Digital technology touches nearly everyone’s life. Be it delivered through cell phones, home entertainment devices, ATMs, storefronts or countless other means, digital design is big business and Robert Miles Kemp is at the forefront of that exploding movement.

The son of a carpenter and general contractor, Kemp visited job sites from the time he was small. At nine years old, his father gave him the challenge of designing a structure for a neighbor, which was subsequently built. Kemp loved both the process and the end product. Thus began a career in architecture. More after the break.

Starting as a teenager, Kemp worked in nine architecture firms of various sizes, specialties and markets (New York, Los Angles, DC) before going out on his own. He participated in more traditional residential and large apartment building design at SOM, then moved over to more modern design projects that included flexible, modular spaces and his passion; interactive design.

As founder of Los Angeles based Variate Labs, Kemp now wears numerous hats: leader, rainmaker, translator, social media machine and chief creative. They have grown steadily to a staff of 16 (which include architects, engineers, developers and marketers) with projects ranging from video games and mobile phone and tablet applications, to interactive museums and wine bars.

Kemp is obsessed with human behavior. During the recent design of the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, he formulated 12 main archetypes, which represent most museum attendees and developed a corresponding narrative, which drove his technology and design. Balancing the informative and the emotional, Kemp made design decisions with this narrative in mind and modified his design as users revealed more about their habits and desires, through real time behavior.

Knowing his own storefront is his best avenue for self-promotion, Kemp has implemented their signature interactive retail façade on their West Hollywood location. Images glow and various Tweets display (including the one I sent, which is pictured here) for passersby to see and consider.

The façade has infinite uses for retailers who want to interact with existing or potential customers. Examples include fashion brands that allow users to try on outfits virtually, financial institutions that facilitate customers checking their balance or paying their bills or real time voting or input at large social events. “The possibilities are endless and we have solutions for any business that wants to communicate effectively to their customer,” says Kemp.

A challenge for Kemp’s team has been to convince executives overseeing large brands of this new approach. They are skeptical and want guarantees before spending the time and money to create something untested. A hybrid of the two, Variate Labs competes with both with digital agencies and large architecture firms, which are attempting to expand their offerings through these projects.

Rather than pursue one project at a time, Kemp is developing technologies that can be licensed for numerous applications. Seeing the larger picture, Kemp creates solutions to benefit retail, healthcare, financial, advertising and gaming sectors.

Simple and straight forward, Kemp offers his company mantra: Excite (looks cool); Connect (personalized for an audience); Engage (create technology that enables interactive experiences) as his approach for getting to the next level.

Watch my interview with Kemp, tour his office and see samples of Variate Labs projects below. Follow Kemp @variatelabs.

See article at Arch Daily

Presentation

http://class.lecturecapture.uh.edu/uh/Viewer/?peid=70f6a3b3f12740379296f482a73e04d11d

Audience and Presenter Dialogue

http://class.lecturecapture.uh.edu/uh/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=7ad1b21a1f7d4a6db165ac1ddaf4f2761d

words Mark Dery

top image Dan Tuffs

If Miles Kemp were a tag cloud, he’d be a collection of buzzwords and catchphrases associated with the emerging field of interactive architecture: modular robotics, biomimetics, morphing furniture, smart goo, embedded computation, augmented reality, kinetic architecture, responsive environments. Here and there, in the whirl of words, we would catch glimpses of the surfer-dude speak he has picked up in southern California, where Kemp’s multi-disciplinary design company, Variate Labs, is based. “Awesome” is a frequent superlative, “majorly” the default intensifier. He recently remarked to a friend on Twitter that he was “down to hang”.

In person Kemp is a boyish-looking 32-year-old with a seriousness of purpose that belies his years. Interactive architecture’s most fervent evangelist grew up on a farm in Easton, Maryland. By the age of five, he was “swinging a hammer”, helping his father build their house. At 14, he knew his way around AutoCAD software and was working for an architect; at 21, he was a junior architect for Skidmore Owings and Merrill, “working on skyscrapers as one of the lead designers in the office in New York”. In 2003, he enrolled at SCI-Arc because he knew they’d let him do his thesis on robotics. He graduated in 2005 with a master’s degree.

