[MEL] ADAM PARKER Arch-techne 9/8

peter_j

ADAM PARKER: Arche-techne: On the architectural and philosophical scaffolding of new
technology concepts for robotic materials

ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOSOPHY 2007 PROGRAM
AUGUST: TWO EVENTS AT RMIT
Both presentations will begin at 6:30pm at RMIT 8.11.68
ALL WELCOME - NO NEED TO RSVP

TOMORROW EVENING AUGUST 9
Thursday, 6:30pm at RMIT 8.11.68

A common feature of modern robotic devices is that they are designed
within the categorical framework of the robot understood as a biomimetic
system. This can be as overt an influence as the anthropomorphic nature
of an android, or as subtle as the worker replacement of a Cartesian
manipulator arm. Biomimetic influences on robotic design can be seen to
manifest in robot morphology, where animal locomotion and perception
studies play a considerable role in suggesting engineering research
directions and solutions, as well as in control systems, which commonly
use models derived from various methods of modeling organic cognition.
Biomimesis also shapes the very categorical structures we use to
describe robots as robots, and outlines their social purpose.

A major outcome for robotic user interfaces of this trend to biomimesis
is that the problem is often couched in terms of communication with a
synthetic organism. A lot of progress has already been made along this
communicative path, as was also made in human-computer interaction. Yet,
thanks to tangible interaction and other fields of interaction research,
we know that computers are not simply communication devices and can be
conceived otherwise - so, following this analogically, how might a robot
be alternatively conceptualized? And what might we gain from so doing?

In approaching this problem, my research has been necessarily grounded
in a pragmatic analysis of robotic engineering. At the same time, it has
operated in an analytic-critical fashion between the twin poles of
architectural practice (in a broad sense) and philosophy. In particular,
I have been influenced by Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, von Glasersfeld
and de Landa (amongst others), and those visionary aspects of
architectural practice (such as the Crystal Chain, Futurism, Bruce Goff,
the various movements of the sixties and seventies and so forth) in
which technological structures were brought into question. This has led
me to conceptual design solutions for robotics that explore and exploit
the categorical nature of how we approach the artifacts we design.

Alternative robotic technologies under investigation, such as massively
parallel microrobotic lattices, hold the promise of a
reconceptualization of the robotic as a material process, and thereby
suggest the potential for interaction systems based on systems embodying
this approach - systems in which the properties of such robotic
materials might be malleable, shiftable, even seemingly unnatural. Such
robotic materials would be inherently haptic, tangible and spatially
transformative, raising a range of opportunities and issues for
interaction designers, foregrounding recent key theoretical areas of
concern such as embodiment and process.

This presentation will firstly outline the current state of play in
engineering massively parallel microrobotics, then explore how my
definition of a new conceptual space for technological pr the engagement
of the different yet intertwined disciplines of philosophy and
architecture. This will serve as a point of departure for a broader
discussion of the nature of technology stewardship - what I term the
arche-techne, or the defining-principles-leading-bringing-into-being of
the technical-conceptual.

ADAM PARKER escaped from Law and Philosophy at Monash University with an
Arts degree in 1994, to the relative tedium of the commercial world of
interaction design. Here he spent seven years designing user interaction
for clients such as Telstra, CUB, L J Hooker and Lend Lease. After a
brief spell as a hospital porter, where he learnt more about life and
death than in the previous thirty, he returned refocused to interaction
design as an academic in 2002, where he lectures in the Communication
Design and Industrial Design programmes at RMIT University. His
love/hate dissatisfaction with haptics, augmented reality and
interaction design in general led him to consider robotic interaction
systems, which he found to be in an even worse state of incompletion.
His exposure to architectural academics and students reinvigorated his
understanding of the links between philosophy and design of complex
systems. His PhD, being undertaken at SIAL RMIT, aims to bring some
conceptual, disruptive yet technically grounded design thinking to the
promising area of robotic interaction research.

http://www.architecturephilosophy.rmit.edu.au/