Tag Archives: interactive landscapes

Welcome to the SensorScape

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While this blog was launched as a venue for the students of LA301L, it is part of a bigger research initiative by Prof. Lehrman.  Hoping to get a panel session at the Council of Educators of  Landscape Architecture at the March 2015 conference at Kansas State. Here’s the proposal:

SensorScapes: deploying DIY sensors to create poetic and interactive landscapes

Research and Methods Track

Panelists:

  • Brad Cantrell – Harvard University
  • Allison Lassiter – University of California Berkeley
  • Barry Lehrman – Cal Poly Pomona
  • Lucia Phinney – University of Virginia

Keywords:

Ambient displays, Arduino, coding, environmental sensors, interactivity, landscape performance, microcontrollers, responsive landscapes, ubiquitous computing

Panel Rationale/Abstract [400 words max]

Environmental sensors generate data streams about landscape dynamics that can be used to create responsive landscapes. This panel shares our convergent strategies for prototyping sensor nodes based on the open-source Arduino hardware and programming language (Arduino 2014).

Beyond gaining a deeper understanding of environmental metrics and contemporary design methodologies, prototyping devices provides an essential 21st century digital literacy (Prensky 2008; Davis and Peters, 2013; Vee 2013). This literacy supports the emergence of a new landscape poetic featuring applied sensing.

Aimed at an audience unfamiliar with the technical aspects of Arduino microcontrollers and coding, our session starts with an overview of the available hardware and software tools. Then we cover our four complimentary approaches to utilizing Arduino within our courses and scholarship, covering our poetic applications of environmental data, methods and materials, pedagogical practices, and unique learning outcomes generated by using Arduino.

1) Phinney will report on her pioneering use of Arduinos to create connections between biotic and constructed territories and to enhance thermal outdoor comfort by seamlessly bridging between data collection, graphic analysis, simulation, design, feedback, and fabrication.

2) Cantrell shares how Arduinos provide a versatile prototyping platform to test real-time feedback loops between ecological systems and landscape interfaces; loops that are then utilized to reimagine new infrastructures that are more tightly integrated and responsive to dynamic environmental processes.

3) Lassiter covers how customized, coordinated networks (meshes) of Arduino-based sensors can be used to generate high-resolution data. Identifying space-time variations within a landscape allows her to craft hyper-local, dynamic design solutions.

4) Lehrman shares technical details and preliminary learning outcomes about deploying Arduino-based ambient landscape displays that reveal eco-technical flows.

We will wrap up our session with a discussion covering:

  • Rising to 21st Century landscape challenges through interactive/responsive prototypes and theatric displays
  • Empowering landscape users with awareness, engagement, and comfort
  • Situating coding, scripting, and hacking in landscape education
  • Low cost DIY devices versus scalable/durable, deep efforts for responsive landscapes
  • Future research and expanding the field of landscape architecture

Though sensing is an old concept – from surveying topography to monitoring river gauges – Arduino (and the exploding ubiquity of cheap sensors and mobile computing) upends who is responsible for data collection. This enables designers to break from the limitations of designing static landscape with the deployment of sophisticated robots that actively manipulate our landscapes for poetics, performance, and to incite change across the SensorScape.

Citations

Arduino. 2014. “What Is Arduino?” http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction. Accessed 8-3-2014

Davis, Daniel, and Brady Peters. 2013. “Design Ecosystems: Customising the Architectural Design Environment with Software Plug-ins.” Architectural Design 83 (2): 124–131. http://www.danieldavis.com/design-ecosystems-customising-the-architectural-design-environment-with-software-plug-ins/. Accessed 8-15-2014

Prensky, Marc. 2008. “Programming Is the New Literacy.” Edutopia. http://www.edutopia.org/literacy-computer-programming.

Vee, Annette. 2013. “Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy.” Literacy in Composition Studies 1 (2): 42–64. http://licsjournal.org/OJS/index.php/LiCS/article/view/24. Accessed 8-3-2014