Masterclass with Richard Coyne
[Music] hello everyone in this episode i'm hosting one of the world reno design researcher in our field professor richard coyne from edinburgh university i'm connecting to edinburgh right now hello richard hi oysam the time now our phd student asking the question about their own topic relating to your research interests let's start so we are passing through days where more and more robotic robotic devices become a part of our everyday lives i mean this has many benefits for instance like robots can operate monotonous test tasks like driving a car rather than humans and this is this scenario is mostly appealing to uh to many of us on the other hand there are some ethical drawbacks to these robotic technologies and especially artificial intelligence and i think one of one of the most famous examples uh is probably the trolley experiment where the ai is tasked or the autonomous car is tasked to decide between hitting either three people or one person and i mean this is a dilemma that we even we humans do not know the right answer for but uh on the other hand uh not every point where robots enter our daily life involves such vital decisions and some some uh robotic devices in in the everyday home is actually some simple devices like food making devices uh and despite this uh we see that humans can still be hazardous to hesitant and somehow afraid of robotic home technologies uh so my question to you is how can home robotics be improved to overcome this fear and to that is formed under in under the influence of other situations yeah um i think that uh it's never good a good thing to be fearful fear is a terrible emotion but to be cautious and weary and skeptical uh i think there's nothing wrong with that so i think if our devices sort of look a bit scary or as if they should warn us that's quite a good thing so i think we need to be skeptical of the whole ai project and the whole robot robotic project especially when it comes down to uh domestic living um so i guess uh one way to think about that in design terms is that these devices shouldn't look as though or sound as though they're replicating what human beings do that'll be my preference here um even alexa and siri which is sort of simulating conversation in a way people already don't accept that they don't think they're talking to a a person i don't i don't think um and and p and we're kind of wise to it so i i think it's no good thing to try and replicate uh the human voice or the or or human interaction uh so that's one one thing to be said um the trolley problem is kind of interesting because it's it's you know a an intellectual game really to test yourself on that and it's a to do with moral dilemmas um even independent of of computers and robotics um [Music] just a bit of an anecdote a couple of years ago i did go in in an autonomous self-drive vehicle now maybe you've been in them i don't know be interesting to hear but uh it was uh uh a bus a small bus in luxembourg of all places and it it went on a a road a regular road for for a kilometer and there was no uh driver station inside no steering wheel uh but there was a man in there who had a remote had a game control device and he used that obviously in the case of emergency and also when it came to parking the thing and turning it around so shuttle back the other way and it just struck home we've got a long way to go before we're into self-drive uh autonomous uh vehicles and the same thing i guess with the home i can't sort of see it happening for quite a while i think that's mainly what i wanted to say about that um i think things these devices should look like machines the the real fear i think is actually not so much the devices but the infrastructures of which they're apart so people worry about the internet of things for example which is a wonderful idea the idea of networked devices around the home but then there are threats and risks attached to that not least uh the the cycling away of private information and monitoring what you're doing and surveillance and so on so they're the sort of areas of problem in the tuning of plays to explain that ubiquitous technologies influence places by becoming the means to make these incremental adjustments and an example of this can be the studies that are exploring how to promote collocated interactions in public places however these projects also need to explore and understand how to deal with ubiquitous technologies in the sense that they can also promote civilian attention and cocooning and people avoiding interacting with others so how do you think that ubiquitous technologies can actually be supportive of these positive interactions between people that is inhabiting a place one thing to be said is a place is a space i guess a physical location plus people and it's social and human practices that are being adjusted and that impinges on place so insofar as we use these devices and depend on them there's lots of tweaking and small incremental changes going on in the place but that's also us changing um as well as the space is changing um i guess uh your question was really at the end uh the difficult bit is about um about what happens with um with the relationship between public and private yeah i guess one answer is that they already are so uh human practices in public spaces are changing being transformed um whether that's a good thing or not is a good question and we'll get on to that perhaps um but already the fact that people are taking photographs almost constantly around town are not just in a tourist context and taking photographs of themselves and their friends that whole sort of spectacularization of um of our experience is being amplified now and i don't necessarily see that as a particularly bad thing so called you know instagram well the instagram ability of places and spaces uh um and the fact i guess that sometimes architects and interior designers and landscapers and so on have that in mind when developers as well when they're designing places they're thinking well how can we uh design this such that people would want to take photographs of this and publicize give us free publicity online and i don't see that per se as any sort of diminution of of uh of the value of a place so anyway we have that uh the other obvious thing is people communicating on their smartphones with each other um i mean there is this sort of critique where people say isn't isn't it awful to see on a train everybody with their heads down playing games or looking at their devices or possibly