Digitalstructures - by Wendy W Fok (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future engages with digital property and data infrastructures, and explores new modes and impacts of data collection affecting architecture and urban infrastructure.

Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these "supplies". There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources.

Using a mixed-media approach, this book couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into several parts of the book. To prolong the shelf-life of emergent data and case-studies on the topic, the book is complemented with an open-access digital platform for readers to access video interviews with the industry experts, diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and 3D artifacts that shows how data interacts with phygital properties.

Authored by Wendy W Fok, who has been researching and writing on the topic for over a decade, this book includes a foreword by Jesse Reiser and Julian Harake; interviews with and contributions by Greg Lynn, Saskia Sassen, Minerva Tantoco, Lydia Kallipoliti, Michael Young and Kutan Ayata, Andrew Witt, Amber Bartosh, Mik Nayeem, with an ongoing list of interactive interviews.

Review Quotes

"DigitalSTRUCTURES by Dr. Wendy Fok makes a compelling scholarly case that digital properties and structures possess both conceptual and physical weight. The book is beautifully clear, and Dr. Fok admirably elucidates intangible concepts through rigorous research explained in accessible terms. As an architect working with AI and digital tools, I found the chapter on Ownership and Authorship especially insightful."--Robert Cha, author of AI Sapien

"This interactive read interrogates the relationships between urban spaces and digital structures, examining everything from supply chains to civic planning. Author Wendy W. Fok weaves prose together with mixed-reality, augmented-reality, and cartography, exploring how data interacts with physical and virtual environments." --Architect Magazine