Probably the best contribution Interaction-Ivrea canmake to contemporary architecture and designdiscourses is to define what it does. Interaction-Ivrea isnot a traditional academic institution, nor is it aresearch centre: it borrows certain elements from both,and adds the electrifying tension and risk of evolvingreal-world projects. Teaching generates professionalopportunities, as the people and companies who takepart in our courses and workshops develop the ideasthat emerge there and turn them into real projects.Examples of this are our work with the Illy coffeebrand, the Aquafan water amusement park and Prada.At the same time, the impact and benefits of suchprojects are filtered back into teaching: Interaction-Ivrea is a place where ‘learning by doing’ is a fact, nota worn-out motto.

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Walter Aprile and Stefano Mirti have beenengaged as designers, researchers andteachers at Interaction-Ivrea, atechnological research institute innorthern Italy, since it was established byTelecom Italia and Olivetti in 2001. Here, thetwo reflect on the series of experimentsthey have undertaken at the intersectionof interactive technology and architecture,analysing their own working systems andthe means by which they have chosen topursue interdisciplinary dialogue.

Or, What Architects Can Learn From Interaction Designers

Building as Interface

The institute is an odd mixture of designers,technologists, computer scientists andresearchers, some with business-orientedminds. It is an independent, nonprofitorganisation1 located midway between MontBlanc and Turin that offers a two-year mastersprogramme in interaction design. Above westressed the importance of learning by doing;however, we would now like to contradictourselves immediately by instead theorisingabout what we consider to be the necessaryconditions for a productive meeting betweenhigh tech/new media and architecture.

Firstly, processes and tools interest us morethan aesthetics and iconic statements.Nonetheless, we acknowledge the importanceand relevance of aesthetics. But we must notforget that technology and technologists havetheir own concept of aesthetics andappropriate form. The designer is not the onlycharacter in play.

We want to avoid pyramid structures wherethe architect/designer/pharaoh is on top andtechnologists (software, hardware, electronic)drag multi-tonne blocks through the landscape.Our vision is a horizontal circle with charactersfrom different disciplines talking to each other,in which there are no grease monkeys, butwhere all are partners working together. Thisinterdisciplinary dialogue is the most important(and difficult) element of the whole process.

The best way to produce a working structureis to iterate rough prototypes methodically.Ideate, make a cardboard mock-up, do it again,adapt, add some electronics, motherboards,Styrofoam, accept mistakes, try again, anothertime. When the project is over, track carefully allthe mistakes and look for an opportunity to dothe same project again, only better.2

We follow the ‘form follows fiction’ approach,rather than ‘function follows form’. First andforemost, projects must tell a good, believablestory in which the listener can find a place forhim- or herself.

Though Italian, we love to indulge in the greatBritish tradition of science and social fiction. Weare not referring so much to HG Wells or JGBallard, but to the work that challenges us on amore fundamental level, for example ThomasMoore’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, LewisCarroll’s Alice novels, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland,and The Who’s Tommy. Though we started withUtopia, we often find Dystopia even morecapturing: the work of Orwell, Terry Gilliam’sBrazil, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.But where does architecture come in?

At the frontier of architecture there cannot be clearlyexpressed objective necessities: no user, no client norcommittee can really say they need a mediatheque as ametaphor of information flow, since nobody knowsexactly what a mediatheque might be. No client willstate a requirement for a facade of iris-like glass andmetal components that react to the sun. Amediatheque, a reactive facade, tells and embodiesstories, and these stories are our core business.3

In the stories we try to tell, we generally start fromthe question ‘What if?’ This is the same question posedby science-fiction stories, by Archigram’s ‘What if abuilding could walk?’ or Cedric Price’s ‘What if abuilding could be constantly generated andregenerated?’

What we find interesting in the field of interactivedesign now comes from this rich lode of thought: werefer to the outstanding books by Tony Dunne and FionaRaby. Or to young designers such as Elio Caccavale(‘What if we had to live with our own geneticallycompatible pig?’), Crispin Jones (‘What if our cellphonecould inflict physical pain on us?’) and Noam Toram(‘What if your furniture could feed you subliminalmessages?’).

