The integration of responsive components in architecture offers the potential to enhance the experience of the building by giving expression to fleeting, changeable aspects of the environment. Responsive buildings enable a physical response to changes in the environment through specific building elements; in rare cases these responsive elements become an integral and poetic element of a culturally significant work of architecture. In this paper I examine two types of responsiveness, one which concerns the changing environment and another the activities and needs of the building's inhabitants. I look at two examples of buildings that illustrate a potential poetic role for architectural components responding to these two types of change, and propose that architects will need to acquire experience with designing for specific rates, scales and types of change before responsive elements will more frequently appear as a poetic and integral part of the building.

At the first international Visualization Summit, more than 100 international researchers and practitioners defined and assessed nine original and important research goals in the context of Visualization Science, and proposed methods for achieving these goals by 2010. The synthesis of the whole event is presented in the 10th research goal. This article contributes a building block for systemizing visualization research by proposing mutually elaborated research goals with defined milestones. Such a consensus on where to go together is only one step toward establishing visualization science in the long-term perspective as a discipline with comparable relevance to chemistry, mathematics, language, or history. First, this article introduces the conference setting. Second, it describes the research goals and findings from the nine workshops. Third, a survey among 62 participants about the originality and importance of each research goal is presented and discussed. Finally, the article presents a synthesis of the nine research goals in the form of a 10th research goal, namely 'Visualizing Future Cities'. The article is relevant for visualization researchers, trend scouts, research programme directors who define the topics that get funds.

INTRODUCTIONThe question I would like to address in this article is: Why haven't there been more examples like the Institut du Monde Arabe, buildings which propose a poetic purpose for responsive components in architecture (figure 1)? Part of the answer to this question, I believe, lies in the definition of 'high' and 'low' architecture in terms of rates of obsolescence and change, a distinction presented by Stuart Brand in terms of the capacity of the building to gracefully adapt to change in its surroundings over time. In Brand's book 'How Buildings Learn', 'low' architecture is associated with flexible responsiveness to change over time, in part due to the use of construction methods and materials with a relatively rapid rate of obsolescence and decay. The 'high' road for architecture puts a premium on permanence in buildings, and tends to avoid components susceptible to obsolescence and material deterioration. Those mechanical and electronic devices most susceptible to obsolescence are, in this schema, unsuitable for employment in 'permanent' structures except as 'peripherals' which claim a place outside the primary concerns of high architecture. This dissociation between technological innovation and culturally significant architecture has been challenged by occasional voices in the last century, notably Archigram in the 1960's and 70's, but persists in the strength of concepts and practices that exclude mechanical and electronic responsive devices from prominent inclusion in works of architectural significance.In this paper I will first investigate obsolescence and the strict separation of high and low architecture as concepts that explain, in part, why the responsive components of architecture have seldom been granted an aesthetic purpose. I will then look at one example that tells a story of the architectural contribution of responsive building components, and suggests alternative ways of thinking about the elements of buildings that change over time in response to the environment. And finally, in conclusion I will extract strategies for future responsive buildings that aspire to the kind of expression found in these examples.

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In this paper, we introduce a new form of supermarket: Smart Market, in which customers can acquire detailed product information with Smart Market's facilities and expedite the checkout process without human intervention. We describe how Smart Market works and discuss related issues in detail. Our discussion concentrates on information acquisition, checkout process design, privacy protection and management enhancement. One of our contributions is the concept of "paying anytime anywhere" which gives customers full freedom when checking out and eliminates the time wasted in checkout queues.