The Tracking Tile project is an investigation that combines a very interesting material and its application in the urban context.

The translucent concrete, mostly used for esthetic purposes, is experimented in a smart city element that aims to create an intelligent, responsive and dynamic ground, acting among people, vehicles and architecture.

Mobility is one of the main issues of our time and city citizens are frequently affected by urban problems as bad traffic, accidents or lack of information, while walking, riding a bicycle or driving a car.

What if we could create an element that responds dinamically to the traffic changes, environmental or infrastructural conditions and defines boundaries for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers?

Focusing on the cyclists, the Tracking Tile project consists in creating a component from translucent concrete, embedding lights in it and making it respond to changing conditions, detected by sensors and programmed by simple coding.

For a case study, Barcelona was chosen as an example: as there’s a speed limit for cyclists, this became the input to be detected. The output are the different colors that signalize bicycle paths, depending if the cyclist exceeds or not the 20 km/h.

Using piezoelectric sensors, arduino code and LED rings embedded in the tiles, the variables were captured and the reponses were defined. The tiles were fabricated from laser cutted acrylic moulds, filled with usual concrete and light transmissible rods.

This specific application intends to make the fabrication process feasible, narrow the research and create a practical example for a smart urban element that can be applied in numerous contexts and respond to many different variables with a large range of behaviours.

Open Thesis Fabrication Program 2013

Student: Pedro Moraes

Tutor: Luis Fraguada

Faculty: Areti Markopoulou, Silvia Brandi, Marc Viader,  Guillem Camprodom

Project developed with BREINCO

It was an intense 4 months research and testing procedures in order to get a working prototype with digital fabrication and material experimentation. The research was  focused on creating a new type of adaptive window where the intelligence is embedded directly into the object, rather than being an attachment to the system.

kaleidoscope_Open Thesis Fabrication// IAAC from Dulce Luna on Vimeo.

The system is derived from mimicking the behavior of Cephalopods, a class of marine animals commonly referred to as “inkfish”, whose skin possesses one of the most incredible camouflage reactions that exist in nature. Cephalopods can change their colours and patterns in milliseconds, whether for signalling (both within the species and for warning) or active camouflage, as their chromatophores are expanded or contracted.

The research now derived in what kind of materials can I use in order to get that effect?  I found thanks to collaborative network research as “materiability” the information needed in order to develop the idea of electroactive polymers as a muscle cell.

The procedure was adapted in order to develop a material that could react to an electrical field to change size, colour and opacity.
The connections, the size and the separation of each dot were empirically developed and iterated various times when changing the size of the prototypes.

Scissors system in order to expand the polymer in the acrylic frames  before applying the conductive material.

The patterns were applied with a 3D printing machine from Luis Fraguada, then we took some testing to see how much air pressure, velocity, thickness of the conductive material we needed to be able to print the pattern in each frame.

Very much alike the skin of the octopus, Kaleidoscope consists of various layers of coloured dots which can change their size in response to an electrical impulse to generate shadow or create differently coloured atmospheres.

The final prototype was a three layered polymer based frame with a double-sided coloured gel.

While the project was very successful considering the short time span, it would be interesting to continue the research in a bigger scale in order to improve the application of the patterns and to see what other use scenarios could be developed

Kaleidoscope

IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (www.iaac.net)

This research describes a studio experiment developed by Iker Luna, under Luis Fraguada, inside the Open Thesis Fabrication program, in the research line of Smart Urban Elements. The project aims of exploring the bio receptivity of ceramics taking advantage of the porosity of the material that allows it to retain water and using natural fibers as complement elements to benefits other properties.

It is known that species like moss and other organisms have the capacity to grow in diverse typologies of surfaces, in particular surfaces with high levels of moisture and acceptable pH levels. Ceramics, such as roof tiles, become suitable places for the reproduction of this organism, providing even more benefit to the material performance in terms of thermal and acoustic parameters, not to mention, photosynthetic organisms help to improve air quality, and to alleviate urban heat island effects.

Material limitation

It is important to understand that materials suffer different physical changes depending on the environment and climate conditions. Moss and other plants can also be responsible for increasing the moisture levels and, with temperature rise; water can significantly damage a normal ceramic piece.

Testing Material Phase 1 [TM1]

A first phase of research was dedicated to a comprehensive framework on previous work in ceramic fields taking in account components to test different levels of porosity and roughness. By nature of its microstructure, traditional ceramic material can function as a buffer for both heat and moisture. The use of bentonite white clay was chosen as it has been proven that the material offers an equilibrium moisture content of 13 percent under 50 percent standard humidity conditions, whereas the equilibrium moisture content of kaolinite under the same conditions is only 0.7 percent.

Introducing porosity into any material will improve the thermal insulating characteristics (decreasing the conductivity) of the material. Porous materials consist in a solid matrix containing gas within the pores. Their good insulation properties are achieved due to the reduced thermal conductivity in gases, in comparison with solids or liquids. Pine sawdust was therefore incorporated in different proportions, as well as chamotte to produce a rough finish helping the growing process.

