TRANSIT

Recently we have witnessed a paradigm shift from cyberspace to pervasive computing. Instead of pulling us through the looking glass into some steril, luminous world, digital technology now pours out beyond the screen, into our messy places, under our law of physics; it is built into our rooms, embedded in our props and devices - everywhere.

Malcom McCullough, 2004, Digital ground:architecture, pervasive computing, and environmental knowing, MIT, page 9

Just as text long since escaped medivial monasteries and can now be found not only in portable books, but also on stickers, shirts, street signs, and all over product packiaging, similary computers have long since escaped the glassed-in laboratory and the beige office cubicle.
we see them everywhere and sometimes they see us. far more microchips go into objects we hardly think of as computers than into boxes used through a keyboard, mouse, and screen. Today less than a quarter of the chips produced by Intel, the largest manufacturer, are put into desktop or laptop computer motherboards. The rest are embedded into physical locations. They drive personal gadgets, information appliances, smart tags, responsive rooms, enviromental monitors, and location-based services.

Malcom McCullough, 2004, Digital ground:architecture, pervasive computing, and environmental knowing, MIT, page 4-5

Software engineers think they know what they mean by design, and so do architects. When information technology becomes a part of the social infrastructure, it demands design consideration from a broad range of disciplines. Social, psychological, aesthetic, and functional factors all must play a role in the design. Appropriateness surpasses perfomance as the key to technological success. Appropriateness is almost always a matter of context. We understand our better contexts as places, and we understand better design for places as architecture.

Malcom McCullough, 2004, Digital ground:architecture, pervasive computing, and environmental knowing, MIT, page 3

digital networks are no longer seperate from architecture. unlike cyberspace, which was conceived as a tabula rasa, pervasive computing has to be inscribed into the social and environmental complexity of the existing physical enviroment. Situated technology may help us manage the protocols, flows, ecologies, and systems that form the basis of valued places; or it may add a layer of distrust, information glut, and experiential uniformity to them.(...) Whereas previous paradigms of cyberspace threatened to dematerialize architecture, pervasive computing invites a defense of architecture.

Malcom McCullough, 2004, Digital ground:architecture, pervasive computing, and environmental knowing, MIT, xiii