This research presents results from a study developing a smartphone app, Urban CoBuilder, in which citizens can collaboratively create designs for urban environments using augmented reality technology and game mechanics. Eight prototypes were developed to refine selected design criteria, including tracking strategies, design elements, user experience and the interface with game mechanics. The prototypes were developed through an iterative design process with assessments and incremental improvements. The tracking was especially challenging and using multiple bitonal markers combined with the smartphone’s gyroscope sensor to average the user position was identified as the most suitable strategy. Still, portability and stability linked to tracking need to be improved. Design elements, here building blocks with urban functions textures, were realistic enough to be recognizable and easy to understand for the users. Future studies will focus on usability tests with larger user groups.

Ceramic building material is a useful passive modulator of heat and humidity in the environment.Components can be designed to respond to specific environmental conditions by controlling material density and porosity as well as surface characteristics. Through investigations into materials engineering, formal design, and prototyping, key physical attributes have been identified. This relates to a number of physical principles: the ability of the material to absorb and release thermal energy, the ability to absorb and then "wick" moisture within the pore structure, and the decrement factor or "time lag" of the effect. The interplay between these effects points to the importance of directionality in the granular structure, as well as at the architectural component scale. Recent work done on monitoring has led to the development of software tools that allow feedback approaching real time-a visual representation of the dynamic thermal and hygrometric

We designed, created and tested an underactuated soft gripper able to hold everyday objects of various shapes and sizes without using complex hardware or control algorithms, but rather by combining sheets of flexible plastic materials and a single servo motor. Starting with a prototype where simple actuation performs complex varied gripping operations solely through the material system and its inherent physical computation, the paper discusses how embodied computation might exist in a material aggregate by tuning and balancing its morphology and material properties.

The article describes a method for gamifying the design and assembly of computationally integrated structures built out of discrete identical blocks. As a case study, the interactive installation Sensitive Assembly was designed and built at the Digital Design Unit (Prof. Dr Oliver Tessmann) at the Technische Universität of Darmstadt and exhibited during the digital art festival NODE 2015 in Frankfurt in 2015. Sensitive Assembly invites people to play a Jenga-like game: starting from a solid wall, players are asked to remove and replace the installation’s building blocks to create windows to a nurturing light while challenging its stability. A computational system that senses the current state of the wall guides the physical interaction and predicts an approaching collapse or a new light beam breaking through. The installation extends the notion of real-time feedback from the digital into the physical and uses machine-learning techniques to predict future structural behaviour.

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