The visual is not taken as merely contemplative and experience is not taken as merely active, they work in a dialectic relation, enriching each other, avoiding a contemplative finished product and promoting a seductive and enduring interaction of people with each other and with the space.
Published in Chapter:
Dialogue With Interfaces: Beyond the Visual Towards Socio-Spatial Engagement
Ana Paula Baltazar dos Santos (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), Guilherme Ferreira de Arruda (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil), José dos Santos Cabral Filho (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), Lorena Melgaço Silva Marques (University of Birmingham, UK), and Marcela Alves de Almeida (Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-7371-5.ch006
Abstract
This chapter grapples with the hegemony of the visual and its pervasiveness in current urban installations. It discusses how technology and the visual are fetishized instead of used in their dialogical potential to engage people in socio-spatial transformation. This chapter presents the trajectory of the Graphics Laboratory for Architectural Experience at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (LAGEAR) in its theoretical and practical development. This chapter then discusses LAGEAR's main drives, which are the playful interaction, the distinction between interface, and interaction and dialogue, in order to create interactive interfaces that actually engage people in socio-spatial transformation. It presents examples of the authors' works, drawing from visually based to bodily engaging and socio-political installations. Discussion concerns the problematization that leads to the need of engagement rather than the bodily engagement. Emphasis was put on working with the socio-spatial context and proposing interfaces that take into account the process in its openness and indeterminacy instead of prescribing a product (even if an interface-product).