Integrating messages on buildings will become a greater challenge for architects, designers and advertisers as public advertising mediums such as the billboard disappear. It gives way to new technology and production methods, but it’s proving difficult to merge the kind of consumer expected interaction we are used to from Web 2.0 in to more rigid architectural structures.
This in an attempt by ARUP and UN Studios to integrate LED technology in to the facade of a shopping mall. It is not really interactive but was awarded in 2005 by the IALD for its magical design:
Arup’s Rogier van der Heide has been accorded the most prestigious award for Lighting Design – the Radiance Award, given by the IALD (International Association of Lighting Designers.)
The award, bestowed by a panel of design peers, was given to Rogier in recognition of his contribution to lighting design, highlighting one of his most recent projects, the Galleria West Shopping Centre in Seoul. The judges described the project as ''State of the art technology and design... a striking effect... a vibrant and scenic experience at night''.
Together with Ben van Berkel of UN Studio in Amsterdam, Rogier and his team developed a lighting scheme for the building skin that changes, chameleon-like, at night, and during the day reflects the subtleties of natural light on the opalescent, dichroic glass discs facade. At night, the discs are individually backlit and controlled by a computer program to create brilliant colour schemes all over the building - each disc acting like a big pixel on a giant screen feeding text or images around the entire external structure. More...
I believe the main problem with interaction is the perceived authorship. Unless architects, planners and commissioners are getting keen on giving away their authorship in favor of true interaction, it will never reach the level of interaction that we see in other digital media. There seems to be the old perception that if you give someone the opportunity to speak freely or have their voice heard, then they will undoubtedly express something inappropriate (or even unethical). This could be compared to the situation of the WWW in its early days. I remember in the nineties when it truly started to spread to the general public, the media reporting on worst-case scenarios and raising concerns about the availability of information. There where actually people claiming that they didn’t want this technology in the home because of the intrusion they felt from inappropriate material. There was this belief that as soon as you turn on your computer, immoral content would come flashing at you and you wouldn’t be able to stop it and you would be corrupted. (Thank god for pop-up blocking) The idea back then was that if any type of information was easily accessible to anyone, then we would have total anarchy. Because deep down we are all a bunch of bomb-building perverted sociopaths out to destroy civilisation as we know it? Fifteen years later and the technology is mostly used for…yeah, you guessed it. To slag other people of.
