Intelligent stairs - can it be done?

Intelligent stairs - can it be done?

Yesterday I wrote about local intelligence and the possibilities doors have in this respect. Today, reading yesterday's note, my mind turned to stairs - another building element that fascinates me. Why do I expect intelligence from doors and not from stairs? Why do I assume that stairs are to remain passive or even unyielding? Is it just that I'm used to dynamic behaviour in doors? There are automatic stairs, too; escalators that detect that someone is approaching and start rolling. Why does this impress me less than a door automatically opening to admit authorised persons on a biometric basis? Could it be so that I see stairs as a danger, something to be feared and treated with caution - and for that reason prefer them to be passive? 

It could be because intelligence in stairs may be far more demanding than in doors. Automatically adjusting the stair dimensions to the size and mobility of every user would certainly impress me but it wouldn't be easy to achieve, even if it were about a single user at a time. Stairs that could accommodate several users simultaneously in this manner would be a feat worthy of the highest praise for its ingenuity but, as societal or technological priorities go, not of the same order as a cure for any persistent illness. So, I fear that stairs are to remain relatively unintelligent, passive and a bit menacing - beautiful but rather dangerous. 

What every door should know about itself

What every door should know about itself

Doors have a fascinating duality. Open they become space, part of the 'voids' of architecture: a hole that connects two spaces. Closed they are 'solids': building elements that separate the two spaces. Their interactionwieh humans can be complex, allowing first of all change between the two states of open and closed, as well as recognisable variation in between: ajar, half open, half closed - many recognisable states, often with specific maning.

This duality and interaction makes doors critical for the behaviour and performance of a building. It also makes them prime candidates for intelligent behaviour of the kind that delights me: local, practical, modest. Such intelligence can be observed both n real life, with automatically opening doors and similarly smart recognition of the user, and in design representations, with doors sticking to their walls or otherwise becoming attuned to their context.

What delights me above all is that such intelligence, certainly in a design representation, can be made possible by collecting all constraints on a door and using them to determine the behaviour of the door symbol. It's an interesting perspective: when the door knows enough about itself, it can become intelligent.

Walls

Walls 

There are some things that rarely escape the background. Walls fall under this category. They are important only when we build them. Afterwards they become just limits of spaces and surfaces that accommodate decorations and the like. We expect a lot of them, from supporting our own weight when we lean on them to grasping onto screws and nails that lift even more weight. Indoors they determine our horizons; outdoors they shape streets and squares. Still, they are largely treated as immaterial entities; only their surface textures are apparent to us.

One often reads of intelligent objects, e.g. intelligent behaviours of object symbols in digital representations. It's a fascinating subject and I firmly believe that we can do much with such intelligence. The only problem is that I don't see it as applicable to walls, not because walls require no intelligence but because they don't seem like objects to me. Especially when I look at them in floor plans, all I see is a complex, often ad hoc network with fuzzy subdivisions. More than an object it looks to me like an amorphous substance that fills in the gaps, covering and protecting the rest. Such as substance requires a different kind of intelligence to the anthropomorphic one we take for granted.