having a conversation was pretty rare now and it sort of visually it doesn't look all that healthy but it's just the way things are and i don't think it matters that much um the way it looks and i think people are being put in touch with each other and i think that's a good thing basically and also people are developing new practices where they realize the strengths and limits of these technologies and devices and these opportunities and it could be that things are settling now that people aren't constantly on the phone nor constantly texting or looking at social media sites but they they get drawn away from that um from time to time and most of the time so there's an interesting set of interactions between the social media addiction phenomenon and being engaged in the places and the people around you recently there have been many studies to incorporate new technologies in cities and architectural spaces and in fact we see that these technologies as you gave example of a mobile phone in the previous question uh these are affecting the way people use these spaces in current cities but besides this architecture is also concerned with its environment and its surroundings and also has a responsibility a certain impact on nature therefore architects have a complex task of integrating technology into our lives while maintaining our connection with our environment and also with each other and so my question is going to be uh in this hundred percent age in what way should architectural education be changed to guide the students on how to integrate technologies into spaces while considering the impact of architecture on the environments and following this design education if we consider that human activities will be influenced by both technology and also environments and also maybe with our connection with each other how can public or private spaces be redefined accordingly yeah until the very last phrase um that that i was so pleased that you were asking about education and not about the changes in environment because i mean what a wonderful opportunity education provides in terms of exploration and experimentation and particularly i'm thinking of studio uh your area is um your architecture yeah so you're used to the idea of a design studio and other people are as well of course uh where there's a brief or a program set um and there might be some readings associated with that and it can be very speculative and open-ended so there's no necessity that the thing get built or whatever and so it's a while since i've taught studio to be honest but i see what my colleagues are teaching in studio and certainly some years back when i was running studio uh that was the case then you can set a a fabulous project to do with the anthropocene or to do with um uh the ridiculous uh heat footprint is generated by uh search engines and uh and blockchain technologies and security systems and so on and you can throw that at students without necessarily thinking about a solution yourself you're not a practitioner and the students can revel in that problematic and try and work through the interstices of the problem to come up with an intervention that responds to the challenge doesn't necessarily solve it um and so studio is a great environment for that and i think in your question you asked about change or can change in architectural legislation it just depends what kind of architectural education or studio education you're talking about because different schools of architecture different schools of design have different cultures and different traditions uh but certainly the ones that i've been associated with um here and then years before in in sydney uh there was this sense of design studios exploration uh and almost like a research uh environment so um i think uh yeah well if yeah as i said it does depend on the kind of studio you're used to but from my point of view here in edinburgh there's no no change particularly required because i see some incredibly innovative and provocative uh studios being set up with some brilliant work by students i guess my only addition to the process would be interdisciplinarity and i'm not alone in saying this i can see this is an investment team here um i think that's something that might be missing on occasion various studio projects but it's difficult to organize in an architecture school to bring in geologists if you're talking about the anthropocene or to bring in social scientists or geographers or or bioscience people because they have different agendas and different problematics to deal with um but anyway and surprise we can it's good to get insights from other disciplines and work as teams either on the teaching side or the student side bringing students together um from different disciplines can be a great a great exercise maybe this is something that's more possible rather than in the in the initial four or five years training of a an architectural design practitioner um might be a postgraduate sort of um pursuit in master's degrees beyond professional training when we look at your educational background after your massive architectural education you are preferred to go with a phd in the field of artificial intelligence i am wondering what was your main motivation behind this choice with this increasing popularity of computer-aided design tools in those years were you really thinking of a combination of these tools and artificial intelligence in those years it's always nice to have a question which is just your own experience so you can just go i could talk for an hour now my own experience and life life course but uh yeah um interesting architecture has uh i think uh traditionally always had purchase in the realm of computing and lots of other sort of science and engineering areas architects have flirted with um with computers anyway uh from from right from the beginning as soon as in fact especially when computers uh turned graphical when we had screens and so on um it's their application to architecture was immediately apparent to a lot of architects especially from particular traditions anyway my own background i'm educated in melbourne university which was a general architecture degree and uh then i i did a landscape architecture degree and i discovered then that in landscape architecture there was a lot of interest in digital terrain modeling so that's laying a grid across uh so you perhaps know what they are across the site uh and then on each grid cell you take data their data points and and there's you can overlay lots of different