ETH Zurich, CAAD

Manuel Kretzer is responsible for coordinating and leading the postgraduate Master of Advanced Studies class’s digital design and production modules. His research aims at the notion of a soft and dynamic architecture with a specific focus on new (smart) material performance.

In 2012 he established the materiability research network, a platform that brings together architects, artists, designers, students, scientists and researchers who share a common fascination with smart, programmable materials and their potential integration into architecture.

He is also partner and co-founder of responsive design studio, based in Cologne and Zurich. The strength of the team is rooted in design research and a commitment to exploring opportunities in creating responsive, adaptive and adapted physical space. A special interest lies on alternative solutions for vivid architectural geometries that interact with their user in the process of creation but also in the built shape, materialization, surface and visual behavior.

He has previously worked with Philip Beesley in Toronto, Canada on the development and realization of interactive environments and taught seminars in temporary experimental architecture at the Institute for Industrial Design (ifib), University of Karlsruhe (TH).

Interactive Architecture Lab, The Bartlett School of Architecture

The Interactive Architecture Lab is a multidisciplinary research group interested in the behaviour and interaction of things, environments and their inhabitants. Areas of current research include adaptive responsive environments; kinetic design and robotics; multisensory interfaces; wearable computing and prosthetics; the ‘internet of things’; performance and choreography. Situated within the 12-month Masters programme, MArch Architectural Design (AD), the Lab gives students an opportunity to exploit the potential of new sensing, computation, networked and responsive technologies to imagine, build and test new spaces of interaction.

Atelier Iris van Herpen

Iris van Herpen stands for a reciprocity between craftsmanship and innovation in technique and materials. She creates a modern view on Haute Couture that combines fine handwork techniques with digital technology. Van Herpen forces fashion to the extreme contradiction between beauty and regeneration. It is her unique way to reevaluate reality and so to express and underline individuality.

The essence of van Herpen is expressing the character and emotions of a woman and to extend the shape of the feminine body in detail. She mixes craftsmanship- using old and forgotten techniques- with innovation and materials inspired on the world to come.

Iris’ designs require every time an unique treatment of material or even the creation of complete new materials. For this reason, Van Herpen prefers interdisciplinary research and often collaborates with other artists or scientists.

Hyperbody, TU Delft

Directed by Prof. ir. Kas Oosterhuis and managed by Dr.-Ing. Henriette Bier and Dr. Nimish Biloria, Hyperbody focuses on employing and advancing techniques and methods for designing, building, and operating Non-Standard and Interactive Architecture. Interactivity is embedded not only in the process of informed collaborative design, but also in the production and the operation of buildings. In this context, non-standard architecture is defined as an architecture, which departs from modernist, repetitive, mass-production principles in order to address complexity, variation, and mass-customization. Furthermore, interactivity in architecture is addressed at the level where building components and buildings become dynamic, acting and re-acting in response to environmental and user-specific needs.

Hyperbody focuses not only on issues of interdisciplinary design implemented in digitally and electronically augmented spatial environments but also on prototype development for non-standard and interactive architecture. In addition to implementation and development of computer-based methodologies for design conceptualization, representation, and simulation, Hyperbody addresses issues of computer-aided design and manufacturing employing parametric design and building information modeling. In this context, real-time interactive environments are conceived as connectivities between buildings and building components via embedded sensor-actuator technologies. These enable emergent spatial behaviors through real-time data-exchange-based on multi-player game designs.

University of British Columbia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sid Fels has been in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UBC since 1998. Dr. Fels received his PhD and MSc in computer science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively and his BASc in electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1988. He was recognized as a Distinguished University Scholar at UBC in 2004. He was a visiting researcher at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997.

Dr. Fels previously worked at Virtual Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, CA. He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, 3D displays, biomechanical modeling, neural networks, intelligent agents, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts. His lab website is at hct.ece.ubc.ca. Dr. Fels is also the director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) at UBC (www.magic.ubc.ca).