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images produced by iMAL.

How to install:

1. Install unstable OpenNI. Choose the Development Edition 32bit (even if you have 64bit, Osceleton only works on 32bit)

2. Install Sensor. Click on Downloads then go to the Bin folder and install SensorKinect-Win-OpenSource32-5.0.3.4 (Win 32bit)

3. Install unstable NITE. Choose the Development Edition 32bit

4. Install Osceleton. Click on Downloads then choose OSCeleton-v1.2.1_win32.zip

5. Install gHowl.

7. Open Osceleton.exe

8. Run Rhino & Grasshopper

9. Use the UDP Receive from gHowl in Grasshopper (P: 7110 and #: 999)

Today, this generation is 5-10 years older and has been forced to swallow the previously unimaginable conclusion that software tools have actually changed the way that people operate and function (beyond just architecture). Within architecture, too many buildings have actually been constructed using digital methodologies, for the old arguments to be convincing.

These days, the old professors and practitioners solve their moral dilemma by associating the digital with the efficient and the optimized in terms of sustainability. They say things like ‘parametricism at its best can produce buildings that are more efficient in their use of resources and better adapted to their environment.’ By at last acknowleding a narrow utility for digital tools, and invoking the quasi-mystical binding agent of greenness they seek to escape the inherent stupidity of their position. They need to stop saying it and actually do it if this is what they think. It would help them to be much more specific and credible.

What would we get from them if they were to actually get their hands dirty with software? More or less, we would be looking at Norman Foster’s practice. Foster’s office is one of the more competent practices at articulating the mainstream modern position of this generation through built projects and pursuing an agenda of sustainability as the discipline of architecture conventionally understands it. What they are doing is building optimized buildings and using technology to pursue calculated high performance. Foster is an effective and credible architect, but his buildings look like they were designed by a corporate boardroom – all differences are smoothed over into a completely integrated system which normalizes moments of differentiation. Any articulation is highly systematic. If anything is excessive, it is the overall expenditure of resources and a much higher than normal quotient of engineering prowess. So sometimes the results are attractive, but are seldom of much interest unless you are analyzing them with a spreadsheet. This normalization of difference -even if it is accomplished using computers effectively – is no longer relevant as a desirable goal for today’s culture.

Parametrics are tools, they are technique, maybe they imply methods. But tools, techniques, and even methodologies ultimately they depend on decisions, on what they are asked to do, on the skill of the craftsmen wielding them and how they interact with the resistance and possibilities of the raw materials on which they are employed.

Sustainability discourse in architecture should not be some sort of golden standard: it should be an expected basic competency – for instance we are expected not to use lead paint or asbestos or other materials that would poison the occupants of our buildings. Similarly we should be expected to understand how to design environments that use energy and resources efficiently. Before air-conditioning, it was an expected basic competency.

Environmental parametric tools can help us, and should be used to expose potential -especially at the schematic stages, but a new skyscraper built with the latest technologies will not necessarily be a critical object or a good use of resources. Yes, we can optimize a solution within a scenario. But a poorly chosen solution that is optimized in a sophisticated way- in the end becomes an very belabored expression of stupidity and inelegance. Sophistication needs to be achieved at the schematic stage. Part of the problem is that it is very hard for an architect to turn down the economic gain (for themselves) of a ground-up project, when the response should actually be to re-use, convert, or re-purpose an existing assemblage of resources.

We are wasting our time with critical attacks or allowances for parametrics. They are just tools. The tools of the time and place. Anyone with any talent that is coming of age right now must master these. But we have to separately master the art of argumentation and critical decision-making. This involves a very different self-criticism. We must use these tools and become familiar with them personally if we are to understand how to ask them to do more interesting things.

Sustainability happened to be the way that the digital was explained to people without the capacity to understand how the digital operates.

Much more interesting is how we can use parametricism to build correlations between a population of decisions that are tied together into a project. By building in layers and layers of decision-making and analyses where in each stage we process, and further post process the previous decisions, a project can take on an elegance and a momentum that exceeds what we already knew or the capacities that we could manually describe through traditional operations. We can be critical of process and of an ecology of decisions and explicitly defined correlations between inputs, the interpretation and organization of a scheme and its evolution and transition into physical assembly, crafting, instantiation.