It is clear that our references are the Londoncentricworld Gillian Crampton Smith (our director atInteraction-Ivrea) made us discover: they show us howto design by building intriguing and unexpected scenarios.From this point of view, the piece or the environment wedesign is a part of the scenario. Our work for the VeniceBiennale was based on ‘What if you could walk inside ascreen?’ However, Eyal Fried and Luther Thie4 posed asmarter question: ‘What if brain fingerprinting becameas easy as traditional fingerprinting?’ – What productswould result? Where would it surface first? Probably inan airport, as part of the security process. What wouldit feel like?

Once we have a story that can fascinate the peoplearound us, we can start talking about the budget andthe regulations and the form. We need to fascinate thepeople not because we like to bask in affection, butrather because we usually require a huge amount ofsupport and supplies that cannot be obtained by othermeans.

Over the last three years we have made a series ofexperiments centred on the intersection of interactivetechnologies and architecture. The technologiesinvolved – sensing, computation and display – are in astate of rapid flux. While the evolution of basictechnologies and materials might be more or lesspredictable, the standards and applied technologiesundergo frequent change. It is very easy for certainspecific technologies or aesthetics (for example, greenLEDs) to quickly look ‘old’. Incorporating these fleetingelements of practice into buildings whose life spanextends across decades would make us uncomfortable.

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OppositeInteraction-Ivrea withCliostraat, Grace UnderPressure, Venice Biennale,2002The visitor entered a darkenedspace with six informationtouch screens. As theindividual browsed the localwebsite, getting informationabout DARC (the DirezioneGenerale per l’Architettura el’Arte Contemporanee of theItalian Ministry of Culture), hisor her activities influenced theblinking of the suspendedelectroluminescent slidesaround him or her. The Ivreateam designed the website,the physical space, all thetechnological support and theterminals: one issue ofinteraction design is that youoften have to do everythingyourself, as it can be difficultto give specifications clearenough for a contractor.Interaction-Ivrea: WalterAprile, Massimo Banzi,Franziska Huebler, StefanoMirti, Chris Noessel, SergioPaolantonio, Jeremy Tai AbbettCliostraat: Matteo Pastore andLuca Poncellini.

Rapidly changing technologies call for aprototype-based approach, perhaps closer to theworld of product design than to traditionalarchitecture.

Change means, nay, guarantees, obsolescence.One could try to delay obsolescence by using thelatest and greatest technologies, for exampleOLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) as lightsources. But on the other hand, we know thatgetting technology to work for some time, oreven to work at all, is still the main challenge.So to increase this challenge by using still-exotictechnology is perhaps not so wise.

Our guideline so far has been to use off-the-shelf parts as much as possible, and concentrateon temporary structures and installations thatdo not have the opportunity to get old. Thisallows us to make mistakes, and to learn fromthem. We are very clear that our work so far has been a form of practice, training andexperimenting. We are not yet at the Olympics.5

Our first experiment was Grace UnderPressure, an interactive environment for DARC,the Direzione Generale per l’Architettura el’Arte Contemporanee of the Italian Ministry ofCulture. DARC commissioned us6 to embed a setof significant institutional memories into aneutral space. The memories took the form ofvideos and images provided primarily by DARC.

We defined the space with a grid of pulsatinginformation objects, controlled by finite stateautomata7 that reacted to the users’ actions. The trails of browsing produced constellations of blinkinglights in the black boundless space of the room, in Biennale Gardens in Venice, as the perceptualqualities of colour and blink rate became modified by the accumulated behaviour of visitors. In this first experiment, the software and the interactioncompletely defined a space that, without theinteractive elements, would have been neitheraccessible nor meaningful; in a sense the architectureof the space was software.

In Grace Under Pressure we added behaviour to aspace that was blank but given. The first image in thisarticle demonstrates what we mean when we refer tothe need for aesthetic qualities that can speak to thedesigner as well as to the technologist.

The following series of experiments was inspired by reflecting on the thesis work of Shyama Duriseti(traditional Indian space wisdom and new media) andLine Ulrika Christianssen8 (traveller’s bubble for airportlounges). Subsequent work in the Europan 7architecture competition tried to address the questionof prototyping space itself. The technology that mademost sense to us in this context was inflatables.9 Wediscovered that the cheapest kind of white nylonmaterial works quite well as a projection and back-projection screen. Our first prototype – an experimental

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AboveLine Ulrika Christianssen, Re-Lounge, thesis project atInteraction-Ivrea, 2003The traveller in transit atinternational airports canenjoy private time in apersonalised environment thatconforms to his or her desireswith customised music andlighting. A gentle vibrationwarns travellers that it isalmost time for boarding. Theproject uses as a starting pointChillout Room designed byDavid Sevoir, and kindlysupplied byroominteriorproducts.

housing system – taught us10 many things aboutair circulation, solar gain, and a number ofapparently minor technical issues. Quiteseparately from these technical aspects, wedetermined another interesting requirement ofinflatables: you cannot do them by yourself.From the smallest size upwards, this technologyrequires collaboration for setup, operation anddismantling, and more so if they are interactive.This matched perfectly with the accent oncollaboration that runs through the Interaction-Ivrea curriculum.

