The Enactive Environments Lab explores notions of agency, materiality and interactivity, from practical and theoretical perspective. We are interested in kinds of activities and relations emerging when creating or experiencing active materials of both inorganic and organic nature. Their dynamic properties allow us to design and to think form, behaviour and interaction as one rather than as a sum of separates. We put to the fore the experiences fostered by active materials, construct and explore responsive ecologies and environments that incorporate lightness, adaptability and aliveness.
The Enactive Environments Lab explores notions of agency, materiality and interactivity, from practical and theoretical perspective. We are interested in kinds of activities and relations emerging when creating with or experiencing so-called responsive or active materials. By physically engaging with them, we experiment on the threshold between analog and digital materials, tools and methods. The dynamic properties of such materials allow us to design and to think form, behaviour and interaction as one rather than as a sum of separates. We put to the fore the experiences fostered by such materials, construct and explore responsive ecologies and environments that incorporate lightness, adaptability and aliveness.
We call such environments enactive in order to reflect the direct exploration of matter during a creative research process, as well as the exploratory interaction of inhabitants of such spaces. Enactive stands for an embodied and situated type of knowledge that is engaged in both tacit creative processes and physical interaction with our surroundings. Thus, it relates both to the creative hands-on processes and the experience of the user. Theories of enactive cognition show that the world helps guide or modulate action that, in turn, continuously results in the body realigning and remaking that world. Thus, by shaping our environment, architects, designers and artists affect the way in which we explore, learn, experience and interact with things, spaces and people.