GLOBAL – Last week Nokia designer and human behavioral researcher Jan Chipchase posed an interesting scenario related to Augmented Reality and architecture of the future – “To what extent will tomorrow’s urban architecture be designed to be digitally augmentable?” He refers to the concept of projecting images onto architecture, essentially acting as canvasses of digitally harvestable information via your device’s camera. He even mentions the idea of ‘proximity broadcasting’ via sources such as street lights.
But what if we take this concept further. What if the buildings and public objects are designed and built to cohere with the concept of being actively digitally interactive in a number of ways?
The idea being we don’t see architecture as a passive canvass for information that can be digested by your context aware handset, or solely one-way transmitters that feed you pertinent details. Could architecture be designed to actively and openly capture a rich reservoir of sharable data, should you wish to leave relevant info or even opinions, thus making every object home to a host of dynamic material and media that evolves over decades and is accessible by anyone who comes in contact with it.
Landmarks with not only a physical history, but a digital one.
Is this too far fetched a concept or purely a sensible progression in merging of the physical and digital for the practical purpose of improving contextual awareness? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Image credit: caribb