ESO 2024: "DOWN TO EARTH"// Meet the speakers // Dimitris Papanikolaou

Στη διάλεξή του θα μοιραστεί σκέψεις και στοχασμούς πάνω στην ιδέα της Αρχιτεκτονικής ενός Διασυνδεδεμένου Κόσμου.

Τι γνώσεις οφείλει να έχει ο αρχιτέκτων του διασυνδεδεμένου κόσμου; Ο Buckminster Fuller υποστήριζε ότι ο αρχιτέκτονας είναι ένας “ολοκληρωτικός επιστήμονας του σχεδιασμού με βάση την πρόβλεψη”, μια “εξελισσόμενη σύνθεση του καλλιτέχνη, του εφευρέτη, του μηχανικού, του αντικειμενικού οικονομολόγου και του εξελικτικού στρατηγιστή”. Στις μέρες μας όπου η τεχνολογία διασύνδεσης περιβάλλοντος και ανθρώπων είναι πλέον δεδομένη, το πώς η ηλεκτρονικοποίηση και ψηφιοποίηση του δομημένου περιβάλλοντος επηρεάζουν τη σχέση μας με αυτό, τις κοινωνικές μας αλληλεπιδράσεις μέσω αυτού, αλλά και τον τρόπο που το σχεδιάζουμε, αποτελούν ένα επίκαιρο κεφαλαιώδες και ανοικτό ερώτημα.

Dimitris Papanikolaou is an architect, engineer and urban technologist with a research interest in the impact of information and communication technology in the perception, use and management of urban and architectural space.

His research combines analog and digital means to develop enabling systems that connect humans through their built environment. His broader interests include ubiquitous computing, computer-supported cooperative work, multiagent systems, system dynamics, information visualization, urban operations research, human-computer interaction, and design research.

He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) with a joint appointment between the School of Architecture and the Department of Software and Information Systems. He is the founding director of the Urban Synergetics Lab, an interdisciplinary lab between the disciplines of Architecture, Computing and Informatics that conceives, designs and develops enabling systems that connect humans, objects and places and it analyzes how humans interact cooperatively through these systems through analytical and empirical methods. His research has been published in leading conferences, journals, and book chapters, and it has received awards including the international Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the Harvard’s Deans’ Design Challenge and the Knight Foundation’s Celebrate Charlotte Arts. He has worked at Microsoft Research (MSR) at Redmond and at the MIT Media Lab (Smart Cities and Changing Places groups) and he has taught at the University of Patras, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. Dimitris is currently an Associate Editor at TAD journal (Technology | Architecture + Design) published by Taylor & Francis. Previously, he was on an Associate Editor at IJAC (International Journal of Architectural Computing) and he co-organized SimAUD (Simulation in Architecture and Urban Design) conference in 2019. He holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) from Harvard Graduate School of Design, an MSc in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, a SMArchS in Design Computation from MIT, School of Architecture and Planning, and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from NTUA.

In his lecture, he will share thoughts on the idea of the Architecture of an Interconnected World.

What knowledge should the architect of the interconnected world have? Buckminster Fuller argued that the architect is an “integral design scientist based on prediction,” an “evolving synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.” In our days, where technology interconnecting environments and people is a given, the fact of how the digitization of  built environment affects our relationship with it, our social interactions through it and the way we design it, is a question worth answering.

Research Statement 

“Since the early days of computing, the discourse on architecture’s computerization and the subsequent automation of human and social life has not changed much. Today, 40 years after Architecture Machine Group created the Media Room, we still computerize space by masking it with a blanket of technology and we still point and talk to buildings and furniture as if they have mind, soul, and composure. And while more of us can command our environment digitally, our conflicting needs and wants make our collective use of it an increasingly complex political issue that technology alone cannot resolve.

In my research, I investigate how the computerization and sharing of the built environment affects our perception of it, our collective use of it, and our social interactions through it, and how analyzing these relationships through the lens of human behavior, social cooperation, and systems theory can provide the groundwork for theorizing and making architecture of collective action.

