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Our Crafting the Future Conference (hashtag #AIAcraft) comprised of two parts. Part I included a 2 ½ days in Tokyo - Conference of AIA Northwest & Pacific Region (NWPR), hosted by AIA Japan. Part II included the AIA Committee on Design travel trip to Nagoya + Takayama + Kanazawa, Japan. A common thread through the trip was support from the AIA to allow knowledge scholars to help bring the experience of the #AIAcraft to broader audiences. One of the first uses of technology helping to create synchronous shared communications is when Carmeron Sinclair with Architecture for Humanity videoconferenced into the underground Super Deluxe space on Monday, November 14, 2011. This Roppongi district event space held some of the first Pecha Kucha’s. Pecha Kucha’s are a high energy presentation of 20 slides in 20 seconds; a format invented in Japan, by architects, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham. Other presenters for the Pecha Kucha included student design award winners, AIA Japan architects, and the AIA Knowledge Scholars. Jeremy Altman, one of the Knowledge Scholars, presented architectural and cultural details of a typical Japanese residential neighborhood in Sakata Japan. I presented on the idea of “technological craft and materiality” where one could separate presentation, structure and logic. We as architects, design sets of instructions for the built environment that captures spaces and presents forms to provide the framework for functions, people, and living. “Roaming” through Japan, and experimenting with the material constraints on creating shared technological spaces, below are some digital experiences that were woven throughout Tokyo and Japan.

Knowing - where are we at. Geolocation.
Our smartphones, laptops, and tablets know where we’re at. By indicating our latitude and longitude, we connect with one another while traveling through Japan. We conserved our resources of time and bandwidth to post information feeds to multiple platforms by understanding the materiality of our social platforms. A friendly competition sparked among the AIA Foursquare travellers to see who could upload the most interesting photos or tip. We collected and curated our trip so we can make sense of where we travelled and share our maps with other people. By using Foursquare we also added to the credibility of AIA National 4,000+ Foursquare followers. Now others that travel to Japan can also follow our AIA Crafting the Future journey.

Twitter - finding common interests? Collaboration.
Foreign travel makes publishing data a scarce resource. Versed travelers bought foreign data plans that allowed ~250 MB worth of data for a few hundred dollars. A wireless internet connection was also hard to find throughout Japan. However, we were still able to create an online spaces for architects or architecture enthusiasts to connect and have side conversations about our AIA Japan experiences. Here is an image of a timeline that shows some of the conversations with one another. One twitter architect from Japan, Juan P. Ordonez Q, would send hints of details to look at as we checked into various building locations around Japan.