Future of Design and Solar Surface

The current assignment for Smart Surfaces is to develop a solar responsive surface which integrates technologies which we have been using through out the semester (arduino, LEDs, LRDs, servos). The future of design conference was also this week, and one speaker whose talk was especially relevant to our class was Ila Berman, the Chair of Architecture at CCA. She talked about the development of responsive and component based architecture, as well as new strategies for re-usable materials. I had a chance to talk with her after the conference about uses for parametric architecture and surfaces, and how she thought that they would be used in the future. Her response wass that parametric modeling is just like any other new innovation, in that people have a tendency to get really excited about it and play with it for a while before actually figuring out how it can be best applied. I feel that Smart Surfaces falls into this category. We are playing around with tons of new technology, not knowing what we are going to be able to do with it, and thats exciting.

Turning back to the current project, my team decided to work on a surface which contains apertures which can open and close with a mechanism based off of the Hoberman Sphere. We first used Digital Project to analyze the mechanism and determine the necessary proportions. We are now in the process of integrating the aperture into a structure which could be arrayed into a surface.

4