Research Through Making Exhibition

Taubman College Research Through Making Exhibition, January 15 – February 4, 2010, in the College Gallery.

Shadow Pavilion (project)

"Shadow Pavilion is a temporary experimental installation by University of Michigan Taubman College professor Karl Daubmann in collaboration with John Marshall. The project is an extension from a graduate studio course. It utilizes computer-generated architectural forms inspired by organic models to design site-specific structures that maximize utility while minimizing material and waste. This botanical-inspired structure was designed for this overlook on the Sam Graham Trees Trail. It frames the vista for visitors while providing both shade and a visual destination that orients people to the view point."

"Construction was assisted by graduate students Ngoc Thy Phan and Alex Timmer with construction volunteers Craig Borum, Peggy Chong, Jen Maigret, Jessica Mattson, Katie Santer, Dwight Song and Alex Watanabe. This project was made possible by a Research-through-Making grant from Taubman College at the University of Michigan and the U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum."

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/mbg/happening/shadowpavilion.asp

Shadow Pavilion (in progress)

The Shadow Pavilion explores the paradox of cutting holes in a structure because the removal of material makes a structure weaker but also lighter. The Shadow Pavilion, designed for a site at the University of Michigan Matthaei Botanical Garden, is both a structure and a space made entirely of holes. The pavilion surface is made with almost 100 aluminum cones that vary in size. Beyond testing the limits of sheet aluminum, the cones will act to funnel light and sound to the interior space, offering visitors a space to take in the views and sounds of the surrounding landscape.

By Karl Daubmann & John Marshall. Assisted by: Ngoc Thy Phan & Alex Timmer

This project was made possible by a Research-through-Making grant from Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

Piled Higher and Deeper

I finally got my piece of paper for 'An exploration of hybrid art & design practice using computer-based design and fabrication tools'.

Sensory Urbanism Proceedings

This book contains papers from the January 2008 conference, Sensory Urbanism, held by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. This conference was part of the Designing for the 21st Century Initiative project: 'Multimodal Representation of Urban Space'. This project is funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I am on the advisory board of this project. Papers deal with issues surrounding the sensory perception of urban design and how to design better for all the senses. The book is illustrated throughout, and contains 26 papers from fields including architecture, urban design, environmental psychology, urban design, planning, sound design and more.

"Representing space is not only a long-standing challenge to the arts but is also a major task in the planning process for buildings, cities, and many other products. This particularly applies to the "Urban Renaissance" of our days with its emphasis on public places.

Space – more than the surrounding objects or buildings – seems to demand to be represented not only visually, as it is not only determined by the visible surrounding objects, but also by sound and smell which are literally "in the air", and by an integrated multimodal body experience which is related to the space itself. Nevertheless, spaces, especially urban spaces in planning processes, are today usually only represented in a visual manner.

The major hypothesis of our project is that much better results for convenient and appealing urban spaces could be achieved if all sensory factors were acknowledged and controlled during the design process. There is no doubt about the multimodal quality of urban space – it always appeals to all senses. For example the most beautifully designed public square is destroyed if a noisy and odorous motorway is nearby, and not much would be left of the special atmosphere of the Piazza della Fontana di Trevi in Rome if the sound and coolness deriving from the running water was missing. All these factors are usually poorly represented (if considered at all) during the design process, but such an appropriate representation could help create better public spaces.

How might such an appropriate representation of the multimodal qualities of urban space be achieved during the design process? Depending on this general question several sub-questions emerge: How can space be represented in general? What means of representing space have already been developed? What kind of design control could be achieved if the multimodal qualities of spaces were also included into the design process? What kind of creativity might be evoked by using methods of multimodal space representation? What affordable and practical technologies might be used in common design processes for spaces?"

For more information contact:

Dr Raymond Lucas
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Architecture
University of Strathclyde
Room G28, Architecture Building
131 Rottenrow
Glasgow, G4 0NG

raymond.lucas@strath.ac.uk

The Sensory Notation Handbook will be available soon, with the first edition detailing the notational system and providing 30 case studies from Rome, Tokyo and Boston. An expanded edition of 50 studies - including Glasgow and Edinburgh will follow.

