Architecture and Pervasive Computing: When Buildings and Design Artifacts become Popular Interfaces

Information Technology has in many years been driven by research methods developed within engineering and natural science. The capacity and the ever-decreasing size of IT-devices enable penetration into almost any object. Computing can no longer be regarded as an isolated technological possibility; through networks and telecommunication it has become an integrated part of our everyday life – pervasive computing emerge. The notion of Intelligent Buildings has developed over a longer period but pervasive computing accelerates the development. The perspectives range from monitoring and controlling energy consumption over interactive rooms supporting work in offices and leisure in the home, to buildings providing information to by-passers in plazas and urban environments. IT alters the ways we connect both culturally and socially in our environment. Thus aesthetic research perspectives become essential in the development of IT with respect to environmental impact and cultural changes. Furthermore IT has the potential to alter the premises for design and architecture in more general terms. This paper illustrates the development and the need for new IT and architectural research perspectives. We discus approaches for a common basis of both scientific and aesthetic research in pervasive computing and ways of including architectural and artistic approaches to integration of IT in living and work environments. We illustrate the discussions with examples from our Laboratory for Interactive Workspaces (http://daimi.au.dk/ispace) in the Center for Pervasive Computing (CfPC).