Interactivity, Interfaces and Building Design: Leverhulme Lecture 3

In this lecture, Professor David Kirsh explores the differences in how architects and HCI designers think of interactivity and interfaces.   At a high level, architectural space resembles HCI space in constraining, supporting, scaffolding and enabling activity.  But there, the resemblance ends.

Architects think about interaction in terms of the geometry of physical space and the spatial dynamics of face to face social encounter. In HCI, designers think about interaction in terms of digital control. People are not thought of as constituting interfaces - as they are by many practicing architects - they are users of interfaces. Input devices mediate control of tools, media, and the manipulation of digital structures. But where are input devices in architectural space? These dissimilarities lead architects and HCI designers to problems that are different in scope, form and dynamics.

To explore how the two fields may improve their dialogue, Professor Kirsh will contrast three foundational concepts at the core of both fields:

1. Interaction
2. Interface
3. Reading an environment (making sense of an activity space)

Professor Kirsh will then develop a more general theory of interactivity that supports a network vision of interaction, allowing us to define interaction between groups of people and structures.   The design tools that each field uses will also be considered: parametric and generative design tools in architecture versus 3D modeling, and app design tools in HCI and product design.

• Find out more about the MSc/MRes Architectural Computation programme

David Kirsh is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. His is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He was educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post-doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and has held research or visiting professor positions at MIT and Stanford University. He is also currently is Adjunct Professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

He has written extensively on situated cognition and especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD, where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world and how human environments have been adapted to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life. Some recent projects focus on ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making and choreographic cognition, how thought unfolds in many modalities, and how new digital and media tools are reshaping thought, especially in the different stages of design. He is on the board of directors for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.