Guest Jury:
Andreu Ulied (MCRIT-BCN)
Marta Malé-Alemany (IAAC)
Willy Muller (IAAC)
Maite Bravo (IAAC)
Cesare Griffa (Turin)

The final presentation for the IAAC Global School was the closing event of a research project with a promising road map in the future. Smart Cities is a concept that has been developed during the last years, but still our cities are far away from smartness, in terms of how they exchange information beyond the social networks. The IGS points out the question how we can think about the cities of the future, not in terms on a new brutalism construction, but in how we optimized the constructed environment, how we can take advantage of that invisible layer of information, and how we generate a platform to understand the relations of energy, environment, production, economy and resources into the city.

IGS 2011 has been an intensive workshop, with 22 participants of the 5 continents (for some people 6) of the Earth, in Barcelona; and 8 participants from India, at the Balwant Shelth School of Architecture, and in collaboration with Hangar in Barcelona, and the Politecnico di Torino, in Italy.

IAAC Global School 2011 is based on the multiscalar approach lead by IAAC during its history, 10 years ago. Projects like HyperCatalunya, HyperHabitat (presented for the Venice Biennale 2008), has been a reference for the production of the model of a Smart City.

De Gss Visit at Dhub

Yesterday IaaC Global School participants visited the exhibition at Dhub design museum. The exhibition “The senses of machines ” (Interaction Laboratory) proposes an experimental and educational look into the relationship between man and machine at a time when new generation interfaces include natural interactive features and social behaviors. It is an exploration of new areas where interaction design is developed and generates new needs, disciplines and experiences.

De Gss Visit at Dhub

De Gss Visit at Dhub

Societies are living organisms that constantly generate data of different layers. Data that once available and processed become useful knowledge. The understanding of this concept leads research fields to come up with various methods of collecting and mapping data.

Barcelona Fab Lab has been developing the ASKit Ambient Sensor Kit based on the premise that a personal understanding of the surrounding information is a key to sustainable and informed habitation of space. ASKit is an open hardware initiative intended to make active personal data collection and sharing accessible. Its components are a MicroSD shield, a GPS shield, analog sensors(CO2, movement, temperature, light, GPS) and the protective acrylic box.

ASKit has been used so far in  the Urban Feeds cluster of Smart Geometry Workshop 2011, the Data Driven Structures Workshop Tel Aviv  and the Live Parameters-Live Architecture Network. Currently it is  being repaired in BCN  Fab Lab to be reused for the IaaC Summer Global School_self<a>architecture.

 

 

 
http://smartgeometry.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53%3Aclusters-page&catid=36&Itemid=56

http://www.iaacblog.com/blog/2011/iaac-in-tel-aviv/

http://www.livearchitecture.net/archives/6082

Paths of the city will be mapped by capturing and storing data in the MicroSd card. Based on that data digital visualizations will be rendered with Processing and Pachube .The next step is to equip the kits with a Xbee ZB wireless antennna, that will be transmitting data to a coordinator node that consequently will be feeding Pachube with real time data. Real time scope empowers the significance of the process.The digitalisation of the information and computation opens up new fields of exploration.

POWERED BY

De Iaac GlobalSchool

The boards for creating an interactive urban tool arrived yesterday at IAAC and the Fab Lab Barcelona.
There are 2 different boards:the Hub (Master) that will be placed in the centre of each urban block and the Building (Slave) board that will be placed in each building of the urban block.
The Hub is able to receive real time data from the Building board that captures information of the building and send it to the Hub.
Information captured and interchanged is related with Energy and Water Consumption,CO2 emissions and environmental conditions (light,temperature,sound etc)
Hubs of each urban block of the city are interconnected using a communication protocol that enables them to interchange information and real time data converting the city into a networked informational system.

What happens if we think Urbanism and Energy through a new informational layer added in our cities?
Might our city model be responsive to our behavioral changes over time?
Can we give the data back to the people who themselves generate it through their actions?

Our goal is to create an urban tool of a networked city based on a new informational layer.
From the Device to the city
Networked devices<buildings
Networked buildings<urban blocks
Networked urban blocks<city

The intention is not simply to interface with the built environment but to implement strategies that will transform built environments themselves into information systems.

De Iaac GlobalSchool

Detailed description of electronic components:

The interactive model will be based on customized boards developed in collaboration with fablabBCN and Hangar.org. The boards are arduino compatible and are designed to use CAN bus as communication protocol, based on SECUduino library.
There are two kinds of boards, the master and the slave.
The Master is a fully integrated board, equipped with a Atmega168 microcontroller+ CAN bus RJ11 connection to be linked to other boards of the model. The master works as a block hub, receiving the information from the slaves and other masters.The master board will manage the information within the block and will be able to exchange data with the other blocks of the superblock.
The Slave board has the architecture of an arduino shield, which will be attached to standard Arduinos. The slave is a representation of the scale of the building and is able to handle the information of five inputs (data base,pachube feeds or sensors) and five outputs, represented with RGB LEDs displaying the behavior of the network. The LEDs transitions are used for RGB multiplexing.The slave interface is a RJ11 connector powering by “HUB” board and CAN communication.

Here you can find the files of Master and Slave for Arduino:
iaac_summerschool

Here you can find the files of today’s tutorial for Barcelona:

Grass.Tutorial3

and for Mumbai:

Mumbai definitions

In the following file you can find two grasshopper definitions:
One is a path visualization of the ASKit data (spreadsheet) over the line path where the data was collected.
The second is with a gps visualization.It alings two selected data points over the line path where the data was collected, it recognizes the orientation via gps, visualizing the collected data (spreadsheet).
Definitions