304). These experiments or assays
bring together experts and scientists, practitioners
and theorists around an architectural object to test
out new devices, submitting new observations and
facilitating new collaborations and discussions.
Heading towards the non-representational aspects
of performativity, as also included in the
beginning investigations of Austin, we can take a
look at recent studies in performative science.
Callon has extended the utterances from Austin
into an understanding of science as also
performative: “Scientific theories, models and
statements are not constative; they are
performative, that is, actively engaged in the
constitution of the reality that it describes”.
(Callon 2006: 10)
In order to deal with this complexity of science
and architecture Latour is one of the advocates of
an object-oriented approach, which is a way to
assembly a variety of different actors around a
political object. "Each object gathers around itself
a different assembly of relevant parties. Each
object triggers new occasions to passionately
differ and dispute." (Latour 2005a: 15)
This involves using the experiment as a public
object as a tool for discovering a reality that need
to be tested out on location using interactive
technologies to reach out for a debate about
architecture and science.
Bringing in a notion from Michel Serres we can
call these object-oriented experiments for ´quasiobjects´
as they act as a formation of a collective
network out of the most intense solitudes. (Serres
1994: 96). In a similar way Latour could call these
Design Science Through Architectural Experiments 5(11)

objects for mediators as they are transforming or
translating the meaning that they were supposed to
carry (Latour 2005b: 39). Quasi-objects are then
no-longer images of architecture in place as an
ultimate aim for realizing a complex design or a
representation of one master narrator. Instead
these quasi-objects are interactive experiments as
architectural drivers of a new discourse that
situates the event and experiment. These objects
are bound to the particular kind of urban space and
local actors that gathers around them a specific
assembly of relevant parties (Latour 2005a: 15)
and the quasi-object-oriented architecture do not
strive for technology to become an ultimate goal
for integration in the light of scientific progress.
Instead this quasi-architecture describes local
actors involved in a collective experience through
the interaction with urban spaces, and takes hold
in specific intelligent open experiments that
incorporates feedback from the public space.
Thus we need to look at these new ´quasi-objects´
as tools for experiencing a dialogue that initiate
cultural development, as “tools for discovering a
reality, or aspects of a reality, that is out there in
a fairly definite form but is more or less hidden to
us.” (Law 2004: 38)
In the same way it aims at bringing analysis into
real-time experience in the same way as
laboratories are migrating to forums (Latour
2005a: 15) and the study of science as part of
everyday laboratories (Latour & Woolgar 1986).
This should be an alternative way to look at
architecture and design experiments and the
related scientific methods, in order to invent
reality through the interactive public architecture
acting as a tool.
“So what of research methods Our argument is
that these are performative. By this we mean that
they have effects; they make differences; they
enact realities; and they can help to bring into
being what they also discove.
(Law & Urry: 2004: 393).
Now this might be a very different approach to the
legitimation of knowledge as not based on the
empirical facts in the laboratory experiment but on
the realities that the object is able to enact through
the involvement of a variety of actors. The
interactive technologies and above-mentioned
notion of architecture is then actively contributing
to shape the scientific agenda according to the
relationships it is able to connect on location and
in public minds.
This is argued as necessary in order to deal with
architecture as a scientific field that rests between
social and natural sciences and deeply grounded in
practice and perception. Also importantly these
methods are required because the architectural
field rests in a society increasingly affected by
multiple moving forces that makes it an issue for
complexity theory, where the emergent effects of
the architectural integration cannot be reduced to
its individual elements. There is no irreversibility
of time in these matters thus the studies performed
should be through the experimential settings that
can inflect a cultural production to be studied for
its implications. Especially as there might be
coherent patterns to generate from the observation
of the architectural experiment, when it becomes
seriously involved in place-making as an
interactive object.
Designing the urban experiment
The concept for the 10 th International Architecture
Biennale in Venice involved around the concept of
a space designed from the relations between cities,
architecture and society. The building was
designed as an event base for the National
Culinary Team of Denmark as well as a temporary
generator for urban development, site initiator and
forum in urban environments, which could
activate and involve the citizens as a quasi-object.
Architecture could act with the urban environment
and the surrounding social patterns and enact a
reality in the same way as Doreen Massey
beautifully outlines the social construction of
place (Massey 1994: 154). At the same time it
puts new constraints on the design process and the
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ability for architecture to maintain its capacity to
respond to changing environments, and in this
regards important to “recognise space as the
product of interrelations” (Massey 2005: 9)
The opening statement of the conceptual approach
to the Architecture Biennale was to understand
architecture as evolving from the interactions
between inhabitants and the activities in the
generated field of dynamics between site
constraints and global input.
Through the understanding of new infrastrucutres
(Graham & Marvin 2001), complexities and
global fluids (Urry 2003) and the study of fluids
and relations (Mol and Law 1994) the
architectural process was inscribed in the complex
flow of relationships interweaving through the
site. Instead of focusing on the static appearance
of a site as the beginning constraints, it was more
important with the idea of Bergson, where
position should be secondary to movement in
order to maintain the architectural experiment
open for interactions and to investigate the
potentials for new scientific objectives.
(Massumi 2002: 6).
understand architecture as a tool for materializing
forces on the site to encapsulate and virtualize for
later affects. In this regards it was much more
valuable to consider the acts of the continuously
developing digital prototype and how it could
stimulate the interactions at place. This required a
much more open debate about space and place and
approach where architecture is in a constantly
changing relationship with the social. No longer
the architecture was the objective and a result to
be maintained but much more a tool for working
with place and perception:
‘Thinking of place as performed and practiced
can help us think of place in radically open and
non-essentialized ways where place is constantly
struggled over and reimagined in practical ways.
Place is the raw material for the creative
production of identity rather than an a priori label
of identity.’ (Cresswell 2004: 39)
The NoRA pavilion was investigating ways to
incorporate complex site parameters and new
ways of materialization through the massive
influence of new impulses. The tendencies
towards the introduction of complexity theory and
emergence in the design processes are opening up
the design effects of flows as well as management
of highly complex and individually related design
procedures that are able to test out constantly new
scenarios.
In this regard context is considered as a dynamic
entity affected by forces and encapsulated in a
digital simulation as an ordering system affecting
the creation of space from the initial analysis and
costantly shifting between analysis and
materialization.
Through an understanding of initial parameters on
the site in Venice, the design process tried to
NoRA and the urban relationships
Illustration by the NoRA project team
NoRA acting on site
After setting the scene with the fluid dynamic
simulations for the generation of a changing
typology, the next level was to open up the space
for individual interactions as basis for place-
Design Science Through Architectural Experiments 7(11)