Parametrics includes issues of environmental adaptation, but this adaptation is not the point of digital tooling. It doesnt make much sense to ask if the computer is good or bad or if it is a silver bullet for the ecological crises (it is not – though it will certainly be part of any proposed moves in that field). It makes more sense to evaluate the talents of the designer in the situation into which they are thrown, and the situations into which they throw themselves. Digital tooling is already an irresistible attraction for our generation because it is part of the general resurgence of interest in our broader society with the sciences and with using technology to interact with the world. The critiques of technological modernity still apply – but the postmodern was never an end of modernity – it was the acceleration of its effects. Where design (digital or otherwise) becomes relevant is when it takes on messy situations – sometimes where it is completely overwhelmed – and takes pleasure in responding to the situation. There is absolutely nothing wrong for instance with the grossly irresponsible Hernan Diaz Alonso. He is not trying to create followers. He is trying to ask his students to articulate an meaningful argument beyond their tools. Its hard to see the point of talking shit on a new technique if you are not going to try it – just do what you do and shut up. But if you are going to be part of the broader conversation, then first use the tools, and with that basis, criticize them.. I wouldnt want to convert followers for Patrick Schumacher, or even to convince people to read him: he is purposefully dry as hell and repeats himself incessently and with the utmost bluntness and dogmatism in his manner. But if he is not a good writer, he is still absolutely correct that the digital style is here to stay – and that it is interesting beyond its mere fashionability.

via: Causa Locuta: Sustainability and Parametrics.

When collaborating, people work together (co-labor) on a single shared goal.
Like an orchestra which follows a script everyone has agreed upon and each musician plays their part not for its own sake but to help make something bigger.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet common goals.
The logic here is “If you help me I’ll help you” and it allows for the spontaneous kind of participation that fuels peer-to-peer systems and distributed networks. If an orchestra is the sound of collaboration, then a drum circle is the sound of cooperation.

For centuries collaboration has powered most of our society’s institutions.
This is true of everything from our schools to our governments where we have worked together through consensus to build systems of increasing complexity.

But today, cooperation is fuelling most of the disruptive innovations of our time.
In virtually every aspect of our culture, the old guard is being replaced by cooperative, self organizing, distributed systems.

Collectives collaborate. 
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era. They give priority to the group over the individual and encourage members to adopt a joint identity that unites them around their shared goal.

Connectives cooperate.
A connective doesn’t give priority to the group or the individual but instead supports and encourages both simultaneously. There’s no shared sense of identity in a connective because each member is busy pursuing their own goals.

Collectives are breeding grounds for hierarchies and power struggles.
Even with the best intentions, collaboration often encourages pyramids of power and authority. The higher up the pyramid you are in a collective, the more freedom you have to carve out your own individual identity and direct the group’s efforts towards your own goals. The conductor is famous while the tuba player remains unknown. But if the tuba player gets up to leave someone needs to step in to replace her.

Connectives are self-organizing and self-sustaining.
No master architect, conductor, or blueprint is needed. You can join or leave a drum circle at any time and the beat goes on with or without you.

Wikipedia is a collective. Delicious is a connective.
Hence the brutal hierarchies and old school power structures that govern Wikipedia. Delicious on the other hand doesn’t have the same problems; No consensus is needed because people aren’t collaborating. Each user is free to use Delicious for whatever they want.

Since connectives support individual goals, they create value even when a group is small and growing.
Wikipedia is pretty much useless as an encyclopedia until it contains thousands of articles which requires a huge collaborative effort. But the very first person who used Delicious was able to get value from the system right away. As the system became more popular new kinds of value emerged.

By linking selfish yet common acts together, connectives are able to empower individuals while creating new kinds of group value.
Moving your bookmarks from your own computer to Delicious enhances their value because you can access them from anywhere, but the kind of value you get from them stays pretty much the same. Once bookmarks are shared and interconnected though, an entirely new kind of value is created … one that transcends the original act of bookmarking and yet fuels it at as well; bookmarks are no longer just about remembering but also about finding. And this illustrates the real power of connectives: they’re able to support individuals while encouraging the emergence of new kinds of group value.