Kyoto

I am just back from a week in Kyoto, Japan. I went there to begin the process of producing an exhibition for The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in 2010. While there I visited OMRON, who will be providing sensing and control technologies for the project. I also met with faculty from Kyoto City University of Arts.

I met many people and saw some amazing things, but I think this roller coaster (below) in Osaka was one of the most striking things I saw.

Ok, I'll bite...

A couple of videos that I watched recently that give a taste of what might be coming down the pipe.

Design Connexity (event)

The Eighth International Conference of the European Academy of Design will take place at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, 1st, 2nd & 3rd April 2009.

Conference themes are:

Design Connexity
As the trend towards globalisation continues there is a growing connectedness between all our actions and a growing interdependence between the social, economic and the environmental. This increasing connectedness raises new moral and ethical issues and challenges. This concept has been termed ‘connexity’ (Mulgan, 1998) and provides the title for the conference and the backdrop for the themes of the EAD 08 Conference, which seeks to explore the implications of these trends for design research and practice.

Design Interconnections, Intersections and Convergence
This theme is concerned with the growing inter-connectedness of design, the interaction between design and other disciplines and the convergence between disciplines. Are design schools becoming the new business schools? Are new design professionals emerging that challenge the existing notions of what designers do? This theme invites papers that consider the impact of inter-connections between disciplines, the professions, and the implications for design education and professional practice.

Design Empathy
Products and environments need to satisfy functional as well as supra-functional needs (including the social, cultural, emotional, aspirational and spiritual). The data that can shape and guide decision-making can be visceral and ephemeral. More compassionate design approaches are necessary to ensure empathy and shared understandings are developed, and are particularly sensitive to how individuals communicate. We live in a verbo-centric culture, yet we experience the world visually. This theme invites papers that address issues, strategies and theories that consider empathic design.

Design Thinking
Design thinking is concerned with bringing about improvements in the human condition. This contrasts with critical thinking, which is concerned with the analysis and the breaking down of existing ideas. Design thinking is a creative process based around the building up of ideas. Design thinking does not seek to evaluate, as there can be no simply right or wrong answers. All ideas are welcome, since these have the potential to provide creative solutions. Design thinking offers strategies which can be applied to everyday situations. This theme invites papers that provide insights into the ways in which design thinking can be applied to address the critical issues facing contemporary society.

Service Design
Service design is concerned with both the tangible and intangible. It may be concerned with human interactions within systems, environments, communication and social interactions between people and organizations. It requires designers to question existing assumptions, undertake close observation of environments, provide diagnostic assessments and envisage new solutions. It has been applied in areas such as information services, health and education. This theme invites papers that provide insights into the application of service design that offer new solutions to tangible problems.

Design Boundaries
In a post-modern digital age we can witness attempts to combine art and technology crossing the boundaries in what was originally described by C.P. Snow (1959) as the ‘two cultures’. Snow’s fundamentally convergent position sought to expose the cultural divisions between art/humanities and science/technology. New design courses are being developed that embrace the concept of transdisciplinarity, moving beyond traditional subject boundaries. This theme invites papers that explore the boundaries between disciplines and professional practices, for example between design and architecture, design and craft or design and fine art.

Responsible Design
Designers are often cited as being major contributors to the ever-growing problem of waste as landfill sites fill up with discarded products that were designed without any consideration for recycling or reuse. Responsible designing makes it imperative that new products are designed with ‘cradle to cradle’ vision. This theme invites papers that explore the issue of responsible design, developing new strategies and insights into how this may be achieved.

Anti-Design
The Ad Busters web site states that: “We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century”. Is this the beginning of anti-design, a reaction against our material culture? This theme invites papers that challenge our notion of the role of design in the 21st century.

inter_multi_trans_actions (event)

On Thursday 26 June, 2008 there will be a one-day symposium that I helped organize at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland. The symposium is titled:

inter_multi_trans_actions
emerging trends in post-disciplinary creative practice

This one day symposium will bring together a number of leading practitioners from the fields of art, architecture and design who each share a common desire to exploit the latest computing technologies in their creative practice. The invited speakers will reveal their cutting edge work that blurs the traditional boundaries of the creative disciplines.

