To get a sense of the mood in Microsoft’s Research Building 99, just take a look at "Ada." Named for the polymath and programming visionary Ada Lovelace, the two-story tall architectural pavilion suspended in the atrium, at the tech company's campus headquarters in Redmond, Wash., emanates a rainbow of colors based on the sentiment data—facial expressions, voice tone, and gestures—of occupants captured via the building's existing network of cameras.
Created in a collaboration between architectural designer Jenny Sabin and Microsoft researchers as part of the company’s artist-in-residence program, the knitted dome of photoluminescent fibers is the first pavilion of its kind to incorporate artificial intelligence, according to Sabin. As one of Microsoft's resident artists, Sabin began working on Ada last spring, hoping to develop a project that would spark conversations around AI, a topic that many in the design community still hold at arm’s length.
“We were interested in how the project could facilitate conversations around AI [and] make it human-centered," Sabin says. "[We wanted to] shift some of the viewpoints or perspectives around artificial intelligence—which sometimes are a bit dystopic, fearful, worried in terms of how it might affect humans—to something that is much more about celebrating AI and [the fact that] it's driven by humans.”
Sabin honed in on the idea of human emotion with Microsoft’s sentiment researchers, focusing on the interplay between an individual’s environment and mood. She developed a structure to embody this relationship within the atrium's space constraints, crafting a cellularlike, textile structure—a symbolic heart for the research hub.
In April, Sabin began constructing Ada, working in her eponymous Ithaca, N.Y.–based studio to develop a bespoke exoskeleton from 1000 fiberglass rods connected by 3D printed nylon nodes, each one unique. Then, using a custom fiber-optic thread that Sabin had developed and featured in previous projects, she deployed robotics to digitally knit a second skin for Ada, spending six weeks perfecting the structure. After completing the fabric skin and framework components, Sabin and her team carefully transported them across the country to Building 99. They then manually attached the fabric skin to the structure, a process that took weeks before reaching completion earlier this month.
With Ada up and running, responding in real time to the facial expressions captured through the building's camera network, Sabin believes “a world of possibilities” exists for additional data sets that could feed into the pavilion, such as soundscapes or crowd size. Moreover, she hopes that Ada will reframe the conversation about AI in architecture, and illustrate that architectural materials are more than "elements and things in our buildings," but also "immersive and transformative." Intelligence embedded within the architecture of schools or hospitals could, for example, result in structures that self-transform based on comfort or need.
“I'm interested in what it means to personalize spaces, to have agency ... to look at architecture, space, and materiality as something that can provide transparency,” Sabin says. “[T]here's a lot of concerns around data—personal data—and how it's being used. I'm excited to think about these technologies in terms of how they engage with our spaces.”
"Ada" is now on display in Microsoft's Building 99, where it is expected to remain for an indefinite period of time.
The Jenny Sabin Studio team includes Jenny E. Sabin, architectural designer and artist; Dillon Pranger, project manager; John Hilla, Jeremy Bilotti, and William Qian, design, production, installation. The Microsoft research team includes Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director; Shabnam Erfani, director of special projects; Asta Roseway, principal research designer/fusionist; Wende Copfer, principal design director; Jonathan Lester, principal electrical engineer; Daniel McDuff, principal researcher; and Mira Lane, partner director/ethics.