data and so initially that was my thought when i i decided to do a phd and i moved from melbourne to sydney to do that and i found myself in an architectural science department which was the service department for uh teaching architecture and also the research heavy department this is back in 1981 that's when i was in sydney so that that was um initially i was in as i say digital terrain modeling and also visualization um but then i got moved or i've developed an interest in in artificial intelligence i guess because it was just growing in importance and one of the tricks for doing a phd is to latch on to an area that's new uh that hasn't been researched before in a particular application area and that has currency and some longevity um so i think that was one reason opportunistically why i latched onto ai but also it was just so incredibly fascinating but i didn't move to an ai department um in fact i don't think they existed then really not at sit not in sydney but i didn't move into computer science but there was a lot of interaction between our architectural science unit where i was studying and the engineering department and computer science and ai was actually uniting these different disciplines at the time people were in expert systems and knowledge based systems which pushed the idea that you could actually code somebody's knowledge so interview somebody find out what their knowledge base is write that down and put it into computer systems and then automate it which is quite seductive as a way of dealing with expert problems um so i guess that's it really um just that that tradition in architecture is very strong so you might know that uh nicholas negraponte for example who founded the mit uh media lab uh wrote about architecture and i think he was an architect so some of the earliest applications of serious computing is about visualizing space and also uh creating 3d virtual environments and and computer-aided designed woven into that so some of the pioneers were in architecture so i see this is a trajectory i don't i don't see it as somehow the deviation i've deviated because now i'm much more skeptical and critical of the whole idea of automation in design and in architecture but the grounding i had in those areas i think means i can be an informed critic and i've kept up to date with at least as far as i can with some of the major changes that are happening does this give me an opportunity to say what my current interest is because in this trajectory um i'm interested in crypto cryptography which is a wonderful technical area and uh and the idea of the blockchain and uh secure computer systems and what are the implications of all of this for the city and for architecture for design um and you know we've been talking a bit about uh the problem of ai in the home and networking and so on uh and one of the challenges is data security which sounds kind of boring but uh some of the technologies devised to address that are really interesting and i think the whole idea of ensuring peer-to-peer uh pseudo-democratized interaction and and transactions between people on the blockchain and using cryptocurrency is really really interesting so i've kept an interest in the technology of all that um but also obviously i'm interested in the social implications i have a last question to you oh there's more i just just laughed you work for a long time on theory and philosophy in design research in this respect how do you see the how do you see near future and how do you see the future of design research well it's always been changing that's one thing that's one point there's nothing new in terms of the trajectory of change and i guess what we tend to do is move on this as researchers if you're talking about design theorists which of course are many and varied and people come from different schools of thought um and my my background is somewhat technical and i can resonate with all of that whereas some of my colleagues who regard themselves as design theorists don't have that and they may not possibly take a more political angle than i do and they're more more skeptical and cynical anyway so it's multivarious and there are lots of different um channels uh so that's one thing so there'll be a fragmentation of the research a design research field um so uh splitting up there'll be lots of different people looking at from different points of view different perspectives um but at the same time there's going to be i don't normally like to predict there's going to be uh some sort of re-weaving together of these various strands thanks to um a bit of a technological determinist in this respect thanks to the um proliferation of of documents and their accessibility and availability for everybody so even a hard-nosed computer scientist that happens can be reading heidegger or somebody's commentary on heidegger um easy as anything and they might even just stumble across it by accident and so um that that i think is a big change that's sort of interweaving so you've got a lattice structure everything's sort of breaking apart into different strands of thought and then overlapping and coming together in new ways that's a bit arm way isn't it um and the other the other thread of course into this lattice is the technologies that are of course provoking all sorts of uh of thoughts and theories so you know i suggested that in the 80s and 90s the bandwagon then if you like was artificial intelligence and that still continues although that's changed it used to be rule-based systems is all all the rage now it's big data and it's um it's uh statistical methods for extracting not rules but just behaviors from uh from masses of data um and that's a change and there are implications of that the big data sort of revolution if you like uh and that leads us to reflect uh from a design point of view what what that means uh and i i okay that's another kind of uh bandwagon or trajectory that's driven by the technology to some extent and then the final one that i just mentioned was um was the idea of the blockchain and uh security systems um and you know that opens up a whole pandora's box of uh of issues to do with encryption cryptography and a big question is what's that got to do with architecture and space and place and that's what i'm trying to address at the moment in a in a book project thank you richard uh in this episode we hosted one of the world reno design researcher professor richard coyner from university of edinburgh have a good day from istanbul coach university i'm also
2022-01-23 20:44