Emerging trends in post-disciplinary creative practice highlight the interplay of conventional boundaries. Speakers:

Moritz Waldemeyer
is at the forefront of mechatronics, a combination of mechanics and electronics, that helps create innovative design ideas for concept cars, smart weapons and washing machines. Over the past few years, Waldemeyer has worked with the likes of Zaha Hadid, Ron Arad and Hussein Chalayan who have all availed themselves of his expert technical know how.

HeHe
Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, the HeHe duo explore the territory that is the common ground for designers and artists. They have developed a concept of Cultural Reverse Engineering, that raises political, economical and sociological questions: to study a device or a software in order to modify its initial function is a way of re-appropriating the technology, in a world where most of us have no idea of the way everyday objects actually work nor how their cultural position has changed over time. The workshops they organize to “teach basic of DIY technologies, to students, artists and designers”, can be seen as a concrete application of that concept. HeHe is clearly related to the Lo-Fi philosophy (and it happens to be the title of one of their works), with its playful, yet serious, issues.

Usman Haque
has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.

the POOCH
explore non-navigational spaces and interfacelessness. They use less technology, not useless technology and they like extreme prototyping. thePOOCH also prefer to build rather than blog. thePOOCH is a young company with a wealth of experience in computer programming for mobile applications, interactive art installations, advertising and live events. thePOOCH’s team of programmers has 40+ years combined experience in software engineering, user interface design, computer networking and hardware development. thePOOCH work one-on-one with clients and end-users to design, develop and build interactive installations that are tailored for specific target audiences.

TROIKA
is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art. Our backgrounds in graphic, product design and communication allow us to engage in work that is at the intersection of the three disciplines, thinking of design as communication art. We develop a variety of self-initiated and commissioned projects that are both engaging and demanding to the user, from printed matter to product design and custom installations. Our approach focuses on the contamination between the arts and design disciplines and is born out of the same love for simplicity, playfulness, and an essential desire for provocation.

Greyworld
In 1993 Andrew Shoben founded Greyworld in Paris. Greyworld’s goal is to create works that articulate public spaces, allowing some form of self-expression in areas of the city that people see every day but normally exclude and ignore.

Jason Bruges Studio
is a Shoreditch based studio producing a diverse range of work that includes interactive light sculptures, interactive environments, events and screen-based installations. We explore the use of interactivity with the public and environment through the use of highly imaginative technologies. Jason Bruges Studio specialises in 'interactive light environments', from installations on the streets ofNew York to London's South Bank.

The Owl Project
make sculpture, music and sound art, notably the Log1K, Sound Lathe, Sound Chair and iLog. Drawing on influences such as woodworking, hobby style electronics and open source software to create music-making machines, they take a craft-based approach to designing their own interfaces and objects. The result is a distinctive range of musical and sculptural instruments that critique human interaction with computer interfaces and our increasing appetite for new and often disposable technologies.

Lucy Bullivant
is an architectural curator, critic and author. Lucy has worked internationally with leading museums, galleries, cultural institutions, publishers and corporate bodies since 1987. Her latest book, Responsive Environments: Architecture, Art and Design (V&A Contemporary, 2006), explores the hybrid discipline of interactive architecture and design. She regularly contributes to Domus, The Plan, a+u, Volume, Architectural Record and Indesign, some of the world's most authoritative international architectural magazines.

Thursday 26 June, 2008
Faculty of Engineering, Computing, and Creative Industries
Napier University
Merchiston Campus
10 Colinton Road
Edinburgh EH10 5DT

Places are limited and cost £20.00 each (which will include a publication of the speakers’ essays published after the event).

Anthony Dunne Innovationsforum (video)

Anthony Dunne // Dunne & Raby from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

PhD

Yesterday, February 25th I successfully defended my PhD thesis (An exploration of hybrid art & design practice using computer-based design and fabrication tools) at Gray's School of Art (Robert Gordon University) in Aberdeen, Scotland. I passed with minor amendments. My examiners thought the thesis made a contribution and that the contextual review was particularly strong. They have asked me to make explicit reference in my conclusion to the assertion throughout the thesis that there are new economic opportunities available for practitioners and to reflect on the curation of an exhibition as a research method. I was examined by Dr. Beryl Graham and Professor Stuart MacDonald, OBE. The examination was convened by Dr. Bernice West. My supervisors were Dr. Jon Pengelly and Dr. Julian Malins.