In our next exercise with inflatables weemployed them as the medium for the first termof teaching, christening them CICCIO (CuriouslyInflatable Computer Controlled InteractiveObjects) and giving them to the class togetherwith a microcontroller development kit. Twoteams of students used them in distinct andunexpected ways. Giovanni Cannata and AnuragSehgal designed Creative Collisions, an objectthat secreted all its machinery inside the CICCIO

and used the external skin of the inflatable topresent the visitor with an interactive surfacethat reacts to thrown objects with graphics andsound. Meanwhile, the Audiograffiti team(Andreea Chelaru, Ben Dove, Noel Perlas and

Thomas Stovicek) defined a white environment in whichvoices and sounds could be recorded and left for awhile, like idle writing on a sandy shore, to be heard by successive visitors.

Another CICCIO project, done with the fundamentalcollaboration of Daniele Mancini, took the concept toINARCH (the Instituto Nazionale di Architettura in Rome),for a workshop within the digital architecture course11

organised by professor and architectural critic MariaLuisa Palumbo. Here, the inflatable environment metwith a radio frequency identification (RFID)12 reactivesystem that we had previously designed for anothercontext. The visitor would hold a bottle of wine, a dish of cookies, or a piece of chocolate up to a reader, and a short student-produced video segment would beprojected through a window cut in the inflatable skin.The idea was carried out by Daniele Mancini as a thesisproject, and presented at the end of the year show. Onthis occasion, the system powered a portable museumabout the tourist experience in Rome. The visitor wouldhold up to the reader common tourist knickknacks, and the system would present a segment of video that either related the story of the object, or freelyassociated with fragments of classic movies aboutRome. The concept driving the portable museum wasthat the highly mobile curator would wander aroundshooting video, collecting objects and presenting dailybuilds of his museum-in-progress.

We believe that this sequence of experiments anditerations highlights the value of choosing one themeand sticking to it. In this case, we stuck to the theme of inflatables, gradually making them more complexand interactive. While there were many small technicalfindings, the main lesson was a metalesson:experimental technology cannot be right first go.Iteration is required to move forward. In this, all of ourprojects are partial successes because we learnedsomething, and partial failures because, in attemptingto add new elements, we were not fully prepared forthem. Looking at them in retrospect, we realise howmuch we have learned that we could not have learnedfrom books. With regard to inflatables, for example, welearned that sphere-shaped inflatables are expensive to make, and that inflatables smaller than a minivancollapse too rapidly when visitors enter and exit.

After experimenting with the inflatable on theground, we decided to branch into helium balloons for a number of experiments at the launch party of Clustermagazine, held at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin.Students experimented with connecting differentenvironments through projections on flying screens.The visitor entered the building, saw a strange butinviting panel and put his or her head into a cutout. A camera discreetly took a picture of the visitor’s face,and stored it on disk. The image was then put into aloop and projected in the main hall of the Mole, an

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BelowInteraction-Ivrea,Experimental housing system,Europan 7 architecturecompetition, 2003Russian doll-like inflatablesproposed a light and cheapsolution to the problem ofhousing on a riverside site inPescara, Italy. When a livingspace is needed, the inflatableunit would be placed on aconcrete pad, connected toservices and inflated in amatter of minutes. Wepreferred building a 1:1 modelto making renderings. Thiswas our first experiment withinflatable structures, at thetime still without interactiveelements.

enormous vaulted space that just begs to beinvaded. As the visitor arrived in the hall, he orshe saw his or her surprised face everywhere,projected on the CICCIOs and on helium-balloonscreens flying above the party crowd. The finalaesthetic result was quite crude; however, theprocess was smooth. What we aimed for here, inkeeping with the party context, was surprise anddelight, and it again confirmed how much peoplelove seeing their own image in a delayed mirror.This event started a relationship with Clustermagazine that resulted in Interaction-Ivreacurating the special-interest section of themagazine’s third issue on interaction, which wasthen distributed at the Salone del Mobile 2004.

