Diorama(n)tic is an experiment of architectural design and computation questioning the fundamentals of how we engage with our surroundings and our surroundings with us.
The exploration into a multilateral behavior-based relationship between humans, spaces, and objects is approached through the implementation of four interrelated parts operating as a feedback loop, (1) landscape/object, (2) sensors, (3) actuators, (4) human.
The formal qualities of the object maximize the affordance of various human postures while refraining from explicitly indicating any order or hierarchy of the spatial organization. Additional micro-patterned bumps are generated, again referring to some capacity of affordance at a more intimate and tactile scale.
To imbue a degree of sentience, the landscape is fitted with various biometric sensors including a galvanic skin response sensor, heart-rate monitor, and a small webcam for detecting facial expressions. These inputs determine different degrees of arousal and valence; factors in determining emotional states.
The landscape responds by color-changing fiber-optic lighting and fog ejected through the artificial flowers which influence spatial qualities via tone and clarity. The lighting is organized to remain somewhere between hairs and blades of grass, effectively situating the reading of the piece as neither object nor landscape.
The presence and engagement of the human kick starts the dialogue, where bio-metric values are computed into various actuated responses; which in turn have the capacity to modify the human’s emotional status, thus feeding back and creating an evolving dialogue.

The outcome is a responsive landscape that produces an immersive space in response to the dweller’s emotional state; creating a horizontal locus for dialogue between humans and objects.

Human emotions are as active as they are withdrawn, making the dialogue between the inner self and the exterior world something that is being perpetually stimulated and interacted with. The process in turn affects and influences behavior at individual and collective scales.
If humans are complex processing and emotional beings who enact, engage, process, and respond, is it possible for objects and architecture to be imbued with the same kind of agency; that is to say responsive and autonomous while remaining partly withdrawn? How might places inhabited by living bodies change when non-living bodies are imbued with a similar capacity to sense, feel, and react?
The project seeks to elaborate on an aspect of architectural design and computation that finds its roots between mythologies, such as those of particular cultures as Shintoism where everything is considered to be animated, as well the architectural discourse generated by the emergence of cybernetics in the 1960s. The provocation raised here is one that addresses the dialectical of autonomy and control; where traditional architecture is considered to be subservient to people. Under a contemporary lens, it highlights issues brought about by the current COVID pandemic where people’s sense of personal and public space has become more acute. Similarly, there is an increasing awareness of the non-human and non-living parts of our earth being communicated via signals such as climate change. We inherently register things that react; this project considers what a future might be when such agency is given to things around us that we generally consider non-living.