First Post

As an Architecture major and CS minor, I enrolled in this class primarily because it seemed like an interesting way to work towards my intended minor. Now I think it might be pretty relevant to my major, too. Our first homework assignment was to read and then present a research paper about tangible user interfaces. I (obviously) chose to present a paper about an interface for urban design called URP.

URP is an "urban planning workbench" designed to help urban planners recognize and solve problems in building placement. It's basically a table which can project information onto it's surface. When you place a model of a building (which you've already given the computer information about) on the table, the table will display shadows, reflections and changes in wind patterns created by the building, just to name a few of URP's abilities. URP was introduced in 1999 (which is much earlier than I had previously thought this kind of research was being done) by John Underkoffler and Hiroshi Ishii and was received quite well by the architects and urban planners who had a chance to use it.

The article got me thinking about how obvious the connection between architecture and TUIs is. Architecture is an art form which is inherently 3-dimensional. While it's technically possible to imagine 3-dimensioanl forms on the 2-dimensianl suface of a computer screen, I would argue that you lose a lot of what makes a building art when you do so. That being said, architecture is also highly mathematical and benefits greatly from using computers. CAD software is notoriously counter-intuitive and difficult to learn (I'm taking my first course on design software this fall, so I'll get to experience this this firsthand!). TUIs allow you to keep the tangible, real-world part of architecture that is at it's core, while gaining the mathematical precision of a computer.

I'm really excited to see what else we're going to cover in this course. I think there are a lot of other ways TUIs could be used to help architects.