Another important element of our work is that although at Interaction-Ivrea there is indeeda difference between students and faculty, thisdifference is not necessarily reflected in theproject hierarchy. Different projects demanddifferent leaderships: for example, the event at the Mole Antonelliana was built around theFace to Face to Face interactive game designedby Giorgio Olivero, at the time still a student.

Giorgio Olivero with Peggy Thoeny developedthe environment research direction for theTableportation thesis project. Tableportationexploited the ambiguous private/public status ofthe surface of a table in a club, and augmented it with a new expressive layer, linking it withother tables to form a shared projectedenvironment. The additional layer used discreettouch sensors, embedded LEDs and software toturn the table top into a drawing surface, thusadding new functions and meanings to a well-

known object. Developing the project within anacceptable budget required support from Osram. The project prompted us to think lucidly in terms ofpromoting interactive projects to companies. Designersare prone to living in a hermetic world inhabited bythemselves, the client and a number of suppliers. In theworld of new technologies, suppliers must be turnedinto partners – an old business-school chestnut thatmeans that your success must contain a portion ofsuccess for them too.

As they grow, projects change in nature and refocustheir topic. For example, Dario Buzzini (then a student),together with Massimo Banzi (professor of physicalcomputing), developed a project called Not So White

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AboveGiovanni Cannata and AnuragSehgal, Creative Collisions,and Jennifer Bove, Simone Piaand Nathan Waterhouse,Collabolla, first-year project, 2003Creative Collisions (to theright) was designed to test avery engaging mode ofinteraction: the users threwobjects at a CICCIO, and thesurface reacted with graphicsand sounds. Collabolla (in thecentre) proposed a new way ofinteracting with classic videogames by playing with yourwhole body and forcing theuser to collaborate with afellow player.

RightAndreea Chelaru, Ben Dove,Noel Perlas, Thomas Stovicek,Audiograffiti, first-yearproject, 2003A white environment wherevoices and sounds could berecorded and left, like traceson the sand, for future visitors.Sounds echoed and faded overtime; the microphones wereactivated by the visitor steppingon a button on the floor.

Walls with the idea of reinventing wallpaper byimbuing it with interactive qualities. The mostremarkable element of this interactive wallpaperhas been the development of a display that usesheat-sensitive ink and a resistor matrix topresent large-scale pixilated images. Theseimages change slowly, with a refresh rate thatcan be measured in seconds, and are made ofreflected light, just like traditional writing orpainting on paper. We consider this to be a signalexample of the appropriate use of technology,since such an effect would not be obtainable viaother means (such as projections, LEDs or videowalls), and because it develops its own poeticqualities of slow and subliminal change. What isperhaps more important is that this display doesnot add more boxes to our cluttered livinglandscapes; when it is powered off, it is just aplain wall with no visible elements of technology.

The project has gone through four iterationsand is now entering the commercial stage.13

Developing an academic project into one ofcommercial-level feasibility is another step incomplexity that shines a particularly strong lighton yet another requirement for an interactiondesigner: social competence.14 But, as JoachimSauter15 reminded us: ‘Design is easy. Socialcompetence is the most difficult thing to teach.’

Interactive wallpaper uses high technology ina peculiar way; the computer disappears as avisible presence – we just get its effect – andtechnology is used in a discreet and effective way.There are three reasons for consideringdiscreetness and effectiveness as generalconditions of success for the use of technology indesign. The first is historical: mechanicalaesthetics was already slightly ridiculous 50 yearsago. The Dymaxion house and vehicle, or LeCorbusier’s Voiture Maximum, are quaint examplesnot to be taken as models. Our favourite LeCorbusier buildings are the Indian ones, becausethey are timeless. Perhaps because we knowmachines, we know that there is no ghost (orspirit) inside them – not even in digital machines.

The second reason is practical: technologyages, and its ostentation has called attention toits unsightly rapid ageing. The Eames used thehigh technology of their time for processreasons, to obtain a shape, a product, a value –not because they suffered from technologicalaesthetics. As much as we love the Eames’products, we do not completely get the wayPiano and Rogers used technology for the CentrePompidou. If we enter a Romanic church, ourheart rate picks up. A Baroque church leaves usa little colder. Technobaroque, more so.

