Computação Urbana e Interfaces Situados

Abstract

This work analyses a set of computer technologies designed for public and semi-public spaces. Also named by informational technologies, they circumscribe a group of artifacts that have been developed by computing engineering in this past decade. These technologies are the reflex of the investigation in ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous artifacts for public and semi public scenarios. These computer technologies provided new forms of interaction between individuals, information and space. This revolution also operated a deep transformation in the contemporary social reality. Nowadays, we stand in an intermediary stage, as the technologies became more present in the territory. The artifacts that establish this ubiquitous connection (computers, cell phones, PDAs, programmed screens, etc) are the portals that operate the interactivity between individuals, territory/space and information. These artifacts are turning more portable in our time and their use is becoming more massified. As their use is more massified the appropriation takes place and therefore also appropriates the space, at the same time these artifacts impose their presence. We need now to understand these new informational spaces. How this technological artifacts work and how can they be used by architecture? As to determinate ways of creating interactive architecture through a relation with these mobile gadgets or integrated computing systems it will be necessary to establish interdisciplinary collaborations between urban computing engineering, architecture and urbanism. We stand by the main importance of conceiving this technology from an architectural and urban point of view, predicting its use applied in space right from the start. We should understand these new types of reactivity and the kind of interactivities created from information devices, permitted by integrated computing systems within the territory. In what way the information adds meaning to the actual physical territory? By the other hand, these technologies also change the way individuals sense the physical space. Architecture is at the present time also consumed in a state of abstraction. How will we draw this new reality on the limit of the physical and virtual world?