In this week, I am committed to discovering people’s research on interesting public spaces in the past, hoping to find inspiration to create new online spaces suitable for today. I found an article that introduced a prototype of an AI city, designed in 1965, called fun palace. I found it is important to thinking of first principles. You will find that if you try to break a thing into the most basic parts and think back, you will have the opportunity to improve it and think about the future. After world war two, London in 1965 was a place and a time when everything was changing and anything seemed possible, when radically new architectural ideas burst onto the scene, with vitality, energy, and originality equaling that of the Beatles, Mary Quant’s Miniskirts, and so many crazy things .

So this project is called Fun palace. This was an old factory, a giant incomplete building in east London, either in the process of going up or coming down-it would be hard to tell. It was not really a building at all but a vast, socially interactive machine, an so called virtual architecture, constantly changing in a ceaseless cycle of assembly and dismantling.

After days off, swarms of East London workers would be there, using its cranes and pre set modules to assemble their own learning and leisure environments. So people can basically decorate it whatever they like, and they escape from the work and start on an exciting journey of creativity, learning, and personal development

It was to be a “university of the streets,” where people could learn a language, watch a film, make a film, explore virtual worlds, learn to cook, teach other people to cook, learn to use a computer, learn a new job skill., or simply watch everyone else.

It is really an interesting idea, also Influencing the design of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and The Shed art centre in New York.

And the most interesting part is Roy Ascott, which is visionary computer scientist and artist, who has designed AI system and algorithm for Fun Palace. designed for the Fun Palace’s main entry.

This was an electronic kiosk that could search, display, and track information of all sorts. His system was among the earliest proposals for public access to computers in order to store and retrieve information from a vast database.

In addition, the system would keep a memory of all previous users. As one person sought information from the pillar, it would record a trace of the transaction, and the system would suggest multiple knowledge pathways to subsequent users. Ascott envisioned that this would give users insight into the interests of other Fun Palace attendees.

Electronic sensors and response terminals would gather and assign a prioritized value to raw data on the interests and activity preferences of individual users. A state of the IBM 360-30 computer would then compile the data to establish overall user trends, which would in turn set the
parameters for the modification of spaces and activities within the Fun Palace.

The building computer would then reallocate moveable walls and walkways to adapt the form and layout of the Fun Palace to changes in use. Price hoped that the Fun Palace would be able to “learn” behavioral patterns and “plan” for future activities by processing accumulated data on use according to algorithms derived from cybernetics principles and game theory strategies. In theory, at least, the Fun Palace would be capable of anticipating unpredictable phenomena, to predict the future.

Which whole concept is very close to today idea, the system of date gathering, analysis and predict the future is very close to nowadays AI city’s idea.

http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=603e9ab8-7ac0-4315-9ea9-5de5f792f4a6%40sessionmgr4008&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=18346584&db=asu

Dream review

I was thinking that if we can create a social space, let everyone create their own modules and spaces, and invite friends in, it will be an interesting experience. I know there are many similar products now, but my idea is to use threejs or d3 to combine 3D space.