Taking place in the capital’s most exciting venue, the Truman Brewery, a vast reclaimed industrial site in Brick Lane, Tent London is the most comprehensive and diverse design event of the year, showing art and architecture, vintage and contemporary design by emerging and established designers from around the world.

Open Tables is a software application and a spatial environment, which researches and facilitates collaborative working between individuals and groups. The core purpose of Open Tables is to explore the potential for new kinds of collaborative working to emerge in spaces that combine analogue and digital modes of interaction: engaging both the mind and the senses in the navigation and production of information.

Come and see us at Tent London to talk to us about the project. We will be available at the stand throughout the exhibition.

Tent London opening times:
Thursday 18 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Friday 19 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Saturday 20 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Sunday 21 September: 11.00 – 17.00hrs

For more information on Tent London, please visit their website @ www.tentlondon.co.uk
To find out more about our project, please visit project’s website @ www.opntables.com

The exhibition documents WAG’s winning scheme for the Workspace Group Urbantine Project®Tent competition, and the runners-up schemes

The exhibition is launching with a panel discussion at 7.45 pm on September 11th, which should be interesting. I will be contributing to the discussion with the other invited contributors listed below. The discussion will address issues around new craftsmanship, the analogue space of virtual communication, sensory environments and adaptive structures.

Panelists:

Lesley Gavin [BT futurologists]
Olivier Geoffroy [untothislast]
Jon Goodbun [winner of the Workspace Group Urbantine Project®Tent), WAG]
Usman Haque [Haque design and research]
Alvise Simondetti [Foresight & Innovation at Arup]

Chair: Christian Derix [nous, Aedas R&D]

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=528&storycode=3066225

The project that David Littlefield refers to is the Interspace proposal, which has been published in one form in Medium Architecture (Bauhaus University Weimar Press). Filip Visjnic has recently been relooking at the project and WAG are planning to go for funding for it in the near future.

The initial version of the project can be found at http://www.wag-architecture.co.uk/?p=284
Another review of the conference can be found at http://morfogen.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_morfogen_archive.html

They form an introduction to design computing, working with various software and learning to communicate their ideas and inform their designs.

The theme this year was EVENT AND INTERFACE
Introduction:
In this group we will deal with issues raised by technology in architecture. Transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces. Their relationship to architecture and spatial opportunities they provide. How can these technologies affect the way we use space and how can they improve the way we experience complex architectural environments. Today information technology is distributed into most aspects of our life. We interact with it, operate it and upgrade it. Unfortunately all these devices exist in their own right.
Filip Visnjic
Digital Representation Group A
University of Wesminster

WAG personnel: architects and technologists

Project description: Speculative concept for immersive 3D TV and virtual teleportation environment

Estimated contract sum: £20,000 – £1 million

Publication: Medium Architecture – Bauhaus Weimar University

InterSpace – a proposal for a communicative prosthetic space

WaG Architecture

Technological development does not simply progress through rational scientific advancement, but is also dependent upon imagined solutions for imagined needs and desires. This proposal is a response to a number of contemporary conditions and technologies: from television to bio-mimetics, from computer interfaces to mobile phones and nano – technology. It starts with a proposition that is realisable now at the level of art research. A projected synthesis and development of the entertainment industry and bio-technology, it then suggests a line of development for a number of near future technologies. This product, called InterSpace, would provide:

- 3D immersive television
- Virtual transport and travel – ‘Teleportation’
- Virtual Sex
- Prosthetic environment
- Body based interface environment to computer/internet

The preliminary version of the scheme would be a spatial constellation not unlike a swimming pool filled with small balls. These balls, hereafter called ‘Monads’, should be thought of as 3D pixels. In the more advanced versions they should be thought of as both 3D pixels and atoms. The InterSpace is an environment full of monads. The participants would fully immerse themselves into this technological plasma.

First generation Monad specifications:

(IMAGE 6.7: WaG Architecture, InterSpace Generation One (2002))

- Perforated or otherwise allowing air through
- Variable visual state: either transparent, or emitting light and colour
- Being aware of their state and location

On this basis, an immersive 3D televisual environment can be constructed now. It would require an overseeing computer to hold the overall spatial image (or sequence of images) – and would tell any particular Monad what colour or transparency it needed to be, depending on where it is in the image space. The media surface expands into media space.

Such a space would first be held in a gallery or similar. It would become a product to be sold to the very rich initially. Later, instead of ever bigger TV sets, there might be InterSpace rooms in every house. Once many Interspaces are operational, they would network and communicate. Monads, or other sensors, would see participants in the space. Their image could be broadcast to another InterSpace, allowing participants to communicate with one another.

Second generation Monad specifications:

(IMAGE 8: WaG Architecture, InterSpace Generation Two (2002))

- ability to vary in size
- ability to stick together as necessary to make resistant form (whether temporarily bonded by electro-magnetic, chemical or other forces)

This would allow the dynamic construction of physical forms within the image space. The degree of sophistication of these spatial images would depend upon the resolution of the Monads (i.e. dependent on size.) As a communicative environment, it would allow not just the image of other participants within the space, but also their physical double.

Third generation Monad specifications:

(IMAGE 9: WaG Architecture, InterSpace Generation Three (2002))

- ability to vary in size – including extremely small
- non-toxic – can be consumed internally, whether by accident or for benefit
- ability to be sensitive to and take information from their immediate environment
- ability to stick to human body as well as each other
- ability to communicate with human nerves, to form a second skin

This would allow the dynamic construction of solid sensuous prosthetic additions to the participant body. It would allow the user to grow new and/or remote organs. These organs might be to do with feeling information in data driven environments (i.e. new forms of body based computer interface) as well as being based on existing body parts.

As a communicative environment, it would allow a physical double of the participant to relay sensuous feeling to their real body. This allows:

- Virtual and new forms of sex, using new organs, surfaces, multiple bodies in different places etc
- Teleportation (into other Interspaces)
- Exploration of uninhabitable places on this planet or others by setting up an InterSpace there, to be experienced through another here.
- Computer interfaces: new organs to do with feeling information in Spatial User Interface environments. The user’s cognitive map of their own body expands into the InterSpace, allowing them to drive or wear the machine.

This project was shortlistsed for the AJ small projects award 2003, and published in ‘London Architecture’, edited by Samantha Hardingham.

WAG were asked to produce a retail and work environment for bag and accessory designer Sally Greer. Working within a very tight space, the solution was a commodity landscape, accross which the precious artefacts were organised. The seductive, sensual form vertical landscape – constructed through computer aided manufacturing techniques – created a relationship between the body of the consumer and the commodity.