News

Mind Meets Machine: Immersive Data Interaction

Published: 7.9.2021

The abundance of data has created a rich pool of possible resources to support the creation of sustainable solutions to our pressing societal and environmental challenges we are facing globally.
The future shapers of our environment need to be trained in computationally driven data-informed design methods, as we have already AI-informed automized design generators available to design buildings, cities and landscapes, without any architect or landscape architect involved. This is due the lack of knowledge in the field and affects the quality of the built environment. This is a real pressing problem of global size and major importance. The introduced projects research methods for architects and landscape architects to interact with abstract data, as a creative component in the design process and brings them back in command to interact with AI and other future technology.

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The exhibited projects showcase novel computational design methods to creatively interact with global and local data. Whereas the on-going general discussions in relation to data-handling stresses efficiency, productivity and often de-humanization, the exhibited projects set their focus on the exploration of immersive data-interaction design tools to enhance climate-smart solutions in the urban context. The projects aim for showcasing possibilities to make abstract data visible and tangible, to enter a new level of data-informed responsive design, that has public benefit.

Augmented data-interaction is merged with the tangible sandbox environment, in order to formulate sustainable design speculations for Ainonauki, an urban plaza located between Väre and Aalto Studios. The understanding of available technology to be composed and rearranged in order to support the field specific discourse led to innovative design speculations, based upon human-robotic interaction. The developed design methodology emphasizes the importance of design iterations through computationally informed feedback loops.

Dunes project visualisation (credits: Antti Rantamäki, Kaisa Koskinen, Laura Tuorila, and Teo Rinne)

Dunes; robotic arm integration in the design process (credits: Antti Rantamäki, Kaisa Koskinen, Laura Tuorila, and Teo Rinne)

Visual Noise; pattern exploration with robotic arm (credits: Loviisa Luoma, Kaie Kuldkepp, Eetu Mykkänen, and Marek Kratochvíl)

Visual Noise; hybrid design process, interaction between physical and digital realms (credits: Loviisa Luoma, Kaie Kuldkepp, Eetu Mykkänen, and Marek Kratochvíl)

Visual Noise; project visualisation (credits: Loviisa Luoma, Kaie Kuldkepp, Eetu Mykkänen, and Marek Kratochvíl)

Hydrogrid; computational design process (credits: Miisa-Maari Ulmanen, Huija Zhuang, and Shenyu Sun)

Hydrogrid; design methodology and landscape generation (credits: Miisa-Maari Ulmanen, Huija Zhuang, and Shenyu Sun)

Hydrogrid; project visualisation (credits: Miisa-Maari Ulmanen, Huija Zhuang, and Shenyu Sun)

Project team:

Prof. Dr. Pia Fricker, Kane Borg, and Tina Cerpnjak

Exhibition support:

Loviisa Luoma

Students:

Marek Kratochvíl, Kaie Kuldkepp, Hanna-Kaisa Koskinen, Ahti Launis, Riikka Lauri, Emilia Lemmetti, Huixu Li, Loviisa Luoma, Eetu Mykkänen, Teo Rinne, Miisa-Maari Ulmanen, Eetu Mykkänen, Yanxia Qiu, Antti Rantamäki, Shenyu Sun, Laura Tuorila, Huijia Zhuang