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The Construction/Deconstruction of Ambient

Antonio RizzoUniversity of Siena

rizzo@unisi.it

Job RutgersPhilips Design Eindhovenjob.rutgers@philips.com

Many of our neighbours and relatives spend their free time in re-working theirown environments: at home, in the garden, in the garage, in the by-the-seahouse. They love bricolage, from stonewalls to water pumps, from furniture tolandscape, from painting to lighting. At the same time they are helpless withmost of the digital technology, they are helpless not in the sense that theycannot use computers but in the sense that they cannot include them in theirbricolage activity. The best we saw was a neighbour that came out with a littleaquarium from a Mac Se! But there is more. In a successful book How

Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built Stewart Brand notes howmost architects spend most of their time in re-working or extending existingbuildings, rather than creating new ones from scratch (try to be an architect inTuscany!), but the subject of how buildings change, transform, adapt, isignored by many architectural schools and theorists. By looking at examples(big and small, ancient and modern), Brand teases out patterns of re-use andchange, and convincingly argues that since buildings are going to be modifiedmany times, they should be designed with unanticipated future changes inmind.

1986 1992Every house is a biography house (from Brand, 1994)

Houses, respond to families' tastes, ideas, annoyance and growth; andinstitutional buildings change with expensive reluctance and delay; whilecommercial structures have to adapt quickly because of intense competitivepressures. Brand proposes that buildings are most useful to their occupantsand neighbors when they adapt. He assures that change will happen and thatthe only enduring monuments are those that can transform with time.

mailto:rizzo@unisi.itmailto:rizzo@unisi.it

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21 June 1991 23 August 1991

21 March 1992 22 October 1992Monthly photo-study (from Brand, 1994)

It seems clear that if we really want ambient intelligence to have a successfulimpact on the life of inhabitants and architects we have to consider animportant property of the environment in interaction with the behavior of theirinhabitants: the Construction Deconstruction property. In an extreme formwe 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 theproposed solutions for ambient intelligence run the risk to make this drawbackeven more acute.

We faced the Construction Deconstruction issue in the design of POGOworld. In introducing IT in the primary school environment for supporting thedevelopment of narrative competence in children we acknowledged theparamount need to be able to produce a seamless world between existingand new tools, structures, spaces. This would allow children and teachers togo on with their continuous modification and transformation of their learningenvironment.

The POGO environment can be thought of as a story world, accessiblethrough a number of interactive physical tools distributed in the environment.The active tools are the main interface to the narrative process. Thefunctionality of the tools spans many areas, from gestural (live performances),visual (manipulation of images and drawings) and aural (sounds andatmospheres), 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) canbe converted into digital assets using tools for rich asset creation. These

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digital assets are stored on physical media carriers and can be used in toolsthat support story telling. With these tools assets come alive on projectionscreens, sound systems, paper cardboard, paper sticks etc. The POGO worldis described in detail elsewhere (Rizzo et al. 2003) here we want to focus juston two key aspects:

I) POGO world was built with the idea to allow composition/recomposition withexisting tools, and to promote construction/deconstruction of new toolsproduced by the children and teachers

II) The development of prototypes was oriented by the same approach: thetools were built by a strategy named Smart Shopping: deconstructingexisting hardware and software tools (joystick, console, screen, cameras,memory-card, rfid, editing software, file management systems) andconstructing 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 teacherssuccessfully use in their teaching practice, instead it empowers these toolsand integrates them with new opportunities. This is thecomposition/decomposition properties (examples are the use of wellestablished tool, spaces and structures as digital memory carries, or digitalediting 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

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the new one produced working with the different POGO tools can be edited inreal time. What a child builds or brings as a part of the personal experiencecan be combined with the products of other children in a continuousnegotiation process where the evolution of transformations of the objects isrecorded 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 asthe physical address for the articulated production of future creative activity.

POGO presents a new type of system, an open system. It is a kind ofpersonality, capable of intelligent responses but first of all it moldsaccordingly to the evolving aims and educational practices. POGO reacts tothe user and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. It is open to change. And,while at the moment it supports children in building stories together, POGOoffers many avenues of exploration. It proposes new ways of looking at

interaction design, of handling knowledge management systems, ofenhancing electronic learning for children of all ages. It points into newdirections for collaborative working in the office and collaborative, creativeactivities in the home.

II) In designing the POGO environment we tried to apply theconstruction/deconstruction property to the production of the prototypes, Weexplored what type of joystick, console, screen, camera, tag system, reader,could be deconstructed to easy reconstruction in the prototypes and to affordfurther construction/reconstruction in the class by children and teachers. Thiswas an exercise difficult to overestimate for its heuristic power for building anenvironment that support the construction/deconstruction property. It clearlyshowed the limits of current technology to afford deconstruction/construction itprovided unexpected hints oh how habilitate the construction/deconstructionproperty.

References

Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What happens after theyre built. NewYork: Penguin Book

Rizzo, A., Marti, P., Decortis F., Rutgers, J., and Thursfield P. (2003). BuildingNarrative Experiences for Children through Real Time MediaManipulation: POGOworld In. Mark A. Blythe, Andrew F. Monk, KeesOverbeeke and Peter C. Wright (eds.), Funology: From Usability toEnjoyment. Nederland: Kluwer Academic Publishers.