“Watching The Jetsons as a kid, I thought that the idea of having helper robots around the house seemed plausible,” he writes, in an essay Our Adapting Future, which appeared in the science magazine Seed:

“Smart interactive robots do not need to look like our mechanical humanoid cousins,” he wrote. “Interactive architecture – a burgeoning collaboration across diverse scientific and design communities – has ushered in advancements in manufacturing, behavioural logic, and biologically inspired materials and introduced new ways robotics can enhance our lives.

“Our spaces and environments – buildings themselves – are becoming the robots, Rosie [the Jetsons’ robot maid] is becoming the architecture around us, and unprecedented levels of responsiveness and environmental interactivity are becoming a reality.”

In his 2009 book, Interactive Architecture, co-authored with Cal Poly Pomona professor Michael Fox, and in lectures at events such as the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Kemp spreads the gospel of a polymorphous architecture that, any decade now, will shape-shift to suit our changing needs, maybe even respond to our moods. He imagines domestic interiors and workspaces whose furniture is composed of reprogrammable interlocking miniature robots, capable of reassembling themselves into whatever structure is needed, from coffee table to conference table.

If you crane your neck, Kemp suggests, you can just make out the adaptable, perhaps even affective architecture of the near future, right around the corner. He sees premonitions of it in the Pittsburgh-based Claytronics Project, a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and Intel that is attempting to harness modular robotics, nanotechnology and computer science to create “programmable matter” – a sort of smart putty, formed out of millions of flyspeck-sized robots, that can embody information in dynamic, 3D form. In the tomorrow conjured by Claytronics researchers, you really will Reach Out and Touch Someone by phone: the person you’re talking to will be in the room with you, a hyper-realistic simulation given touchable, three-dimensional form by nanobots.

Alternately, Kemp’s interactive architecture, when it arrives, might look more like Curious Displays, a digital animation created by Julia Tsao for her graduate thesis in media design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In Tsao’s evocation of Things to Come, pixels acquire the distributed intelligence of a social-insect super organism and come swarming off your screen, into your living room. A bubbling mass of bead-shaped little bots flows up a wall, coalescing into a screen playing Finding Nemo. One corner of the screen breaks away and streams, ant-like, down the wall, drawing our attention to a parched plant that needs watering. Another knot of pixelbots comes loose and forms itself into an arrow pointing at a wall-mounted clock; flashing a digital readout, it alerts us to the fact that our morning meeting has been rescheduled. The behaviour of these tactile, mobile, curiously purposive pixels quickly gives rise to questions, says Tsao, such as: “Does this movement and behaviour begin to allude to the development of a type of personality? What role do they take on in our daily lives?”

Kemp likes to describe our relationship to interactive architecture as a conversation. As in: “My vision of the future 50 years from now is, rather than you adapting to your environment, your environment’s going to have a conversation with you.”

Architecture, at least since modernism, has been not only a machine for living, but also the handmaiden of social engineering. “I want to move away from what architecture has been doing for a very long time,” says Kemp, “which is: prescribing the way that life needs to be, for people. You build this a certain way and it will affect someone’s life so much that they will live in a different way.

“I’m more interested in creating architecture that’s about people, that’s in the hands of people, that’s an extension of people. I see this as a kit of parts, a set of tools that you could put in the hands of people, where people could actually determine their own environment – programming it themselves, interacting with these robots in real time to change their space as they see fit.”

If we look in the historical rear-view mirror, we can see precursors of Kemp’s robotecture in the work of English architects like John Frazer, whose “evolutionary architecture”, if realised, would behave like an artificial life form, and Cedric Price, whose unbuilt Fun Palace was “indeterminate, flexible, and responsive to the changing needs of users”, with floors that could be raised or lowered and movable windows and walls.

Even so, Kemp’s interactive architecture is inescapably of its times. His vision of a programmable, maybe even hackable, architecture is tuned to a moment that mythologises the do-it-yourselfer, from the Maker movement to the growing legitimacy of self-published books to urban farming to 3D printing for the masses.

Thinking of the KILL ALL switch Tsao mocked up for her Curious Displays project, with a droll placard that warns the user to activate “if you discover rogue pixel blocks”, does Kemp worry about the dark side of interactivity? What happens if smart goo turns ugly or morphing furniture goes haywire?