Nature is a connective not a collective.
In a forest there is no script that all of the organisms follow. There is no conductor. Yet there are countless levels of interdependence and cooperation at work in which selfish goals intersect to sustain each other and create larger, unpredictable, organic patterns.

Networks are fundamentally natural and organic processes. Although you wouldn’t know that by looking at the corporately controlled internet we have today. Today’s internet inherited the political and technical baggage of broadcast era networks whose mechanical architecture is completely out of tune with emerging logic of our connected culture.

Over the past month, as I’ve been getting ready to launch The Connective, I’ve been using collaboration vs cooperation as a kind of probe to make sense of the many options available to us. I’ve also found that supplementing words like distributed and mesh with cooperative and organic   helps make the whole concept of community powered internet a lot more accessible:

We want to create a new internet architecture that’s cooperative and organic. 
A self organizing, distributed network of equals.

We have the tools right now to roll our own cooperative networks at a hyper local level.
With a little tinkering, off the shelf wifi products will do the job. These mesh networks don’t require users to collaborate – they’re spontaneous, and self organizing.

But as these networks grow and need to be linked together over greater distances, collaboration comes into play.
It’s easy to create small, spontaneous, cooperative networks with wifi, but if you want to join these networks together with decent performance, you need to rely on point to point links to handle the long distance traffic, which by definition, requires collaboration between people on either end of the link. And the common protocols, naming systems etc that are needed to power larger networks will require some sort of governance which also leads us into a collaborative process.

Collaboration isn’t ‘bad’ but it changes the dynamics of the network.
There’s something deeply beautiful and rewarding about a community working together. In Athens Greece, point to point links are at the heart of one of the biggest community powered networks in the world and are crucial for delivering broadband type performance across the network.

But collaboration is often difficult to pull off, especially with strangers and in large dynamic groups, and, as we’ve seen, collaboration opens the doors for group dynamics that are at odds with the spirit we’re trying to capture and preserve in the first place.

Every point of collaboration is a potential source of conflict that often gets ‘solved’ with artificial pyramids of rules, authority and power.

So …

How can we ensure that collaboration and cooperation coexist without threatening the organic, self organizing nature of connectives?

Do all kinds of collaboration threaten cooperative systems?

Can collaboration be transfrormed into cooperation?

via: cloudhead – Cooperation vs Collaboration.

The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling*

Open Source Architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm describing new procedures for the design, construction and operation of buildings, infrastructure and spaces. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and others, it describes an inclusive approach to spatial design, a collaborative use of design software and the transparent operation throughout the course of a building and city’s life cycle.

Cooking is often hailed as an early form of open source; vernacular architecture—producing recipes for everyday buildings—is another form of early lo-fi open-source culture, openly sharing and optimising technologies for building. A contemporary form of open-source vernacular is the Open Architecture Network launched by Architecture for Humanity, which replaces traditional copyright restrictions with Creative Commons licensing and allows open access to blueprints. Wider OSArc relies on a digital commons and the shared spaces of the World Wide Web to enable instantaneous collaboration beyond more established models of competition and profit. Traditional architectural tools like drawings and plans are supplemented and increasingly replaced by interactive software applications using relational data and parametric connectivity.

OSArc is not only involved with production; reception to a given project—critical, public, client, peer-related—can often form part of the project itself, creating a feedback loop that can ground—or unmoor—a project’s intention and ultimately becomes part of it, with both positive and negative consequences. OSArc supersedes architectures of static geometrical form with the introduction of dynamic and participatory processes, networks, and systems. Its proponents see it as distinguished by code over mass, relationships over compositions, networks over structures, adaptation over stasis. Its purpose is to transform architecture from a top-down immutable delivery mechanism into a transparent, inclusive and bottom-up ecological system— even if it still includes top-down mechanisms.

OSArc relies upon amateurs as much as experienced professionals—the genius of the mass as much as that of the individual—eroding the binary distinction between author and audience. Like social software, it recognises the core role of multiple users at every stage of the process—whether as clients or communities, designers or occupants; at its best, it harnesses powerful network effects to scale systems effectively. It is typically democratic, enshrining principles of open access and participation, though political variations may range from stealth authoritarianism to communitarian consensualism.

