Designing a Responsive Material System with Physical Computing

This paper focuses on an investigation to explore architectural design potentials with a responsive material system and physical computing. Contemporary architects and designers are seeking to integrate physical computing in responsive architectural designs; however, they have largely borrowed from engineering technology's mechanical devices and components. There is the opportunity to investigate an unexplored design approach to exploit the responsive capacity of material properties as alternatives to the current focus on mechanical components and discrete sensing devices. This opportunity creates a different design paradigm for responsive architecture that investigates the potential to integrate physical computing with responsive materials as one integrated material system. Instead of adopting highly intricate and expensive materials, this approach is explored through accessible and off-the-shelf materials to form a responsive material system, called Lumina. Lumina is implemented as an architectural installation called Cloud that serves as a morphing architectural skin. Cloud is a proof of concept to embody a responsive material system with physical computing to create a reciprocal and luminous architectural intervention for a selected dark corridor. It represents a different design paradigm for responsive architecture through alternative exploitation of contemporary materials and parametric design tools. © 2014, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.