Fireside Chats with Empathic Futures Lab Empathic Futures Lab

In this episode, Christian and Colter sit down with architect Alex Bahr in the lobby of UIC’s Gallery 400 to discuss speculative architecture, subversive detailing, and alternative means of shaping the built environment. Bahr’s thesis project, the Play of Parts is also explored, check it out at the link below!
 
The Play of Parts (Portfolio +Thesis) 
https://issuu.com/alexbahr9/docs/alexbahr__thesis_book_pages
 
Alex Bahr’s Website
https://alexander-bahr.squarespace.com/

This episode’s home base is “AI” or rather...the current iteration of AI which attempts to pass as Intelligent. The idea behind the conversation is really that AI is at the cusp of being quite useful but it still is flopping around, making decisions that are almost right but wrong in silly ways.
 
Essentially, the conversation is about Dumb AI.
 
Enjoy.

Welcome to another episode of Empathic Futures Lab. This one features a guest appearance by Souyma Dasgupta. It's a pretty intellectual episode (after 5 minutes of fun/goofy introduction anyways) so buckle up. It was a really good discussion if you like that sort of thing. 
 
The topic is about “Authenticity” and “Heritage.” Soumya is a Phd student who’s research centers around the topic. Colter too has researched the topic a bit. We start the discussion by defining the subject, what it means, and what it means to us in particular.
 
Colter discusses how he’s interested in unpacking or exploding authenticity because of how he perceives the inauthenticity around him. Souyma explains the nuances of heritage to his research. He explains the difficulty of even defining what is “authentic” at any one time.
 
This sort of sets us up for the largest talking point of the episode: We discuss authenticity and how it is derived from/related to identity. Moreover, how do we even draw define or draw boundaries around “identity?”
 
It’s probably one of our best discussions to date. Enjoy.

We are trying this new thing where we come up with a topic and then just riff on ideas that come from that topic. This episode’s discussion was nominally about “interfaces.” That was our jumping off point, our “home plate” if you will, was interfaces or invisible interfaces.
 
Before we jump into the ideas though, we define what we mean by interfaces and what we mean by “invisible” interfaces. We discuss what effects they might have on society at this point in time. I’m pretty sure Colter uses the word “automagically” at some point during this section.
 
We then get into Christian’s idea and riff on it for a bit. It gets fun from there. The speculation is based on if your interfaces were connected to particular people or places.
 
Our following discussion gets into place based interfaces. How would that work and would that be better or worse? And does that relate to the demographic composition of that said place?
 
Colter then brings up the new Dimension that he has discovered in technology. This part is actually quite interesting as well. You should take a listen.
 
Hope you had fun. Listen again next time.

This discussion is our follow-up to our last discussion on Mirror World’s. This time, we have Colter on with us as well.
 
We start by discussing different ideas for mirror worlds such as how we might simulate feelings or very large spaces within the context of small physical spaces.
 
Somehow, we end up on a tangent of really “bad” technology. Ideas such as the digital murphy bed, America’s funniest AI home videos, and what’s the dumbest thing that you can make self driving?
 
The first part of the episode is really just a giant tangent though. Eventually we work our way back to the real discussion. Colter get’s us started by bringing up the differences between working in physical vs digital design processes. Particularly, he brings up the idea of svelteness or the scale/fuzziness that occurs in the physical world that we do not get in the digital world.
 
He brings up Dreams by Media Moleculte: https://www.mediamolecule.com/games/dreams as an example of sveltness in the digital world.
 
This leads us to a discussion about the human-ness of this technology. How do we get people started in digital tools vs physical things? How do we expose room for error?
 
What does it mean to be “literate” in 3D modeling in a truly digital world? What does it mean to be design literate in general? Does this increase or decrease the value of design?
 
 

This episode was inspired by Kevin Kelly's MirrorWorld article for Wired. Here is the link: https://www.wired.com/story/mirrorworld-ar-next-big-tech-platform/
Our conversation starts with summing up the article and describing what a Mirror World actually is as an augmented reality future. While doing this, we dig into particular sections of Kelly's writing starting with his ideas of "super vision" - the ability AR might gives us to see the digital insides of every object.
We then discuss what "authenticity" means in a world such as this where we can augment reality - past, present, future melding into one - on top of what "actually" exists. How does this change how we understand "place"? What is "place" in a world where we have a much larger control over how we experience space? Does placemaking no longer necessitate building new buildings and should we then discuss new business models for create places?
What does it look like to design something for the mirror world? Or is it purely a visual overlay? Why pay for architecture if all of the cool stuff is just an overlay?
Then we get to this point in the discussion where we ask if the future of architecture is quite literally "green".
Mirror World article with the mountains and school children that we discuss. http://blog.leapmotion.com/mirrorworlds/
For those of you looking for the Architectural Intelligence book that was referenced a couple times, it is here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/architectural-intelligen ce
Instagram photobooth article: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/1/23/18193574/instagram-photo-wall-personal-home