Open Source Architecture revolutionises every step of the traditional building process, from brief-building to demolition, programming to adaptive reuse, including the following:

Funding
New economic models, exemplified by incremental microdonations and crowd-funding strategies like Sponsume and Kickstarter, offer new modes of project initiation and development, destabilising the traditionally feudal hierarchy of client/architect/occupant. Financing of private projects increasingly moves to the public domain, offering mass rather than singular ownership, whereas funding of public projects can be derived from more flexible, responsive frameworks than simple levies or taxation. OSArc has particular appeal for builders outside the mainstream economy, such as squatters, refugees and the military.

Engagement
Traditional developments deploy engagement programmes in which the community is consulted on incoming developments, with blunt tools such as focus groups, which often result in lack of representation and input, or at worst can result in NIMBYism. With crowd-funded models, forms of engagement are built into the process, enabling a kind of emergent urbanism in which use of space is optimised on terms set by its users. This reclamation of people’s power can be seen as a soft, spatial version of Hacktivism. OSArc can suffer some of the organisational drawbacks of open-source software, such as project bifurcation or abandonment, clique behaviour and incompatibility with existing buildings.

Standards
Standards of collaboration are vital to OSArc’s smooth operation and the facilitation of collaboration. The establishment of common, open, modular standards (such as the grid proposed by the OpenStructures project) addresses the problem of hardware compatibility and the interface between components, allowing collaborative efforts across networks in which everyone designs for everyone. Universal standards also encourage the growth of networks of non-monetary exchange (knowledge, parts, components, ideas) and remote collaboration.

Design
Mass customisation replaces standardisation as algorithms enable the generation of related but differentiated species of design objects. Parametric design tools like Grasshopper, Generative Components, Revit and Digital Project enable new user groups to interact with, navigate and modify the virtual designs, and to test and experience arrays of options at unprecedented low cost—recognising laypeople as design decision-making agents rather than just consumers. Opensource codes and scripts enable design communities to share and compare information and collectively optimise production through modular components, accelerating the historical accumulation of shared knowledge. BIM (Building Information Modelling) and related collaboration tools and practices enable cross-disciplinary co-location of design information and integration of a range of platforms and timescales. Rapid prototyping and other 3D printing technologies enable instant production of physical artefacts, both representational and functional, even on an architectural scale, to an ever-wider audience.

Construction
The burgeoning Open Source Hardware movement enables sharing of and collaboration on the hardware involved in designing kinetic or smart environments that tightly integrate software, hardware and mechanisms. Sensor data brings live inputs to inert material and enables spaces to become protoorganic in operation; design becomes an ongoing, evolutionary process, as opposed to the one-off, disjointed fire-and-forget methodology of traditional architecture. Operating systems emerge to manage the design, construction and occupancy phases, created as open platforms that foster and nourish a rich ecosystem of “apps”. Various practices jostle to become the Linux, Facebook or iTunes of architectural software, engaging in “platform plays” on different scales rather than delivery of plans and sections. Embedded sensing and computing increasingly mesh all materials within the larger “Internet of things”, evolving ever closer towards Bruce Sterling’s vision of a world of spimes. Materials communicate their position and state during fabrication and construction, aiding positioning, fixing and verification, and continue to communicate with distributed databases for the extent of their lifetime.

Occupancy
OSArc enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment—”to Inhabit is to Design”, as John Habraken put it. Fully sentient networked spaces constantly communicate their various properties, states and attributes—often through decentralised and devolved systems. System feedback is supplied by a wide range of users and occupants, often either by miniature electronic devices or mobile phones— crowd-sourcing (like crowd-funding) large volumes of small data feeds to provide accurate and expansive real-time information. Personalisation replaces standardisation as spaces “intelligently” recognise and respond to individual occupants. Representations of spaces become as vital after construction as they were before; real-time monitoring, feedback and ambient display become integral elements to the ongoing life of spaces and objects. Maintenance and operations become extended inseparable phases of the construction process; a building is never “complete” in OSArc’s world of growth and change. If tomorrow’s buildings and cities will now be more like computers—than machines—to live in, OSArc provides an open, collaborative framework for writing their operating software.

via: http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-architecture-osarc-/

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