Following last’s year Smart Geometry conference, hosted in Barcelona, IAAC faculty Luis Fraguada and Tomas Diez and alumni Felipe Pecegueiro are leading the Urban Feeds cluster (assisted by MAA student Morten Bulow) at the Smart Geometry Workshops and Conferences 2011, which is taking place in Copenhagen from March 28th to 31st.

Urban Feeds cluster aims to generate design responses that scrutinize and analyze the relationships between two or more sensor parameters. Like traffic lights with sensors that are programmed to respond to fluctuations in traffic flows, the cluster aims to prototype urban interventions. These ‘behavioral prototypes’ allow the participants to design explicit behaviors and their varying degrees of expression in relation to the input parameters.

To achieve the challenge, Urban Feeds team pre-developed and produced the Ambience Sensor Kits (ASK) at Fab Lab Barcelona, supported and sponsored by IAAC.

Smart Geometry 2011 > Building The Invisible

Vast streams of data offer a rich resource for designers. User data, energy calculations, embedded sensing, material and structural simulation allows design to be situated and responsive. Design sits not separate from is environment but inhabits an ecological system, open, dynamic and interdependent. We now have the chance to instil design with an immanent intelligence creating new relationships between the user, the built and its ecosphere. From the simulation of megacities to the solid modelling of material systems, design has the potential to be informed by the real.

LARS HESSELGREN, AA Dip,  RIBA, MSc (UCL) ,Senior Associate Partner, Director PLP Research

Lars Hesselgren is the Director of PLP Research and a Senior Associate Partner at PLP since October 2007. Previous to that he occupied the same position at KPF and before 2005 he was the IT Director at KPF London.

In 2002 he received the Bentley Lifetime Achievement Award. His most recent work concentrates on parametric modelling in CAD. He helped create the new Computational Geometry group within KPF and advises on visualisation and IT matters. He is head of the Computational Design Group at PLP which is developing novel tools and techniques within the parametric design paradigm. He is establishing new R&D programmes with University partners and other bodies.

His most recent project while at KPF was creating the geometry for the Pinnacle tower in the City of London, currently under construction.
He is a founder member of the SmartGeometry group (www.smartgeometry.org) which is encouraging the spread of parametric thinking as an architectural design discipline, including spearheading Alpha and Beta testing of Bentley Generative Components. The SmartGeometry Workshops and Conferences are now an established premier place to network about the latest digital design technology with conferences in Barcelona (2010), San Francisco (2009), Munich (2008), New York (2007), London (2006), Cambridge Ontario (2004), Cambridge UK (2003).

He lectures extensively both in US and in Europe, both at Industry Events and at Academic venues.