“When I first presented my robots back in school, showing all my animations in a building lab, architects were really excited but other people were pretty scared,” he says. “They were afraid the furniture would swallow them.

“People get hurt when robot response is isolated and automatic. The robot spaces we design should have an active continuous feedback loop, so that the robots are constantly sensing, monitoring, thinking and asking us questions.

“I just hope Hollywood will give robots a break and stop stunting the advance of the field. The last thing we need is a sci-fi movie called The House, about a building that kills its inhabitants.”

Read article at Icon Eye

Because of the advancing development of technical possibilities, the demands on processing digital contents are constantly expanding. We talked to Robert Miles Kemp from Variate Labs about this topic. Variate Labs developed an interactive and communal learning tool for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

We designed and developed the new user experience strategy for the new LAMH. We worked closely with the museum and architect to design how visitors would experience the museum’s content before, during and after a visit to the new museum. We put emphasis on creating an experience that would feel personal to every visitor and would let the content speak for itself. We also wanted visitors to have the feeling that all of the content in the museum, both digital and physical, felt like one unified content set. Variate Labs designed, developed and oversaw the creation of the new museum database, database standards, digitization workflow, website, print exhibits, spatial audioguide, ‘World That Was’ interactive table, ‘18 Camps’ networked exhibit, individual exhibit video displays, audioguide takeaway and logo.

We were constantly editing our designs and process throughout the design process. To us, the artifacts and images in the new LAMH are the most important part of the experience. We used the latest interactive technologies to enable a new dialogue to take place between visitors and content but did it in a way where the technology did not overshadow the physical content. For example, you can see photographs in the ‘World That Was’ interactive table and learn about the stories and themes behind the people and scenes in each of the 25,000 images. We want visitors to connect with the content and relate to the subject matter.

We constantly evaluated our designs to simplify and strip out all unnecessary elements. As much as possible, we made sure that all digital content was shown at it’s true one-to-one scale and designed our experiences to utilize gesture and touch that mimickes the way that visitors interact with physical objects. We made a lot of prototypes and worked closely with the museum to test our ideas with an audience that mirrored our research.

There is always a balance between the two and this balance is constantly shifting throughout the process. We always start our projects by agreeing on the main user experience and content requirements to make sure everyone is on the same page. After you have a solid foundation of expectations and guiding principles then the fun starts. We worked for weeks developing situational use cases that aimed to promote personalization and emotional connections between visitors and content. Because we started with emotion we had lots of opportunities to push interaction design in creative ways throughout the project. Throughtout the project, we would come to the table with creative ideas, test these ideas against a real audience and then move forward with our findings. Once the user experience strategy was built we oversaw and lead the development effort.

This project had the most heart of any project I have worked on. This project had the most raw, powerful and alarming content I have ever seen. My team reviewed and planned out every image in the entire museum with the museum staff. We literally reviewed over 100,000 images of the life before, during and after the holocaust. The entire experience had a huge impact on me while we were designing and has greatly affected my opinions on the holocaust after we finished the project. While we were working on this project we met dozens of survivors and learned about their personal experiences. I felt an emotion connection with the survivors and their stories and felt a tremendous pressure to design and build a new experience that would represent their dedication. This project was about telling the people of Los Angeles about the holocaust through the eyes of the Los Angeles survivors. It is going to take many years for me to unpack the affect of this project on my personal being.

I think Facebook and Twitter are leading the way to create an entirely new type of user… but not in a good way. People love to read and learn about others but they also like to communicate and engage with each other. I think that the experience threshold for each of these services is starting to hit a stagnant plateau as users are becoming bored with the constant barrage of somewhat useful information and lackluster communication tools. It is content overload and users are having a hard time maintaining. I think that in the future, users will want new types of communication tools that allow them to communicate with each other in more lifelike personal ways. I think that users will expect the line between digital and physical to blur over the next years. Beyond video new tools will emerge that will enable communication and collaboration.

I think things are going to evolve in the future to a completely new type of content experience. I think it is too early to tell exactly what this experience will be but there are a number of different components that we are seeing evolve right now. For us, our projects are about creating an emotional connection with people and that means that we try to understand all parts of our experience around the user. We look deeply into the mindset of our intended audience and design experiences to be both personalized and intuitive. I think that personalization will be a huge trend that affects the future of the user content dialogue.

