In the future, wireless technology will work seamlessly and in the background, according to Mark Shepard, assistant professor of architecture and media study at UB.
Shepard presented the last installment of the Cutting Edge Lecture Series, entitled "Media, Architecture and Computing in a Wireless World," held Saturday in the Center for the Arts.
Shepard discussed how the media, architecture and computing are becoming more integrated into one "system." The lecture focused on how computers and wireless technology have driven change.
In the area of computing, Shepard discussed the model of "ubiquitous computing." The model is meant to make computing a lesser concern for people.
"Ubiquitous computing says, 'let's take the computer and banish it to the background,'" Shepard said. "The foreground is the social space of everyday life, so that our interactions are foregrounded, yet computing itself becomes invisible."
Currently, people have a "one-to-one" relationship with their personal computers, whereas the future, ubiquitous computing will allow for a wider relationship with the Internet.
"Rather than many of us sharing one computer, computing itself becomes ubiquitous, and many computers end up sharing each of us on a daily basis," Shepard said.
An example of this is a device called an RF ID, often found on clothing in retail stores and on cattle to track them on boxcars. RF ID's can work together to create linked networks.
According to Shepard, the area of media is advancing by forming more complex media ecology.
"Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a larger ecosystem: blogs, search engines, personal media, Youtube, different kinds of content sharing over peer-to-peer networks," Shepard said. "All of this begins to form a so-called 'ecology' which begins to communicate (with), or at least influence each other."
To illustrate this, Shepard cited a social networking site called Dodgeball, similar to MySpace and Facebook, a web service available in 22 U.S. cities that allows a user with a mobile phone to track the locations of his or her friends in physical space.
"If you think about technologies such as Facebook or MySpace, Dodgeball begins to map those technologies onto physical space in the city," Shepard said.
Shepard also discussed architecture and the changes that computing brings to the field, citing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by American architect Frank Gehry, as an example. According to Shepard, the building wouldn't have been possible without the use of computer design systems.
The same processes used in the design of the Guggenheim Museum are being used to create similar designs in other places that would have been impossible in the past.
The process he described began with a scale model, was mapped onto a data model through the use of a three-dimensional scanner. The resulting data was then transferred directly to metal fabricators, who manufacture the parts.
"The opportunity to produce forms that were not previously capable of doing is amazing," Shepard said. "And that these forms are, today, in the process of enabling spaces which previously were beyond our means to physically fabricate."
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