making and collective appearence. Pervasive
computing and the main principles of access to
both digital and physical experiences was
integrated as a regained focus on sensorial
experiences and perception as a the way to create
collective environments and new scientific
approaches through the relationships that the
quasi-object initiated. It then became a challenge
to introduce pervasive computing as a way to
embed individual effects into the experiment,
which were stimulated by the ambient interactions
as a performative urban dialogue with emergent
social patterns.
During performances the pavilion becomes an
instrument for the performers, where the
technologies are used to enhance the performance
experience as a piece of interactive architecture
involving visitors’ perception of the events.
The design process moves the architecture from an
event to both the materialization of relationships
as well as new affordances for the development of
the area with future research questions. And with
the interactive technologies the architectural
experiment becomes an urban laboratory where
the sensory experiences were brought into play
among a live audience in urban space.
NoRA with satelites extending into the site
Illustration by the NoRA project team
These interactive systems of NoRA extend into
different ambient configurations to be both
remotely controlled by the internet, sensored and
affected by the citizens passing by as well as a
tool for the users inside the pavilion using five
different cameras. The inside cameras are for the
users to facilitate performance, record and stream
to the internet, while the exterior cameras located
in remote ‘satellites’ was tracking people to
initiate changes in the visual and auditory
appearance of the pavilion.
The interactive technologies in the NoRA pavilion
are able to be adjusted as both a system of control
according to the needs of the users inside the
building during performances as well as a selfregulating
system affected by the citizens’
activities in urban space with a feedback to a
collective active environment. In this way NoRA
not only becomes the media for interaction in the
city but as well the other way around as an actual
media and instrument for a performative
environment where the participant is able to
gradually affect the collective experience of
architecture. An issue further treated in the
‘Increasing Media Connectivity’ paper from
November 06 at the Media City conference in
Weimar (Jensen & Thomsen 2006).
With the embedded digital technologies and
audio-visual systems NoRA becomes a cultural
attractor where the narrative of NoRA is
embedded in a sound and visual database and
extending into the site through satellite building
elements.
NoRA becomes performative when it acts as a
tool with the environment and negotiates the
emergent effects of the complexity of the
interactions as a mediation of new scientific
perspectives on how to act in relationship with
technology.
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NoRA as an architectural experiment
Photo by Bo Stjerne Thomsen
Concluding remarks
NoRA explored space from a beginning scientific
understanding of quantifiable forces affecting a
building envelope and looked at these impulses in
a social context as a tool for perceiving a reality.
In this way how space could reach out with
affordances and effects and through technology
bring the local actors in play around the
performative object. The new connection between
architecture and science through performative
experiments thus introduces architecture as a tool
that materializes changing relationships as a
mediator for a new cultural dialogue.
The interactive technologies that circulate
information from the environment and
individualize it to the individual actor as part of an
emergent pattern, emphasises neither the
representation of architecture nor the specific
scientific endeavours as neither of these are
ultimate goals for a culture.
Instead the social relationships and circulating
information will through the common worlds
created by the acts and perceived materialized
experiments generate the new research questions.
The real questions are then related to the cultural
developments of a society that is able to
constantly challenge existing conventions and
negotiate these through experimental settings in a
future where materialization and digital
technologies act in relationship with the
perception of space.
The experiments are important in order to shape
the reality on how to enact new scientific
endeavours and to challenge the conventions for
use and integration of digital technologies. At the
same time the experiments are triggering a public
dialogue which incorporates a feedback between
design, technology and culture, and brings in a
medium for perceiving patterns in complexity that
cannot be imagined or deduced from the isolated
artefact. This incorporates elements of the social
construction of space in urban laboratories and
involves participants into the world of creation to
stimulate a future of science and architecture.
Design Science Through Architectural Experiments 9(11)

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