Research Methods for Design (event)

Yesterday was the first Product Scotland workshop (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Methods Network programme). The subject for this workshop was the use of ethnography as a research method in design. The schedule and brief were as follows:

Emerging Research Methods for Product Design Workshop
Thursday 8 November, 2007

10:30 – Arrive Napier University, Merchiston Campus and have tea or coffee

11:00 – Meet and Greet – introduce the day’s activities

11:30 – Introductions (between people)

12:00 – Kick off Project

Future Body, Future Food, Future City

What will the future body, food and city look like? How have the things we carry on our body changed during the last decade? What do we regularly carry to and from work? Will our body have to adapt to the pressures of the future?

How have our food consumption patterns changed? How do deal with the transaction of food for cash? What kinds of conversations do we have about food? Do we really enjoy eating or is it a task that we just do to survive?

Are cities of today prepared for tomorrow? How do we exploit the physical man made structures of the city? How do we alter or adapt the purpose or context of things in the city to meet our end needs, wants and desires?

Please remember, that it may be the little things (minutiae) that will reap the real insights into the future body, food or city. Someone once said “The Devil is in the detail”, so perhaps you should focus on the little things and leave the grand phenomena to someone else.

12:30 – Research – explore – investigate - observe

13:30 – Return to studio – Food served - analyse & interpret data collected

14:00 – Analyse & interpret data collected

14:30 – Start presentation

15:00 – Prepare work for presentation

16:00 – Pin up work

16:30 – Reflection and discussion of the day’s activities

17:00 – End of the day’s activities

Move exhibition and materials to Edinburgh College of Art (eca)

18:00 – ‘Open Evening’ opens

19:30 – ‘Open Evening’ closes

There were about 30 participants in the workshop from very diverse backgrounds. After a brief introduction we were all sent out into the city armed with digital cameras to explore aspects of 'user-artefact interaction' and to listen to and observe people doing everyday things. Then it was back to the studio to compile our findings as montages of images and texts. Karen Magazine was indicated as an example of what we were aiming for. One of the reasons we created Product Scotland was to create a network through using our design skills rather than talking about it - as at a typical conference. This was certainly the case. Each participant produced a book within a few hours and we gathered at Edinburgh College of Art to look at these and round off the day with a drink. I think everyone's expectations for these books were surpassed. There are some outstanding individual efforts and collectively they offer up insights about familiar activities. Eventually some of these will appear on the Product Scotland website.

The next workshop will be held at University of Dundee on 23 November 2007.

Dead Trees

The image at the top of this post shows some of the paper I've used over the past 3 years in the production of my PhD thesis. Although I'm proud of the work I've done I'm disgusted at the amount of paper and ink I've used. This stack is all the drafts of things I've written - either conference/journal papers or the thesis itself. Time to recycle it.

Talking Shop - Glasgow School of Art (event)

Last night I gave a presentation as part of the "Talking Shop" series at Glasgow School of Art. These talks are aimed at expanding the conception of design and its related fields.

"While the physical world remains very much the product designer's realm, today's product designers are also operating in the age of information technology, where intellectual capital and continuous innovation are key. In order that the designers of the future are equipped not only to react to, but also to anticipate, propose & give 'form' to invisible products - such as systems, services, interactions & organisational behaviours- we need to expand the definition of the term 'product'; the product designer of the future must be equally at home within the world of emerging technologies."

http://european-design.org/

http://www.gsa.ac.uk/

Designed Objects Wiki Updated

There is some new stuff over there >>>>> in the Designed Objects Wiki including some excerpts from my thesis.

PhD Thesis Submitted (at last)

Finally, I have submitted my PhD thesis. The title is "An exploration of hybrid art and design practice using computer-based design and fabrication tools." Here is the abstract:

The researcher’s previous experience suggested that the use of computer-based design and fabrication tools might enable new models of practice that yield a greater integration between the 3D art and design disciplines. A critical, contextual review was conducted to assess what kinds of objects are being produced by art and design practitioners; what the significant characteristics of these objects might be; and what technological, theoretical and contextual frameworks support their making. A survey of international practitioners was undertaken to establish how practitioners use these tools and engage with other art and design disciplines. From these a formalised system of analysis was developed to derive evaluative criteria for these objects.

