Digital technology makes its mark on home designs

Digital technology makes its mark on home designs
Midnight strikes and Bill Trader is checking currency prices from his bedside display. He'll wake to monitor activity again at 4 a.m., then rise a few hours later. After shaving in the glow of an LED in his bathroom mirror, he'll watch financial news on displays of all shapes and sizes strategically placed in his apartment. Then it's off to work for another day as a currency trader in New York.

Trader is fictional, but his home full of digital doodads is not. It resembles an apartment designed in 1988 for a real currency trader in New York City, a private cyberworld that forms one of the centerpieces of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "The un-Private House." The show will run through Oct. 5.

"At the time, there was no Internet, the term '24/7' had yet to be coined and it was unheard of to get proprietary information from the client's employer — an investment bank — piped into the home," Daniel Rowen, who designed the apartment with fellow architect Frank Lupo, told EE Times.

Despite the challenge of getting a Reuters feed and a link to a proprietary bank network into the apartment, Lupo and Rowen pulled it off, integrating more than 10 display screens into the architecture so the client could see currency information at all times. "We were trying to meet a client's needs and at the same time we created what has become a paradigm [in home design]," Rowen said.

That paradigm is the home as node on the Internet. No longer is the dwelling a private haven, a place to escape from the world. Rather, Internet connections, e-mail, fax machines, satellite dishes and set-top boxes have turned it into a 24-hour conduit for digital information.

And the end is far from being in sight. Indeed, some of the 26 dwellings on view at MoMA stretch Rowen's paradigm to the limit, turning walls into screens for digital art and entertainment, giving homeowners godlike control of their own virtual weather, even using LCDs as a building material. And lifestyle guru Martha Stewart has taken an interest, ensuring that digital bells and whistles will soon trickle down to a home near you.

Architects like Rowen say the encroachment of digital technology into the home, and the constant link with the world, blurs the line between public and private life. This, combined with changing demographics and new definitions of what constitutes a family, is changing the way we live and challenging architects to design spaces that reflect it.

"Years ago a child's room was a private domain for fantasy," said Rowen. "Now, if you have an [Apple] iBook on a child's desk, that room is a node on the Internet. An enormous amount of the world has come into the home and it's up to the architect to find new ways to define the private realm."

In the same way Lupo and Rowen wove digital technology into the trader's apartment, the MoMA exhibit integrates a slew of digital tricks into the installation.

Wall-mounted displays show DVD movies, audio and video systems are omnipresent, and technology specially designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — including an interactive table and a virtual welcome mat — let showgoers traverse the exhibit without ever having to sit down at computers.

To assemble this somewhat Orwellian vision, Terence Riley, the museum's chief curator for the Department of Architecture and Design, and his staff marshaled the services of architects, the MIT Media Lab and the Things That Think Consortium.

"The exhibit is one of a series of exhibits at MoMA planned to highlight beautiful architectural spaces," said Neil Gershenfeld, head of the Media Lab's physics and media group and co-director of its Things That Think industrial research consortium, a group of 50 companies interested in moving beyond traditional computing to smart devices and objects.

Gershenfeld said curators are "allergic" to putting computers in art galleries, and wanted interactive technologies instead. Thus, the first thing that greets you at the MoMA show is an interactive welcome mat that uses computer graphics and real-time vision processing to create what MIT calls a "responsive vision system."

When you step over this 4 x 6-foot "mat" — actually a projection on the floor in front of the doorway to the gallery — a camera locates and tracks your movements, and relays this message to a projector overhead. A custom-designed software program triggers the projector to make the mat respond, giving the appearance that it is following you.

Since the mat warps to any presence within its boundaries, it creates the illusion that individual visitors have a different impact as they step on this magic carpet. Step off, the image returns to its original state.

As visitors enter the exhibit proper, they pass what appears to be an interactive game table, which takes them on a virtual tour of the architectural projects in the show. Eight feet in diameter, the table is equipped with a rotating circular center section 5 feet in diameter. Each of the eight place settings spaced evenly around the table, and the central turntable itself, is illuminated by video projectors concealed in a drop ceiling overhead.

The undercarriage of the table is fitted with an array of electrodes, or "tau-fish" electrostatic sensors, designed by MIT. They send a tiny charge to the human body and measure electrostatic charges on a visitor's hand to track its movements. Sensors underneath the table respond to those movements, providing cues for projected images and text to beam onto the tabletop.

