Responsive Systems|Appliance Architectures

Branden Hookway and Chris Perry introduce the Responsive Systems Group (RSG), a newly formed design research collective at Cornell University's School of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, the work here addresses questions of collective intelligence at a number of scales. In terms of practice, collaborative, group-based work is emphasised, with both the students as well as the instructors working in teams of three (Perry and Hookway are co-directors of the Responsive Systems Group along with Ezra Ardolino). The second scale addresses the technologies and methodologies of design itself, exploring problems of ‘responsivity’ in the context of artificial intelligence and the emerging fields of robotic and sensory interaction design. Finally, and by extension, the issue of scale itself becomes a site of inquiry as the RSG's work focuses less on ‘architecture’ and more on ‘design’, implicitly if not explicitly loosening general notions of disciplinarity as a means of revealing new sites for mixture and innovation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.