John Bell, senior lecturer at Canterbury School of Architecture, introduces an MA with a difference – the buildings only exist in cyberspace….
Beach front developments? – Second Life has registered 13 million users
From September 2008 the Canterbury School of Architecture, part of the University College for the Creative Arts, will be offering an MA in Digital Ekistics. The original impulse for developing the course came from a long-standing research interest of my own in the place of electronic spaces as architectural constructs – as distinct from their scenographic or sculptural form.
So, what is digital ekistics?
Ekistics is the study of human settlement, an academic discipline of many years standing. Digital Ekistics, it follows, is the study of human settlement in electronic spaces – be they the existing online game worlds or emerging or novel forms of dwelling in virtual communities. The new MA is concerned most particularly with the architecture and urbanism of virtual environments: those spaces which have been designed to house our virtual bodies or avatars. For spatial designers, these environments present particular opportunities and singular challenges.
From a design research position the conventional metrics of building design no longer have to apply: for instance, the central discourse of tectonics (the art and science of construction) is shifted on the one hand to a semiotic register, on another to a computational problem of tessellation and graphical processing. Habitation, in a predominantly visual, picturesque environment into which the haptic – what can be experienced through the sense of touch – is only just beginning to emerge, confounds many of the precepts of architectural and urban design. Where gravity is optional and weather virtual, architecture has to invent new rules and new solutions. Movement and boundary, privacy and access become highly flexible. In 1996 Beatriz Colomina wrote:
Today, the boundaries that define space are first and foremost an effect of the media. (And not exclusively visual media. Think for example about the space of sound: the radio, telephone, walkman.) The status of the wall has changed.
That change impacts on architectural design in ways unimagined even ten years ago – and the profession must address it if it is not to be sidelined in the near future by other disciplines more familiar with new technologies. This would be a huge loss, to both users and architects: who is better placed to rise to the challenges raised by these new environments?
From the development of spatial interfaces to the design of new worlds, the virtual will make its presence felt with increasing force and frequency. Persistent virtual environments or ‘always on’ internet-based electronic spaces are already prominent features of many people’s online experience, yet these environments are still in their infancy. A well-known example is Linden Labs’ Second Life, which has registered nearly than 13,000,000 users as of March 2008.
The social impact and gaming aspects of these environments have and are being addressed at postgraduate level; however the architecture and urbanism which houses and mediates the activities in massively multi-user virtual environments is not as yet explicitly the focus of any postgraduate course. There will undoubtedly be further developments of these and other electronic environments – if we are to begin to explore the possibilities from the standpoint of design, there must be informed engagement and research opportunities available to foster this creative exploration.
Housed in the Canterbury School of Architecture, the MA Digital Ekistics provides opportunities for both specialist and interdisciplinary work in the areas of architecture, urbanism and architectural history and theory in the context of virtual environments and their interfaces. The course is supported by a range of specialist tutors. There is also much to be gained from the close relationship between architecture and fine art, which continues to develop in Canterbury and across the University College as a whole.
Students will follow an individual programme of study, based on a personal project. However, students will also attend lectures and seminars and undertake joint projects with other postgraduate students. The personal project may be realised in the form of a series of resolved design solutions or theoretical proposals. It should be fun.