All of the Variate Labs team, including myself, has a background in architecture or engineering. We believe that space has the ability to affect people in a deep rooted way. We want to move beyond thinking of experience as being at only a single touchpoint and instead think of the experience as existing between many different touchpoints. This means that the same content needs to be able to scale and transform to accommodate desired interactivity on many different platforms simultaneously. The future of content is all about having an amazing database that stores content and enables flexibility in the way it is experienced.

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Want to learn about what we did? Here is what the judges said:

Audioguide: Gold Award

This was a highly innovative product that effectively enhanced the visitor experience. By integrateing technology to replace labels, this device encourages and enables visitors to have a private and contemplative experience worthy of the subject matter. This is especially relevant for the particular collection objects that relate to extremely difficult and potentially upsetting content. Another good feature is the ability to sync to videos already playing near-by. It is highly appropriate to the content, with ability to hear stories direct from witnesses. A major attraction is that content is completely updateable via the CMS which enables it to be remain current in a sustainable way. The ability to track user behaviour, provide metrics and easily make changes based on user-data is another outstanding feature.

18 Camps Exhibit: Silver Award

… developed an engaging, emotional installation that allows visitors to experience the exhibition both as individuals and as a group. This is achieved with beautiful interface design and visual unity across heterogeneous physical devices. The various elements of the presentation convey a large amount of information: statistics, geographical, personal, and historical information in an uncluttered, effective way. This submission was exceptional for the unity of the presentation of its content, its design, and the degree to which it accomplishes its overall objective: a simple, smart and powerful presentation that brings all elements together brilliantly. There is clearly a technical achievement in the execution, but is made to look simple and easy, a mark of expertise.

The last year was awesome. We worked on a number of different projects ranging from strategy work and exhibit development in a new museum, to designing and developing a flagship interface for an upcoming social media startup. We also built a number of new websites, interaction models, physical prototypes and interaction concepts at a wide range of scales for many different clients.

At Variate Labs, we walk the line between digital and physical. Our clients range from Fortune 500 corporations and entrepreneurs to museums, designers, architects, interface developers, media companies and hardware manufacturers. We offer two different types of services to our clients.

1. We can work with a museum, pioneering company or entrepreneur see a project from concept to reality. We work with our clients directly to see our vision from beginning to end.

2. We can advise companies on both sides of the digital (agencies and designers) and physical (museums, architects, engineers and product designers) fence on how they can use the latest technologies to enhance their offering and workflow.

We have recently created a capabilities presentation that walks potential clients through the services we offer. You can download this document here: capabilities brochure

We want to work with you. Call or email us!

1. For this my editor has asked for me to write about ‘soft architecture’ and how cafes/stores/public spaces will be personalised in the future – in a similar way to the way the iPhone is the same for all (from a hardware perspective) but all are completely different and personalised (thanks to the software). Would you agree with this analogy? If so, can you say why, & if not, why not!

Yes, I think that spaces like shops, cafes and public spaces will continue to become more personalized through the use of technology and software. All of the interfaces that I have designed and developed over the past years have been about personalization or at least have a personal component. People want to feel a connection with content and the means by which they access content. The means or standards (touch motions, gestures, etc.) for interaction are becoming standardized through use but the way we visualize and consume information is still a very personal thing. I think that spaces like shops, cafes and public spaces will see the most change in the areas of visualization and the consumption of information. I think the next years will be about taking personalization off of our devices and empowering the space with our settings. Our mobile devices are extremely personalized and already employ many of our personal preferences for the way we individually interact with and consume content.

In the future, we could use these devices to empower architecture (hard architecture) to become intelligent with our settings. We are each carrying around a sophisticated key to seeing our world in our own personal way. In the near-term, as technology, specifically technology relating to visuals and sound, becomes more ubiquitous in our landscapes there will be more opportunity to control and personalize. Currently, most interaction in this area is still relegated to screens and monitors that are applied to architecture. In the next years, we will continue to do larger versions of what we are already doing. However, the future is more promising. In the future, this technology and means to interact will become more infused and embedded within architecture itself. Surfaces and objects will have the hardware and software that will allow them to become smarter and will also allow them to have some ability to be personalized. My company, Variate Labs, is working on projects like this right now. We are working on software that unites various platforms into a seamless experience. We are also working on robotic and physical hardware systems that can be embedded in architecture to offer new levels of interaction and personalization.