Moss growing acceleration [MGA]

Botanically speaking, mosses are non-vascular plants in the land plant division Bryophyta. They are small (normally a few centimeters tall) herbaceous (non- woody) plants that absorb water and nutrients mainly through their leaves and harvest sunlight to create food through a process of photosynthesis. They differ from vascular plants in their lack of water bearing xylem tracheids or vessels. As in liverworts and hornworts, the haploid gametophyte generation is the dominant phase of the life cycle. This contrasts with the pattern in all vascular plants (seed plants and pteridophytes), where the diploid sporophyte generation is dominant. Mosses reproduce using spores, not seeds and have no flowers.

Since moss gametophytes have no vascular system to transport water, through the plant or waterproofing systems to prevent tissue water from evaporating they must have a damp environment in which to grow, and a surrounding of liquid water to reproduce. They also require enough sunlight to conduct photosynthesis being autotrophic. Shade tolerance varies by species, as it does with taller plants. In most areas, mosses grow chiefly in damp shady areas, such as wooded areas and at the edges of streams; but they can grow anywhere in cool damp cloudy climates. Some species are also adapted to sunny, seasonally dry areas like alpine rocks or stabilized sand dunes. Since life cycle moss can take couple of months to stabilize, the method chosen was of mixing different components in order to accelerate the growth.

Near infrared/ Normalized Difference Vegetation Index [NIR/NDVI] 
In order to analyze the bio receptibility of the BCS the NIR NIR and NDVI technology was used to see and detect first evidence of living moss in the ceramics. This allows observing which samples are more suitable for growing the photosynthetic organism in controlled conditions. This process was developed using a modified digital camera, in this case the Canon A810, by replacing the original filter from the lens and adding a specific blue filter (1). This new filter captures near-infrared and blue light in the same image, but in different color channels. Images are processed with a code (2) designed in Studio R, a language designed for processing images and Quantum Gis a open source geographic information system.

Once the multispectral photograph of the materials is taken, it is possible to post-process the images, compositing the infrared and visible data to generate new images which display the healthy moss, photosynthetically active areas as bright regions. In this case QGIS1 was used to analyze regions, but a grasshopper definition was also generated to explore new potential data. Near-infrared photography has been a key tool for planning at the industrial and governmental level: it is used on airplanes and satellites by vineyards, large farms, and even NASA for sophisticated agricultural and ecological assessment.

(1). Filter created by Public Lab / http://publiclab.org/

What we have are closed, self-absorbed buildings. What we would like to have is open, versatile, interesting and safe cities. The challenge is how to incorporate large buildings in cities where people have the same small stature and slow space they had hundreds of years ago. There is now a considerable confusion in the gap between large and small scales and between ‘quick’ and ‘slow’ architecture. Ground floor facades provide an important link between these scales and between buildings and people. For public space and buildings to be treated as a whole, the ground floor facades must have a special and welcoming design. This good, close encounter architecture is vital for good cities.
( Close encounters with buildings Jan Gehl*, Lotte Johansen Kaefer and Solvejg Reigstad)

An important behavioural factor for facade design is the support effect, which refers to the human preference for standing or sitting and being protected at a fixed point. We have lost this important factor! Buildings became introverted, boring, efficient and separated from the public space.
So the aim is to create a responsive facade that on the one hand protects the people from enviromental conditions, like sun and rain IN- & OUTSIDE of the building and on the other hand becomes part of the public space that is able to interact and correspond to the peoples needs and activities.

First in collab. with Storaenso (wood company) and Baobab- Fusters (carpenter) a catalog of the hygroscopic behavior of wood has been created. Different types, thicknesses, and stiffnesses of wood have been tested in a controlled environment in order to see which material has the best performance for a responsive system. As a result 5mm thick Pine responded very quickly (5min) but it took nearly 4h to get back into its “original” position.

Therefore the principle of the expanding wood-cell has been taken and been applied to a different material (Silicone) for more control.  A high density channel structure lead to strong and big bending movements.  At the moment of inflation it is pushing the material in between which is bending directly the connected not expanding - sublayer.

Finally the two materials (silicone & wood) are being joined together to one composite material. The idea it is to provide a basic panel system for designers, architects,etc.  who can assemble or even re-designed it according to their needs.

Conforming to the density and where the cuts are being placed , diffrent angles of deformation can be approached . The dimensions have to vary as each single peace has to deal with a diffrent amount of forces according to their position in the facade.
The Silicone will take over two functions. On the one hand, it wil be part of the air/water system and on the other it will connect the pannels to eachother. In other words structure, system and joint are out of the same material.

Material references:
Digital Ecologies Seminar, AAC at UCL, 2012
Soft Wood Seminar, MIT, 2011

Project developed in collaboration with STORAENSO