ABSTRACT
The technological shift towards smartness, with manifestations occurring across scales ranging from regional systems, with implementations such as of transportation networks with real-time reporting, to a household object, such as a fridge that manages a family’s grocery list, has foregrounded the dominant role data plays in shaping the way we use and organize the built environment. Innovations such as these, building on developments in the Internet-of-Things, sentient environments, high-speed mobile data networks, and automation, have reinforced data, its collection, transmission and processing, as an essential centrepiece of our time. Interest in exploring the inversion of data from an immaterial entity into a material one is driven by the increasing degrees with which architects, and allied designers, are engaging information communication technologies. In a general sense, architects take an active role in creating technology by engaging in new project types which include “digital tool-making, robot wrangling, and ubiquitous computing.”
