Editor’s Note: The Bialosky team was proud to have Chris Persons be part of our team for a summer internship this past year. Chris is currently pursuing his Masters of Architecture at Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design. This is a recap of an installation at this year’s Ingenuity Festival Cleveland that Chris and colleagues collaboratively designed, fabricated, and installed.
The design team for this piece included myself Adam Prtenjak, Greg Stroh; electronics and arduinos (an open-source electronics platform) by John Popple and myself; budget and grant acquisition by Greg Stroh and Nick Young; and construction was completed by Michael Carnessali, Adam Prtenjak, myself, and Nick Young.
Our original position was this:
The [switch] box is intended to be a low-resolution speculation on future architectural possibilities when digital technologies disrupt traditional built environments. Digital technologies< i.e. sensors, big data, smart cities > have the embodied potential to mediate spaces in a manner with no comparable historical precedent. In this case, the line drawn between user and observer of space in the form of a wall is blurred. Exterior passersby [observer] trigger, through an arduino-linked sensor, a binary color change of a specific interior module, thus informing the construct’s occupants [user] of ambiguous yet located activity outside. This tactic can not only be scaled up indefinitely; it can be implemented through digitally complex mechanisms to fundamentally alter the relationships between users, observers, architecture, and digital technologies.