The researcher developed a curatorial framework for a public exhibition and symposium that explored the direction that art and design practitioners are taking in relation to computer-based tools. These events allowed the researcher to survey existing works, explore future trends, gather audience and peer responses and engage the broader community of interest around the field of enquiry. Interviews were conducted with practitioners whose work was included in this exhibition and project stakeholders to reveal patterns and themes relevant to the theoretical framework of this study.

A model of the phases that practitioners go through when integrating computer-based tools into their practice was derived from an existing technology adoption model. Also, a contemporary version of R. Krauss’s ‘Klein Group’ was developed that takes into consideration developments in the field from the use of digital technologies. This was used to model the context within which the researcher’s practice is located. The research identifies a form of ‘technology-led-practice’ and an increased capacity for a ‘transdisciplinary discourse’ at the intersection of disciplinary domains. This study will be of interest to practitioners from across the 3D art and design disciplines that use computer-based tools.

The thesis is 455 pages and 142,000 words (including appendices). Eventually, I will get it online.

Writing Thesis

I'm (still) writing up my thesis.

[Update] 93,000 words and heading for the final chapter...

In the meantime some diversions:

http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/ reminds me a bit of:

http://thesurrealist.co.uk/priorart.cgi

Also:

Manufacturing Reinvented: additive manufacture and second industrial revolution

Rapid Maufacturing (RM) is the name used to describe a range of new processes that make things by addition - by building the part grain-by-grain, directly from digital data, RM requires no moulds or dies - there is no expensive and time-consuming tooling stage. The technology is in its infancy, but - like all things digital - it is developing fast and, step by step, being adopted in industry. This Materials and Design Exchange (MADE) conference, hosted by the Royal College of Art, will make a critical and provocative examination of a revolutionary technology - how does it work, where it is headed, what will it mean for consumers, for designers and scientists, for society, and for the global economic map? Does RM truly herald a second industrial revolution? This conference assebles a well-qualified group of speakers - leading thinkers and players in research, design, business and economics.

More information: http://www.made.uk.net/

25 Sep 2007

9.30 - 4.45

Royal College of Art

Upper Gulbenkian Gallery

Kensington Gore

SW7

By invitation only - (What's the deal with that?)

Art As Design/Design As Art (event)

Last night I gave a talk at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. I ran through a range of ways of thinking about the relationship between art and design. I was interested in doing this after I unearthed the Dan Graham paper ‘Art as Design/Design as Art’ at the National Library of Scotland. This was first published by Fruitmarket in 1987 to coincide with Graham's show there: Interior Design for Space Showing Videotapes. The paper has just been republished in Alex Coles’ new book “Design and Art”, Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2007.

My talk was broken down into the following sections:

Art as Design/Design as Art - Dan Graham

Design≠Art - Barbara Bloemink

Art in the Context of Design/Design in the Context of Art - Troels Degn Johansson

DesignArt - Alex Coles

Design and Art - Alex Coles

Critical Design - Dunne & Raby

Hybrid Art+Design - Me

Transdisciplinary Discourse - Me

An interesting idea that I tried to throw around was the use of the term "avant garde."

“Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm, or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Postmodernism posits that the age of the constant pushing of boundaries is no longer with us. Postmodernism posits that avant-garde has less applicability (or no applicability at all) in the age of Postmodern art.”