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In a sense, the problem of making technology visibleor invisible is a false one. The real problem is that itshould not be an ostentation. To show off technologyper se is evidence of a cargo cult16 mindset that warpsthe reasoning along these lines: if the computer iscutting edge, and it can generate blobby shapes onhigh-end plasma screens, I will design a building that isblobby and covered with plasma screens, and thereforeI will be cutting edge. The engineer who designs theplasma screens is a hero; the architect who uses themalong the lines we have mentioned is a member of acargo cult.

A third reason is that we believe technology is foruse, not for show: it cannot be a carrier of aestheticvalues because its values are based on internalconsistency and physical constraints. To overload it with aesthetics breaks its back.17

Chairman Mao used to remind us of the relationshipbetween the finger pointing to the moon and the moonitself. As he reminds us, we don’t want to call attentionto the humble finger, but to the moon. If, then, peoplekeep staring at fingers, it is their problem.

Our largest-scale public experiment so far has beenthe ‘Interactive Body Snatchers’ exhibition, held at theMilan Triennale, in the context of the Salone del Mobile2004.18 Here, we presented 20 projects by students,faculty and designers we frequently work with.Everything we were showing carried, as it were, a large‘Please, Do Touch’ sign, and in fact the room made very

Top rightInteraction-Ivrea, Clustermagazine launch, MoleAntonelliana, Turin, 2003Interaction-Ivrea invaded theimpressive vaulted space ofthe Mole Antonelliana withinflatable interactive objectsand flying screens formed by agrid of helium balloons. Thevisitors’ image, captured at theentrance, was presented, aftera short delay, projected on theballoons. The event wasorganised for the first issue ofCluster, a bilingual magazinefocusing on innovation.

Bottom rightGiorgio Olivero and PeggyThoeny, Tableportation, thesisproject, 2004In the bar environment, one ofthe most important elementsis the table. The project, whichwas supported by Osram,enhanced thesemiprivate/semipublic statusof tables by turning theirsurfaces into sensitive areasthat allowed the user to drawand chat with other visitors tothe bar. Ceiling-mountedcameras formed a collectiveimage of the tables, enhancingthe sense of ambiguity.

From the outside, the point where interactive designand architecture meet looks very glamorous, withglimpses of fascinating shapes and exciting magic. It islike a cathedral where gifted craftspeople apply theirdifferent skills to a common lofty purpose. We imaginea master builder, the guild of stonecutters, painters,glassmakers. From the inside, the cathedral revealsitself to be a set of galleries in a mine. There is nomaster plan, no master builder; we vaguely follow alode, digging like moles; there are occasional cave-ins,rare moments of excitement and the occasional nugget.Grisou lurks everywhere, linking mistakes to terrifyingconsequences.

We thought that we were going to paint frescoes. We found ourselves a thousand feet underground,digging with pick and shovel. Unexpectedly, we findourselves in the mine – and we like it pretty much.

little sense without people in action. Thematerials used were basic and affordable:industrial rubber flooring, backstage scaffolding,no carpeting. We didn’t want to show fancyresults; we wanted to show the real features ofour designs. The process became the aestheticquality. As a general strategy, we say that if, forthe time being, we are not able to come up withpolished results, then we show roughprototypes.19 The school was able to do most ofthe lighting via combination lamps/informationpanels, which allowed us to concentrate ourenergies on guaranteeing that everything weshowed was interactive and operational for fivefull days.

The ‘Interactive Body Snatchers’ show hasbeen described as friendly, engaging, rough andcertainly different from the typical high-techshow-off exhibition. It worked only because,before it, we had made two smaller-scale tests,one at the institute and one in the Bu.netInternet café in Turin. The show stated clearlywhat we think of technology: it is something tobe grabbed, used and flexed, but certainly not to be revered or admired for itself. The pieces we exhibited are evidence of a constant processof experimental negotiation between budget,aesthetic values and desire. But the key elementof the show was that we were harnessingemotion, not technology.

Creative Collisions and Collabolla20 were firstshown at the Salone del Mobile and thenreworked as the basis for performance piecespresented in the Media House section ofFabbrica Europa, a month-long internationalperformance arts festival held annually inFlorence. Interactive spaces were also exploredin a thesis project by Tarun Jung Rawat,21 whodeveloped fragments of interaction for a possiblemuseum of writing and computing techniques.

