Interactive Design Studio

Abstract

In recent years, application domains outside information technology such as architecture have shown an increasing interest in the capabilities of networked systems such as localized computation, reduced power-consumption, and distributed interaction. These capabilities incline the design of interactive environments towards the IT-domain. In particular the employment of large scale distributed systems in interactive designs bring along new challenges for architects/designer such as distributed algorithm design, programming skills, embedded platform knowledge. As a consequence of this new trend, adequate software tools to bridge the gap between the IT-world and the field of interactive design are scarce. In order to fill that gap we propose a framework called Interactive Design Studio(IDS) which aims to provide the necessary tools to hide the technological aspects from the end-user when designing interactive environments. To tackle the problem of handling large scale networks of embedded platforms we are convinced that spatial computing is a promising paradigm. The main reasons are the scalability(network size does not influence node behavior) and resiliency to network dynamics(network is hidden by space abstraction). Therefore we present a spatial computing framework for non-IT specialists. We provide a way to specify agent-level behavior and to generate the corresponding code for a specific embedded platform. In our case, we use the eLua VM enhanced with the necessary spatial computing capabilities. We show that spatial computing is a good methodology for Industrial Design and Architecture. Moreover, we show that spatial computing is possible using off-the-shelf virtual machines for embedded platforms. In conclusion, we demonstrate that IDS succeeds within a certain extent in abstracting or hiding the underlying technological aspects(spatial computing) from end-users.