Associate Professor Matthias Haeusler

Haeusler’s has major research achievements in Media Architecture, Responsive Environments, Smart and Ubiquitous Cities and Responsive Transport Environments. In his six years as academic, as part of his postdoctoral work and research as Lecturer at UTS and Senior Lecturer at UNSW, his research was centered on three discrete fields of knowledge that have been developed out of observations and involvement in academia and industry based research projects. These three knowledge domains are:

• Media Architecture and Media Facades (I).
• Augmenting Media Facades through embedding digital technology / ICT into a buildings façade (II).
• Testing the effect of (I, II) on the case study of public transport.

Within these domains his research is applied in two main fields – first, responsive environments with media architecture and media facades in the center of the domain and second, smart and ubiquitous cities with embedding digital technologies into the built environment. Both fields are researched, tested, evaluated and discussed in the context of public transport to make it responsive transport. In the following the three knowledge domains are further discussed and research and publications in the domains listed.

Knowledge domain (I) Media architecture and media façade have been the starting point of Haeusler’s research. At the start of his academic career in late 2008 no scholar has discussed the field of media architecture through the lens of architectural design and with an architectural focus towards designing a media façade. Thus one could argue that through Haeusler’s work, he could address this gap and has contributed here to three main domains:

• Foundation knowledge in the filed
• Expanding the field through conceptualising new forms and techniques
• Developing and testing new prototypes.

Media Architecture is the foundation of Haeusler’s research, a unique field in which he had major contributions in establishing the field by publishing the first academic publication ‘Media Facades – History, Technology, Content’ (avedition, 2009) that has been sold over 1700 times and is cited 56 times. Haeusler was also involved in establishing the Media Architecture Institute, first as a speaker and presenter in early summits and conferences in London 2007, Berlin 2008, Vienna 2010 and since 2011 board member and from 2012 to 2014 President of the organisation. The second book on media facades ‘New Media Facades – A Global Survey’ (avedition, 2012) is as well part of establishing foundation knowledge. He expanded the field further through conceptualising new forms as discussed in ‘Chromatophoric Architecture’ (Jovis, 2010). Lastly, his research during his employment at UNSW included several creative outputs where Haeusler tested under a design research methodology various forms of non-standard or complex curved screens, which have been presented to the public via exhibitions in Sydney, Frankfurt (Germany), and Aarhus (Denmark).

Knowledge domain (II) Augmenting Media Facades through embedding digital technology (ICT technology) into a buildings façade. The second main domain responsive environments and smart and ubiquitous cities have its roots in media architecture. Media architecture till the later 2000s was primarily a giant screen on a building facade. Here researchers and designers been occupied with enabling large screens on buildings and studying their impact onto architecture and urban design. With the rise of the smart phone and the cheap availability of sensors and open source programming language the notion of a media façade being just a screen changed to an understanding of a building being equal to a smart phone. Consequently Haeusler’s research shifted to embedding not only LEDs into a build skin but also sensors and transforming media facades into a hubs that could collect data as well as display information. In the following his work has been centred two discrete questions:

• Developing an autonomous sensing and communicating system (prototype)
• Initialising a thinking and theory to define the field and to further knowledge.

The development of the ‘Polymedia Pixel’ was the centrepiece of generating an autonomous sensing and communicating system. The work was discussed in three conference papers and the book chapter ‘Autonomous Pixel’ (2009), From 2011 onwards the research here shifted from investigating a purely technical domain towards initialising a thinking and theory to define the field and to further knowledge. This has been communicated via the book chapter Media Facades – Quo Vadis? (2012) as well as two journal articles.

Knowledge domain (II) Testing the effect of (I, II) on the case study of public transport. As mentioned earlier both domains are researched, tested, evaluated and discussed in the context of public transport. This is reflected in Haeusler’s publications where seven publications since his employment at UNSW are focused on ‘responsive transport’ The main argument the research makes is that is either expensive, politically difficult or time consuming to building new train lines, bus routes or similar. Research has argued that public transport systems can be as well be improved through better transport passenger information. This is where Haeusler’s research tackles the problem. Passenger information can be provided via retrofitting systems with sensors, screens, computing components and ICT technologies that collect data within the public transport system, use the data to generate information about the system and feed them back to passengers via personal screens (smart phones) or public screens (media facades) to create better knowledge to make informed travel decisions. The findings of this investigation where communicated via the book ‘Infostructure – A transport research project’, (Freerange Press, 2012) and an edited book ‘Interchanging – Future Scenarios for Responsive Transport Infrastructure Design’ (Spurbuch, 2014) as well as four conference papers.

The main question now is understand how to enable a system where a loop between gaining information and displaying information could be automated to a point where the system could self generate content.