Autonomy and the socialisation of architects

The socio-cultural production of architects' identities, and their professional personas, is a lively source of continuing debate. At one extreme, there is the claim to autonomy that highlights the distinctiveness of architecture and its cultural and disciplinary specificity. This view is challenged by those who emphasise architects' dependence, for acting and actions, on their embeddedness into collective, social, settings and relationships. In the paper, we consider what it may mean to be ‘autonomous of’ and ‘dependent on’ in relation to the actions of architects. There is limited specification in architectural writings about what autonomy and dependence are, and we suggest that there is a need not to discount such terms, but to reformulate them by recognising that the socially constructed self is an integral part of individual action. In this respect, we seek to amplify, and evaluate, the concept of relational autonomy that distances the notion of autonomy from individualistic, under-socialised, accounts of architects and their practices. Referring to three empirical examples of practice, we amplify this understanding by, first, outlining what a relational autonomous approach to architecture might entail, and, secondly, assessing how far it may enable a conception of the practices of architects in ways whereby, following Tony Fry's observations, they are conceived as much broader than ‘the specificity of any particular activity’ that expresses their existence.

Situation assessment through multi-modal sensing of dynamic environments to support cognitive robot control

Awareness of emerging situations in a dynamic operational environment of a robotic assistive device is an essential capability of such a cognitive system, based on its effective and efficient assessment of the prevailing situation. This allows the system to interact with the environment in a sensible (semi)autonomous / pro-active manner without the need for frequent interventions from a supervisor. In this paper, we report a novel generic Situation Assessment Architecture for robotic systems directly assisting humans as developed in the CORBYS project. This paper presents the overall architecture for situation assessment and its application in proof-of-concept Demonstrators as developed and validated within the CORBYS project. These include a robotic human follower and a mobile gait rehabilitation robotic system. We present an overview of the structure and functionality of the Situation Assessment Architecture for robotic systems with results and observations as collected from initial validation on the two CORBYS Demonstrators.