Experimental Green Strategies

Experimental Green Strategies

Experimental Green Strategies

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 – PROFILE NUMBER 214 Experimental Green Strategies: Redefining Ecological Design Research Guest-edited by Terri Peters Sustainable design and ecological building are the most significant global challenges for the design profession. To meet new building regulations and national targets for carbon emissions, all future buildings will be judged on their ‘green’ merits. For architects to maintain a competitive edge in a global market, innovation is now key; the design of new processes, technologies and materials that combat carbon emissions and improve the sustainable performance of buildings are paramount. Contemporary practices have responded by setting up multi- disciplinary internal research and development teams, with offices such as Foster + Partners, HOK and Aedas setting the bar for ground-breaking research and development. The aim of internal groups is often to adapt and create new technologies and materials and to borrow ways of working from other disciplines, to focus on innovation rather than incrementally increasing performance or efficiency. This title offers insights into how a wide range of established and emerging practices are rising to meet these challenges. In pursuit of integrated sustainability and low-energy building, material and formal innovation and new tools and technologies, it illustrates that the future of architecture is evolving in an exchange of ideas across disciplines. Incorporating the creation of new knowledge about ecological building within the profession, it also identifies the emergence of a collective will to seek out new routes that build in harmony with the environment.

The Talking Heads experiment

The Talking Heads Experiment, conducted in the years 1999-2001, was the first large-scale experiment in which open populations of situated embodied agents created for the first time ever a new shared vocabulary by playing language games about real world scenes in front of them. The agents could teleport to different physical sites in the world through the Internet. Sites, in Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, London, Cambridge and several other locations were linked into the network. Humans could interact with the robotic agents either on site or remotely through the Internet and thus influence the evolving ontologies and languages of the artificial agents. The present book describes in detail the motivation, the cognitive mechanisms used by the agents, the various installations of the Talking Heads, the experimental results that were obtained, and the interaction with humans. It also provides a perspective on what happened in the field after these initial groundbreaking experiments. The book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the history of agent-based models of language evolution and the future of Artificial Intelligence.