2. What examples have you worked on/seen that point the best way forward?

Over the past years, I have worked on developing interfaces for the Microsoft Surface table, in-store kiosks for Target and mobile interfaces for Sony and Samsung to name a few projects. In all cases personalization was a large component in the final designs. I have also worked on many other projects for web, tv, tablet, phone and car interface projects that have a large personalization component. Most of my projects are still under NDAs and sadly I can’t talk about them. So I will talk about some of the other projects I have seen. Personalization is still in its infancy but it is very much moving forward. I think future advancements in personalization will be largely centered around Visualization and Consumption. Once we get past the short-term, I think we will see advances in these areas.

Visualization

The built architecture around us is largely static and after it is built it usually remains the same design throughout its lifespan. Almost all of the star-architects produce projects like this. Even projects that claim to transform or change are still a far cry from actual transformation or personalization. Rem Koolhaas’ Prada Transformer hardly transforms, it is just a building that is lifted and rotated by a crane (http://prada-transformer.com/). All of this type of architecture intends to change people by making them experience things in a certain prescribed way. This is an old model and I believe does not need to be carried with us into the future. I think, in the future, people will be able to personalize their environments across many different scales based on their own personal tastes and desires. Some of the more simple ways would be to alter the way that information is shown in real-time based on proximity of a user. Our mobile devices could tell objects in our immediate vicinity that not only are we present but that we would like to see things in a certain way. We could affect the size and color of text in real-time. For example, a menu in a restaurant could be customized to make it easier for an individual to read, or visually put more emphasis on imagery then text or highlight specific items based on preference. Stores could work the same way. We could use color or text to show us objects or clothes in stores that we know we would like based on past purchases or user settings. Important and relevant information about specific objects could be shown adjacent to the objects themselves to give us a better understanding of their use, cost, durability or use (reviews from peers we trust). Imagine walking into Muji and seeing which of your friends bought what products or reading reviews from your friends or colleagues about each product just by looking at an object. It would also be interesting to see relationships between different products. Imagine finding a shirt you like and seeing information and visuals about other clothes that would look great with the shirt. This does not need to necessarily happen within a mirror in a dressing room. It would be an amazing experience to see these visualizations without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket or wear glasses or contact lenses. Our devices could tell our environment how we would like to see things.

Consumption

Right now, there are a number of really interesting projects that use augmented reality to allow a person to interpret and explore the landscape around them using their own personal settings. The Sekai Camera (http://www.tonchidot.com/) is a great example of how augmented reality can be personalized. There are many different augmented reality apps that layer information onto geography, people, billboards and products but almost none of them do it in a personalized way. The Tonchidot app allows a person to put in their own settings and the information that they see will be catered to their settings. It is like having your own personal interpreter or shopper with you at all times. If the app knows you are health conscious then it will highlight products that are healthy. Because it is using your settings, it knows about what you as a user like and shows relevant information that it knows you want to see.

Augmented reality promises to show some tangible realities of how we can use personalization the next years. Imagine using the Yelp augmented reality app but having the ability to filter the restaurants that are shown by your personal settings. A number of different companies are working on incorporating personal setting into their apps right now. I think augmented reality is going to show people how much personalization can affect experience and people are going to love it. The future of this personalization is going to be when we can produce the same kind of experience without looking inside of a camera or through augmented lenses. We will take personalization off of the screen and put it in our environments.

As I was talking about before, every interface project I work on has a personalization component in the final design. Consumers are starting to expect this inside of the software they buy and use. At this point, I would assume that everyone expects to be able to customize their mobile in some way, even it it means putting a different background image on a really old mobile. As the new generations of personalized software becomes available consumers will see the benefit and enjoy the simplicity of someone else doing all the work of filtering or screening what they see and how they see it. I think consumers will start to expect to see this in all of the software they use. The next step would be to take this personalization and start to present it on more of an open platform or public platform. I think this is where interactive architecture or smart networked architecture and design comes in.