Yet, Marcus Fairs has titled his book 'Twenty-First Century Design: new design icons, from mass market to avant-garde.' And,

“In 2002 the Crafts Council held an exhibition called Home Made Holland, which suggested that Droog and other contemporary Dutch designers, such as Marcel Wanders and Hella Jongerius, had found a way forward for design by embracing avant-garde craft. Significantly, one of the chief protagonists behind Droog is Gijs Bakker, a radical jeweller who revolutionised the discipline during the late 1960s by combining throwaway materials with conceptual ideas. It was through applying this formula to a wider range of objects 30 years later that the Droog phenomenon exploded, yet in spite of its genesis in art and craft, the design world has been happy to claim Droog as its own.”
Craft Wars icon016 October 2004 by Lesley Jackson

“…admit that so-called avant-garde strategies operating in art and design today should be seen in a context of ‘post-avant-garde’, in which it is no longer relevant to distinguish between the two…”
Troels Degn Johansson

“First and foremost, all the claims that I have inventoried thus far are predicated on certain clichés of what constitutes ‘progressive’, ‘vanguard or ‘advanced’ art and are based on assumptions about current conditions of cultural practice that are out of sync with their realities. One such assumption is that medium categories in art or disciplinary divisions in the humanities are still oppressively strict, so that any art that touts interdisciplinarity or ‘crosses boundaries’ is attributed with automatic and unquestioned critical value. But it seems to me that even while the disciplinary debates/fights continue in certain sectors of academia, the destabilized state of medium specificity and disciplinary categories is already the dominant or given condition of cultural practice. As such, rather than serving an interventionary function within exclusive art institutions, so-called cross disciplinary practices or events that blur categorical distinctions may simply be symptoms of the tendency towards de-differentiation that pervades cultural experience generally.”
Miwon Kwon ‘Jorge Pardo’s Designs on Design’ published in Alex Coles’ new book “Design and Art”, Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2007.

Here are some other articles that I think contribute to this discussion:

What's the use? Art Journal, Spring 2004 by Ross K. Elfline.

Art’s Little Brother icon023, May 2005 by Rick Poynor.

What is Design? icon018, December 2004 by Marcus Fairs.

Historically the use of technology to level out traditional, disciplinary distinctions was a critical driver of De Stijl in The Netherlands, the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists -whose architects, artists and designers saw industrial modes of production as a means of moving art into life:

“…many artists championed the industrial artefact - generated mechanically and consumed collectively - over the singular work of aesthetic contemplation”
Ellen Lupton

Maybe sensational art and the rarefied space of the gallery are so disconnected from 'the everyday' that the last recourse is to turn to craft, design and domestic objects? Or maybe its just a great marketing hook...

The slides from my presentation are here.

Bursaried MPhil/PhD Studentship (Falmouth)

3D Digital Production Research Degrees (MPhil/PhD)

Applications are invited for research degrees (MPhil/PhD) in the area of 3D digital production.

Project proposals should focus on one of the following:
• innovative methods of integrating digital technologies into the creative processes of designing and making;
• online design tools/environments that facilitate collaboration between design professionals and designers, or designers and consumers, for customisation of 3D digital production;
• intuitive/human centred methods of interfacing with 2D/3D Computer Aided Design software and Computer Aided Manufacturing hardware that facilitate collaborative and customised 3D production.

A small number of studentships are available with bursaries covering UK/EU fees and a stipend of £12,000 p.a.

For more information see www.autonomatic.org.uk or for an informal discussion contact Dr Katie Bunnell on 01326 370497.

Deadline for applications: 11 July 2007.
Interview date: 26 July 2007.

Application forms can be downloaded from the website at: www.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/research

Hard copies are available on request by emailing:
admissions@falmouth.ac.uk.

Emerging Technologies (book)

Emerging Technologies and Housing Prototypes is a guide to new materials and technologies being used by architects.
Black Dog Publishing (27 April 2007)
ISBN-10: 190477265X
ISBN-13: 978-1904772651
Link to Black Dog Publishing page

This is an interesting book [even if the introductory essays are a little strange - lost in translation, maybe?] It is a good resource. I particularly like the tables at the start of each section that graph the properties and applications of the materials under the following headings:

Shape Performance
Optical Performance
Sustainable Performance
Integrated Performance
Responsive Performance
Material Profile
Process Technique
Case study Applications

The criteria used to determine innovative materials are:

It is non-polluting during the production process
It has been realised with low cost-effect technology
It is fully tolerable, recyclable and biodegradable
It is easy to stock
It is lightweight while maintaining high mechanical strength
It adds together properties of several materials (composite and nanocomposite materials)
It is obtained through technological transfer coming out of application from a different field