About

As an international network of academic institutions, Adaptive Environments (AE) is advancing cutting-edge research around spatial constructs and systems that are specifically designed to be adaptive to their surroundings and to their inhabitants. The creation and understanding of such adaptive environments spans the expertise of multiple disciplines, from architecture to design, from materials to urban research, from wearable technologies to robotics, from data mining to machine learning and from sociology to psychology. Focus is on interaction between human and non-human agents, with people being both the drivers and recipients of adaptivity as that is embedded into environments. The focus is also on design, from the inception to the development and to the operation of adaptive environments, while considering digital technologies as underpinning the experimental and every-day implementations in this area.

First project, AE Springer book series, has been kicked off during the Robotic Building session at the Game Set Match #3 symposium, TUD:

Adaptive Environments are concerned with spatial constructs and systems that are specifically designed to be adaptive to their surroundings and to their inhabitants. The field has developed over the last 100 years and includes an expansive variety of works, ranging from modernist classics to current buildings, from research prototypes to inhabited structures, and from small scale homes to large scale urban interventions. More recently, the broad availability of computing has caused an explosion in development of Adaptive Environments, as computation itself has become pervasive and end-user and developer expertise around computing has become increasingly commonplace. And so, examples of Adaptive Environments range from Rietveld's Schröder House to Ban's Naked House, from Koolhas' Maison Bordeaux to DRMM's Sliding House, from Mozer's Adaptive House to SPEC's ADA, and from Khan's Open Columns to the network of public screens in Oulu.

To outline what is considered as part of the Adaptive Environments paradigm for the purposes of this book series, it is worth briefly stepping back. The field can most usefully be characterised through three continua that are all intertwined with each other. The first one is scale. From materials to objects, from clothing to furniture and finally from rooms to buildings and cities, the field considers the entire span from micro to macro scales. The second continuum is autonomy. Adaptations include those that are manually operated and device powered, those that are reactive to people and environments and automated and finally those that that are predictive and those that show signs of intelligence. Alongside scale and levels of autonomy, forms of human interaction are of critical concern, from interaction driven by physiological responses, via our hands and full body interaction, and from individuals to pairs, to groups of people and whole populations. The interplay of scale, level of autonomy and forms of interaction creates a large space of possibilities that continues to be explored and understood.