Could our daily interactions and social scenarios with in the city be enabled to restructure our environments through collective interaction? 

What if our everyday local interactions and behaviors were allowed to construct communities and social fabric as living environments that would operate through a collective intelligence that is adaptive and can evolve?

By MINIMAFORMS*

Emotive City is a framework to explore a mobile and self-organizing model for our contemporary city. Models of the past have proven limited and should not operate, as blueprints for our urban future, a new generation of design enquiry by necessity must address the challenges of today. The fixed and finite tendencies that once served architecture and urbanism have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life, machines and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges with an environment of accelerated urbanization.

We propose a framework that participates and engages with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives through a model of living that we call an adaptive ecology. Interaction within this project enables communication and real-time reorganization on multiple scales of engagement. Our interactive model is scenario based and asks what if our living environments were durational, mobile and energy producing could we conceive of a model of city organization that is not tied to infrastructural but would be governed locally through neighborhood relations.

The model proposed is an alternative experiment to planning that acknowledges the limited capacity of systems that segregate architecture, infrastructure, urbanism and the inhabitants. Our prototype examines a model structure through engagement and social interaction that within mobile and flexible infrastructure can dynamically address issues of latency and the unknown. As a response to Nesta’s Future of Machines theme -at FutureFest, where the installation was first presented- we felt that our living environments by necessity should be part of the conversation as we actively move towards an understanding of the human machine ecologies that are forming around us. The emotive city uses interaction as a fundamental communication model to create ecologies of mobile and self structuring habitual environments, a new nature of human machine interactions that are structured through behaviors.

Towards a human machine ecology
Our architecture will enable.
Our architecture will play.
Our architecture will sense.
Our architecture will self-structure.
Our architecture will learn.
Our architecture will be self-aware.
Our architecture will stimulate.
Our architecture will get bored.
Our architecture will anticipate.
Our architecture will interact.
Our architecture will be emotive.

*
Minimaforms: Theodore and Stephen Spyropoulos
Team: Ilya Pereyaslavtsev, María Paula Velásquez, Fanos Katsaris, Octavian Gheorghiu, Hitesh Katiyar, Flavia Ghirotto Santos, Mostafa El Sayed , Iris Jiang, Pavlina Vardoulaki and Houzhe Xu.