Each electrode is also a lightweight Internet node, called a Filament node, which the lab squeezed down to a $10 cost. The nodes all appear on the MoMA building's network.

On the outer edge of the central turntable sit 26 "coasters," each bearing a picture of one of the architectural designs in the show. Visitors can pick up and manipulate these 3.5-inch disks. When they set them down, sensors under the table send out a signal that creates an electromagnetic, touch-sensitive field, making the coasters responsive to touch. Presto! Diagrams and floor plans, as well as photographs of the homes, are projected on the table's surface, in full color.

The coasters are actually "pen- ny-tag," or low-cost, radio-frequency ID tags embedded with low-cost electromagnetic materials. A penny-tag reader tucked under the table analyzes the RF spectrum. Images are displayed via Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and written in Dynamic HTML to enable animation and visual transitions.

Gershenfeld said one of the museum's directors who attended the exhibit's opening said she liked the fact that she didn't feel she was using computers during her visit. "I told her she was probably in contact with more computers in that table than she had ever been in her life," he said. Gershenfeld said the table packs an enormous number of microcontrollers: about 40 at each place setting, plus more than 300 processors in the table itself, all joined in a big network.

Gershenfeld said MIT is working with Martha Stewart to turn such visionary technology into real furniture. One idea, he said, is a kitchen table that can beam up recipes and menus based on ingredients that are placed on top of it — a kind of TelePrompTer for challenged chefs. Other possibilities: a coffee table that acts as an information display or a dining room table where you can access news posted on Web sites with your corn flakes, instead of reading a newspaper.

Screens for walls

The use of technology in the installation echoes the way the architects have used technology in the home designs on display.

For example, a home in Napa Valley, Calif., built for a couple who collect media, has screens for walls. The owners use them to show their vast collection of videotapes, film and digital art. An unbuilt home design for a site on Noyack Bay, Long Island, puts video monitors in front of a picture window facing the bay to duplicate the natural view for playback when desired. Hurricane roaring? No matter. Turn on the virtual sun. (When Mark Twain said that if you don't like the weather in New England, wait a minute, this probably wasn't what he had in mind.)

The Digital House designed by the Manhattan architectural firm Hariri & Hariri uses active-matrix LCD panels as both building material and symbol of the digital age. Gisue Hariri, who with her sister Mojgan designed the place for a House Beautiful magazine project in 1998, said the LCD panels in the interior and exterior walls "reflect the changeability of life in this digital age."

"Architecture has always been viewed as something permanent and lasting," she said, "but as we see it, times are changing so fast, lives are changing so fast, that a certain amount of flexibility [in design] is attractive."

The LCDs can be changed daily to reflect the owner's mood. A panel in the kitchen can give you a one-on-one cooking lesson with a famous chef, bringing, say, Julia Child into the kitchen. Tired of duck l'orange? Turn off Julia and get a crystal-clear view into the next room. An exterior facing wall could be colored blue one day, or have an advertisement on it the next.

The idea, said Hariri, was to "see if we could use digital technology as a material for building." Indeed, major changes in architecture have always come from the introduction of new materials, she noted, likening the use of digital technology to the way architects rediscovered concrete as a flexible building material in the 1920s, largely through the efforts of the modernist master Le Corbusier.

Electricity, even the use of televisions and phones, also changed the way homes are used and designed, said Hariri. And digital technology is having a similar impact.

"We realize how much the way we think and work is affected by the technology," Hariri said. "We viewed digital technology as a material that would be flexible and reflect new forms and ways of thinking."

"Technology has always influenced architecture, be it digital technology, air-conditioning, refrigeration or other appliances that made homemaking easier," said Rowen of Daniel Rowen Architects, who with Lupo created the high-tech trader's digs.

And yet, "As families integrate more technology into their private homes, from big-screen TVs and surround sound to high-tech gymnasiums, they still want it to feel like a home," he said. "Has this changed the philosophy of the architecture of the private house? There is no glib answer."

Martha Stewart notwithstanding, the trader's apartment, the Digital House and the other off-the-wall dwellings showcased at MoMA are not, by any means, what every house will look like in the next millennium, Rowen said.

"On the creative edge of architecture, where a certain kind of client can bring a specific program to an architect, there is potential for doing something innovative that represents a change in philosophy about public and private," he said. "This is not public housing and it is not for everyone. Is it a snapshot of the future? Who knows?"