Finally, at the institute’s end-of-year party, we used the facade of Talponia, our studentresidence, for a number of partially interactiveprojections. People could send text SMSs andtheir texts were projected on the curved-glasswall. This was at the beginning of the summer,the end of our year-long efforts. To be honest,22

even though the image was nice, almost nothingworked properly. We set some design goals and we failed on most of them.

So was it a disaster? Not at all – as long aswe acknowledge our failures, understand themand see ways around them. We did ourpostmortem and now we know what to fix. In this field, being humble is useful. But beinghonest is a condition of survival.

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AboveDario Buzzini, Not So WhiteWalls, thesis project, 2004The last in a series ofprototypes on rethinking thewallpaper concept, this large-scale environmental displayused a thin array of resistorsto form an image by gentlyheating cloth dyed with heat-sensitive ink. When turned off,the display was just a greycanvas surface with no trace ofa technological presence. Weenvision the display to be usedfor slow-changing information.The device started as a thesisproject and has been patentedby the institute.

Above rightInteraction-Ivrea andstudents, end-of-year partyinteractive facade, June 2004Because of the peculiar shapeof the facade of the studentcampus (an enormous longand narrow screen), weelected to show videos fromthe year’s work and designedsimple interactive displaysactivated via SMS.

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TopInteraction-Ivrea, ‘InteractiveBody Snatchers’, Salone delMobile, Milan, 2004At the Salone del Mobile inMilan, where the internationalfurniture and appliance designworld gathers annually,Interaction-Ivrea presented 20interactive projects bystudents, faculty anddesigners who work with theinstitute. This created a largeand mysterious environment,where everything was made tobe touched, and where theinstitute students, staff andfaculty were ready to explainand demonstrate. Exhibitiondesign was by the Cliostraatgroup.

Notes1 The institute was founded by Telecom Italia and Olivetti in 2001, and it is now part of the Progetto Italia initiative of Telecom Italia. Through themasters programme and innovation projects developed independentlyand in partnership with businesses, it acts as a cultural centredisseminating interaction design knowledge and know-how. Furtherinformation can be found at www.interaction-ivrea.it2 We are manic worshippers of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time. Quotingfrom it: ‘The oldest surviving things made by men are stone tools. Acontinuous series runs from them to the things of today. The series hasbranched many times, and it has often run out into dead ends. Wholesequences of course ceased when families or artisans died out or whencivilizations collapsed, but the stream of things never was completelystilled. Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of somethingmade a little time ago and so on back without break to the first morningof human time.’3 To this extent, we are really modern, and our references are MarshallBerman’s descriptions of the Crystal Palace, the Brooklyn Bridge, themaking of St Petersburg, Rimbaud and Mallarmé in All that is Solid Meltsinto Air. We could define ourselves as Modern because of our ambition,and as Postmodern because of our attitude that cannot escape irony.Thirty years from now, we want to build an airport that embodiesArchigram’s playful irony, not high-tech arrogance.4 Who graduated from Interaction-Ivrea in the summer of 2004 with theAcclairism project: for more information see www.acclair.co.uk.5 And here lies the exceptional value of Interaction-Ivrea, as a place that needs and fosters experiments with their attendant successes andfailures. Generally, large established technocentric architecturaloffices or high-tech corporations couldn’t and wouldn’t support such an attitude.6 ‘Us’ stands for a group of predominantly first-year students andprofessors: Walter Aprile (software), Massimo Banzi (electronic), StefanoMirti, Chris Noessel (content), Sergio Paolantonio, Jeremy Tai Abbett, and Franziska Huebler (graphic design), with Matteo Pastore and LucaPoncellini (Cliostraat) for space.7 A finite state automaton (FSA) is a mathematical/computer scienceconstruct that has a set of states and some rules that make it changestate deterministically based on its previous state and its input. In thiscase, the FSAs were used to generate arbitrary sequences of blinks in an efficient way. They were also used because they are an elegant formalconstruct that lends itself naturally to parallelism, and the pulsatinglights had to operate in parallel. Any hint of sequentiality would havebetrayed the machinery of the space.8 Stefano Mirti was thesis adviser for both.9 We know that inflatable spaces have a rich and long history that startedwith blimps, hit a highly significant moment in 1968 with Archigram’sInstant City and the ‘Les Structures Gonflables’ exhibition in Paris, andproduced many interesting buildings, most of them temporary. Manyhopes have focused on inflatables, but for practical reasons it seems thatwe are not living in inflatable houses yet. Still, it is difficult to deny that, if you want to build a prototype environment, the technology that costsless per cubic metre is inflatables. And, if we want to work on a chain of prototype iterations, the inflatables are one of the most interestingsolutions. Cheap to buy, easy to make, to change, to fix, to reorganise;they allow mistakes, and maybe even call for them. In this case the groupincluded Walter Aprile and Stefano Mirti plus the energy and passion ofDaniele Mancini, Dario Buzzini and Eyal Fried.10 In this case the group included Walter Aprile and Stefano Mirti plusthe energy and passion of Daniele Mancini, Dario Buzzini and Eyal Fried.11 On this occasion the design team included Walter Aprile, Daniele Manciniand Stefano Mirti. We love doing one-week workshops with external

