Abstraction language: Digital/ analog dialogues

Abstract

The connection between biological systems and machines is quickly becoming an important factor in designing the built environment. Sustainable power generation, water management, ecological infrastructures, and other nascent enviro-tech applications require negotiations between digital technologies and analog systems. This paper explores the model of abstraction languages as a method to create communications between biological and mechanical systems, focusing on modes accessible to design professionals. Developing a mediating language based on abstraction creates an approach that addresses simultaneous issues in enviro-tech interfaces for sensing, responsiveness, automation, and interactivity. This language exists in a liminal realm between mechanical or digital devices and biological or ecological systems. Abstraction addresses simultaneous modes of complexity through a common dialogue. This comes in multiple forms, from a library for design to a logical interface between chaotic components. This lends itself to the development of methods of abstraction, taking infinitely complex organisms and finding threads to abstract information meaningfully. The development of data and control abstraction in programming is explored in order to develop linkages between physical systems and digital interfaces. This examination looks at current methods of data conveyance for the built environment, and at pushing beyond these current methods to suggest a method of abstraction. The researchers are particularly interested in the ability of abstraction to compress ecological/biological complexity into accessible modules for responsive environments. These modules would be developed to create evolving systems to control, modify, link, or interpret ecologies, biologies, cultures, and societies.