» Scattered House Drop-in

Friday, 4 July 2008 4 - 6 July

Part of the London Festival of Architecture

Scattered House is an architectural experiment founded on a truly contemporary notion of space, where issues of ubiquitous connectivity, family diasporas, design-by-occupant, and public control technology come together in an installation assembled from inexpensive electronic toys and gadgets. Installed in several locations in London, and exhibited internationally later in the year, the networked House appeals to the ‘scattered’ identity of contemporary citizens, across nations, disciplines, interests and attitudes. Scattered House is founded upon Reorient, Hungary’s Pavilion at the 10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, dubbed one of 2006’s finest by Financial Times cultural critic Edwin Heathcote; and Reconfigurable House, commissioned for the 10th anniversary exhibition at Tokyo’s Interactive
Communication Centre.

We are inviting members of the public to visit the Hungarian Cultural Centre and contribute to elements of the house: participants can bring their own toys and gadgets, or make use of those provided free. Participants will be able to open up toys and gadgets, gain a simple understanding of how they work, and learn how to connect them directly into the installation themselves. Architects and interaction designers Adam Somlai-Fischer and Usman Haque, authors of the online manual Low Tech Sensors and Actuators, will be on hand to advise and assist in this process. This threeday
event will be suitable for families and children accompanied by an adult, as well as design (and non-design!) students who would like to take part.

No experience is necessary, though enthusiasm for hacking toys is welcome!

Key project concepts and project background

Reorient

Focusing on Budapest, its Chinese community and trade, and the south-east Asian production of cheap electronic toys and goods, the project envisaged possibilities where the chaos and multiplicity of thousands of cheap goods begin to define architectural spaces, homes, and the built environment in general. Driven largely by economic factors, this tendency produces a heady cocktail of cultural codes applied across various functionalities. The Reorient team designed and built a large installation based on their earlier research, transforming the Hungarian Pavilion into a nearfuture scenario where spaces were ‘active’ and ‘responsive’. However, rather than creating luxurious or high-tech spaces, instead we attempted to embed in the site a mix of the cultural qualities of both the Pavilion and the toys themselves.

Reconfigurable House

As with Reorient, Reconfigurable House was also constructed to challenge the usual hi-tech and luxurious aspects of architect-designed responsive spaces. The difference here was that we developed a way for occupants to ‘rewire’ the piece themselves, re-programming the way the House, composed of thousands of low-tech devices, responded to them.

Scattered House

Building on tactics and techniques developed over previous installations, Scattered House goes back to basics, locating core qualities and focusing on those concepts that have become more important to our work over the past couple of years:
• Closing the circle (real time connectivity, the simultaneous virtual and physical presence of other places);
• Home is not a place, but a composite of fragments (home as a construction of several places, fluctuating over time yet still shaping identities);
• Personal, yet context-free (blurring the boundaries between virtual and real, local and remote, an architecture that is human, yet not bound by geographical location);
• Tangible benefits of peer production (a genuinely unique creation that does not belong to any single author or artists, but to an undefined group of participants)

schedule:

friday 4 july morning › start constructing framework in HCC main hall; afternoon › doors open to the public

saturday 5 july all day › public contributions

sunday 6 july all day › public contributions

Free. RSVP to 020 7240 6162 for 4th July, then just pop in during the day…

The HCC is open from 10 am–5 pm Monday–Sunday this week.