ABSTRACT
Towards Sentience, a graduate design thesis, and other various research experiments, sponsored by the basement laboratory of the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design incorporates the design of responsive systems to test adaptive infrastructures within a geomorphology. Complexities are some of the issues that designers must confront when dealing with landscape phenomena—and the foremost concerns when engaging with fluid dynamics that affect a landscape's geomorphology. The experimental tests aim to simulate the potential of responsive infrastructures to modify the behaviors of riverine landscapes and their fluvial morphologies—including land accretion, vegetal proliferation, and species colonization. The shift is inevitable, as we continue to create new technologies in order to mitigate landscape phenomena for benefit. When deployed in the one-to-one landscape, the machine intends to learn from initial site conditions of typically degrading engineered channels, but also from the modifications it will produce independently with its sensor systems, and co-dependently with sensed data of environmental phenomena.