institutions because they force us to explain to others, so we can explain toourselves. Despite the apparent complexity, mixing design and technology is notdifficult. Things you see in glossy magazines can be analysed, learned andimproved with surprising ease. Once more, the magic ingredient in the learning is the doing. One week working together has the same effect as 20 lectures or asemester of classes.12 Radio frequency identification technology consists of tiny cheap tags that can beembedded into objects. These tags contain small amounts of digital information thatcan be read rapidly, invisibly and without physical contact using radio technology.The simplest form of RFID is systems that prevent store theft; more refined systemscan be used to manage inventory, storage and reordering, to build ‘smart shelves’ in shops, and even as electronic purses. For example, London Transport’s Oystersmartcard system is an RFID system. RFID systems can be made much smaller thanmagnetic systems, can be read from impressive distances and made much moreresistant to the physical and electromagnetic environment.13 The thesis project was developed by Dario Buzzini, tutored by Jan-ChristophZoels, with Massimo Banzi and Stefano Mirti. During the process of thesis-making,the project produced a commercial prototype for the Prada fashion house. It iscurrently being developed as an internal project by the institute.14 We have already mentioned collaboration, and at this stage we can also see it as a specialised form of social competence – an ability that is very difficult to teach,although hints can be given.15 Professor for new media, arts and design at the University of the Arts in Berlin,designer, co-founder of Art + Com and a brilliant critic.16 The story starts in Melanesia, during the Second World War. This region of theworld was disturbed by the establishment of a series of US bases where cargoplanes would arrive loaded with goods. The indigenous people of Vanuatu observedthat, before the arrival of the cargo plane, things would happen; the flightcontroller would climb on the control tower, put on headphones and talk to invisibleentities. Afterwards, the plane would arrive. After the US forces left, the inhabitants of Vanuatu tried to make the planes come to the island again, by mimicking theritual; they lit signal fires on the landing strip, built a bamboo control tower and,wearing half-coconut headphones, muttered into the air. Of course, the Melanesianswere perfectly right in their method, as far as they knew. But we know somethingmore: that if we want to build a plane today, we should start by experimenting withgliders, not with a 1:1 painted clay representation of a Boeing 737. On the other hand,we are surrounded by designers who build representations of the future, in the hopethat these representations will entice the future into arriving in the shape and colourthey want.17 Everything you see has its internal or external necessity, and if it makesaesthetic or compositional sense, we would never admit we did it on purpose.18 The exhibition was curated by Massimo Banzi, Edoardo Brambilla, Line UlrikaChristianssen, Holly Coleman, Stefano Mirti and Yaniv Steiner. 19 To tell the whole truth, we are not really interested in polished results. The rough prototype stage is the one that best represents the state of the art in thisfield. Coming up with apparently perfect solutions is ethically and practically wrong.Roughness is not an option: it is the most appropriate answer to the currentproblems generated at the meeting point between interaction design and architecture.20 The design team for Creative Collisions was Anurag Sehgal and GiovanniCannata, and for Collabolla Jennifer Bove, Simone Pia and Nathan Waterhouse.21 With Britta Boland and Alberto Jacovoni as thesis adviser.22 At least with oneself! On the other hand, if you are a freak with no sense ofpropriety like us, you can also afford to be honest in public … 4

Walter Aprile and Stefano Mirti have been teaching, researching and carryingout design work at Interaction-Ivrea for the past three years. Aprile haspreviously worked in Mexico and the US, and Mirti completed his postdoctoralwork in Japan. They are the co-founders of The Italian Job Ltd, a Bangkok-baseddesign studio. For the record, Mirti plays the architect and Aprile acts as thecomputer geek. More information can be found at www.interaction-ivrea.it