There are some interesting issues that come up. I raise them, because I think you would find them to be very interesting. Most of the new ‘revolutionary’ interfaces have some sort of advertising model that pays for their use. Music applications are a perfect example, Pandora, Last.fm, Grooveshark etc use advertising to pay for most of their use. Advertising plays a large role in the development of software, design of software and even the final look and feel. Advertising is far from going away in the built environment and will likely become even more prominent. I think that we will need to be careful in the future to make sure that we can curb advertising or at least incorporate it in a tasteful way. I really like this student project (http://vodpod.com/watch/2939661-augmented-hyperreality-domestic-robocop-on-vimeo) but it makes me think that unless we are much more proactive about setting public standards we may end up with a very horrific form of the interactive advertising…way beyond Minority Report.

The technological development curve is exponential but I am not convinced the software and hardware will be readily accessible by 2020. There are still a number of different hurtles that will need to be overcome for ubiquitous personalization to take place. As I see it, advancements or at least changes will need to take place in a number of different areas. The most immediate areas include the development of universal software standards and increased privacy and individual control.

For a personalized public system to work a new universal open-source software standard would need to be created to connect our devices to the environment around us. The iPhone is so successful because it is a closed system. Apple is ruthless about setting standards for their products and while they work well when you use them with other Apple products they do not play well with other systems. A new type of universal software language or at least software standards will need to be created to allow for a multitude of devices to connect with the architecture around them. This system would need to be an open system that is not proprietary to an individual company.

Privacy and individual control is a huge issue now and will only become a bigger issue in the future. People became outraged when they realized how much of their personal information was being shared with outside sources. So much so that Facebook attempted to change the settings interface to give users more control of what is shared. They didn’t do a very good job but other companies are making progress in giving users more control of their own settings or at least making it appear as they are. In the future, for ubiquitous personalization to happen (or at least for people to allow their information to be shared) it will need to be easy for users to have control over what is shown and how it is shown. This could also vary depending on where you are. It might make sense for your home environment be more visually personal then in public stores and cafes. The amount of personalization could also vary depending on where you go; your trip to the bank may be less personal then when you visit a store or maybe exactly the opposite scenario is more appropriate. These scenarios are exciting and will need to be explored in the next years.

3. To make it easy for people to understand, I want to say that it’ll be similar to the way things are in Minority Report. Would you agree?

Minority Report is just one example (and an old played out version at that) and we have already created and are using most of the technologies shown in that movie in our built environment. We can control our media with gestures without even using gloves (Primesense and XBox Kinect) and we already have technology that allows for sound to travel in a very specific direction (http://www.explainthatstuff.com/directional-loudspeakers.html). 3d TVs have already hit the mainstream market (http://www.3dtvmanufacturers.com/) and we already have augmented reality devices (see above). We can already control interfaces with our minds (http://www.emotiv.com/). We have already moved beyond Minority Report. I think your article is coming at a great time. Personalization is definitely the next wave of experience. I would say the last Iron Man movie would be a better example if you want to use something contemporary. The interface that he has to design his suits and technology is ubiquitous and personalised. He can move personalized information freely from any surface and affect other information. Real-time tangible gestures control 3d imagery. The interfaces in the last 007 movie and Star Trek also worked the same way, seamless and ubiquitous.

4. What have I missed? What’s the aspect of interactive architecture that I’m missing – especially with regard to personalised experience?

The more ubiquitous the control and manifestation the better the experience. The more all platforms feel like one cohesive whole the better the experience. It is very important that the way we see information and experience information is as seamless as possible.

After months of searching, delays, false starts and snags with the building department, we are excited to announce that we are opening our new studio space! We’ve put in a ton of work into the new space, and we’re very excited to start showing it to our friends and clients. In the past week the plumbing and cabinetry has been installed, exterior and interior painting has been done, heating and air conditioning installed, and the furniture assembled. We even passed the City plumbing inspection – we’re going legit! Now we have to get the alarm and wireless internet hooked up before we’re fully in business on Beverly Blvd. Can’t wait!

The new address is:

Variate Labs, LLC
8451 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Look us up on the contact page!