Introduction

摘要

4dspace investigates the reality that the perceptual boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds have been broken, and asks how architecture and its tasks can creatively adopt a fourth dimension, that of digital technologies. Their time-based nature is increasingly producing sociospatial effects that challenge architecture's traditional identity. Meanwhile, the strategies the designers and architects featured in this issue have made their chosen domain of activity seek to constitute a new threshold between the virtual and the physical. What's clear is that, independent of architecture, this fourth dimension is already inexorably transforming the previously understood identity of space, as a penumbra of new technologies - WiFi and other features of pervasive computing like Bluetooth, RFID tags and GPS - support the spatialisation of time. After a decade or more of the Internet being regarded as an alternative world, now virtual networks are generally perceived as an enhancement to the multidimensionality of the real world. 'Multi-mediated' interactive design is already entering every domain of public and private life as a spatial medium, revolutionising and reinventing our work, leisure and domestic spaces. Social contexts are dominated by the blurring of boundaries between work and play, information retrieval and use. However, as Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground, published in 2004, points out, pervasive technology does not obviate the human need for place.