I focus on conditions that arise when multiple individuals share common resources, and on how the design of space, connective media, and social mechanisms can induce or limit cooperation among them. To address these questions, I combine quantitative and qualitative methods by integrating big data with simulation models for scenario analysis and by designing, prototyping, and evaluating novel human-computer interfaces and platforms for sharing. At UNCC, I founded and direct the Urban Synergetics Lab, a collaboration between the colleges of Art and Architecture and of Computing and Informatics that explores participatory models of urban intelligence, analyzes their possibilities, and devises novel strategies for implementing them.

I advance the fields of architecture, urbanism, and computing in three ways.

1. I develop data-driven simulation models that predict dynamics of shared systems.

These models can be used to predict behavior of existing shared systems or to plan future shared systems of predictable behavior. I particularly research how movements of human and physical resources affect their spatiotemporal accumulations and how the dynamics of these accumulations affect system performance. My doctoral dissertation, titled The Potential of On-Demand Urban Mobility, developed the foundation of a dynamics theory to relate performance of shared mobility systems to trip patterns and urban form

My goal is the development of a theory that reciprocally relates spatial organization to performance of shared mobility systems and the subsequent development of data-driven tools to help architects and planners design shared systems of predictable behavior.

2. I design enabling media that connect humans, objects and places across scales.

I am interested in the role of the built environment in mediating human and social interactions and in how this role can be amplified by technology. My internship work at Microsoft Research investigated how mapping traces of human activity across objects and places can, not only mediate human presence remotely, but also, associate remote places in the perception of people.

In my project BodyPods, I designed and engineered a pair of resting seats that digitally register, map, and manifest a person’s bodyprint from one seat’s sitting surface to another seat’s sitting surface through the internet, and I examined how people gave meaning to this affordance. My work gave empirical evidence that although attention during object-based telepresence interactions focuses on the remote person’s presence, it is the remote place that participants often associate as a matterful context.

Making sense of place(s) through information networks continues being a central inquiry in his research. My recent work focuses on collective shape-changing interfaces for public participation and on how they can influence perception of locality, belongingness, and identity among social groups. My lab developed a backend/frontend, software/hardware platform that allows individuals to collectively actuate large-scale inflatable shape-changing interfaces in urban or territorial contexts through the internet.

Charlotte Breaths is an urban-scale installation of ten interactive wirelessly connected giant inflatables, placed at ten sites in the city of Charlotte, will enable visitors in each site to physically experience the presence of visitors in remote sites, reflecting the two categorical ways with which we perceive our socio-locational identity: “us versus them” and “here versus there”. Expected results will provide empirical evidence for the extent to which design of physical locative media can steer territorial behavior and social structure in urban space.

3. I design mechanisms that induce cooperation in shared systems.

Such mechanisms are inspired by areas of behavioral economics or social psychology while their study can be based on computer simulations, designed experiments, or game theory. My MSc thesis, titled The Market Economy of Trips, focused on the question: is it possible for users of a shared mobility system to collectively govern it while acting selfishly? In addressing this collective action problem, I considered the design of a pricing mechanism that causes trips from empty to full areas to cost more while trips in the opposite way to pay back. I showed that for each population of travelers with their own trip preferences, there exists a set of trip prices that allocates optimally funds from those willing to pay more to those willing to wait more, such that no one can make any further trip changes to be better-off without making someone else worse-off, and such that the entire population’s travel costs are minimized.

Next, I showed that such set of trip prices can derive competitively in a system designed as a two-sided market in which riders buy vehicles from origin stations and resell them at destination stations, and stations buy vehicles from incoming riders and resell them at outgoing riders. In my current work, CloudCommuting, I develop an online marketplace platform for collectively deriving trip prices in shared mobility systems through public participation. The platform allows users to register online as riders and traders and to transact over physical or virtual locations in real time on a live map. This platform will provide the backbone for conducting urban scale game experiments to measure the effectiveness of self-governance mechanisms (compared to centralized control) in shared mobility systems of any kind”.