Dana Cuff

Urban sensing: out of the woods

Embedded networked sensing, having successfully shifted from the lab to the environment, is primed for a more contentious move to the city to where citizens will likely be the target of data collection. This transition will warrant careful study and touch on issues that go far beyond the scientific realm.

Immanent Domain Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm

Abstract A wave of emergent digital technology holds vast implications for the public sphere. Indeed, these new forms of mobile and ubiquitous systems, called pervasive computing, challenge some of our fundamental ideas about subjectivity, visibility, space, and the distinction between public and private. Together, these challenges reformulate our conception of the civic realm. From cell phones to wireless local area networks, smart buildings to embedded vehicular computers, an invisible web of digital technology already lies across the visible world creating new space for work, data, advertisement, investigation, communication, intimacy, and danger. This generation of computers is so well integrated with the environment that it will be difficult to distinguish between the two, which represents a profound transformation for everyday life.

Divisive Tactics: Design-Production Practices in Architecture

Perhaps most fundamental to architecture is the marriage of conception and execution, aesthetics and materiality. This ideal persists, but some major commissions today are awarded not to one architectural firm, but to two or more firms that divide up the labor, severing what is called the buildings “aesthetic design” from construction-related services. This study is an attempt to understand the motives for entering such arrangements and the implications for buildings, firms, and the profession as a whole.

The political paradoxes of practice: political economy of local and global architecture

Globalization, while extensively theorized and empirically studied by economic geographers, has yet to be seriously investigated in architecture. There are multiple forms of architectural practice in the United States and some significant changes are under way. In addition the local politics of urban architecture discloses a counterweight to balance globalisms homogenizing tendencies. This paper proposes strategies for a more experimental architecture that partakes of the global-local dialectic.