Revisiting Equipotential Space

(Revisiting) Equipotential Space: Freedom in (Digital) Architecture

Cover of Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture, Renato Severino, Praeger, 1970

Overview

In 1970, architect Renato Severino published Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture, arguing that future spaces needed total flexibility to accommodate rapid socio-technological changes. The concept he championed to achieve this is "equipotential space." He believed that fixed structures constrain freedom; that traditional, rigid architecture locks society into outdated political and social configurations; that industrial technology must serve the user, with mass production and prefabricated components used to build adaptable, ever-changing modular environments rather than permanent, static monuments; and that every point in a space should have equal potential, so that instead of prescribing specialized, single-use rooms, architecture provides an open infrastructure where any activity can happen anywhere, shifting seamlessly based on human needs.

When Severino said that future spaces needed flexibility, continuity, and articulation, digital spaces were just beginning. Presently, digital spaces are flexible in meaning, continuously carrying inhabitants and users from one region to another, and articulate themselves through others and their environments.

The determining characteristics of equipotential space are continuity, flexibility, and articulation. Instead of being planned for a few specific purposes, equipotential space can be modulated at will for any purpose.

In developing a new approach to deal with the problems described, we must clearly articulate a concept and begin applying and refining it on the level of the mass society.

This concept is Equipotential Space. Spatial formulations in current usage proceed from a definition of space as a value and are concerned with its geometrical characteristics.

Instead, the definition could be extended to cover changing patterns of relationships. The matrix in which these relationships exist can be called Equipotential Space.

The determining characteristics of Equipotential Space are continuity, flexibility and articulation. Instead of space planned for a few specific purposes, Equipotential Space can be modulated at will for any purpose.

A Japanese camera or a German car, Severino writes, can function all over the world, regardless of local social, political, or economic conditions. The same airplanes regularly serve all countries. Penicillin is equally useful for combating infections in India, Africa, and China, as well as in Europe. In these instances, a certain task has to be performed, a certain standard or result has been expected, and techniques and equipment have been developed to provide widely acceptable responses. These responses are products of technology. They begin with the assumption that all peoples of the world share sameness, regardless of any local or historical factors.

Constructions of architectural space during this era from several authors attempt to create modular futuristic spaces as they conceive of technological effects on space. Some of these spaces began to resemble spaceships, or pods: interlocking places suited either to a small number of occupants or to many.

The issue here is that the future architectural spaces are not analog spaces. They are digital ones, and it is these digital spaces that are modular and resemble spaceships, protecting us from the liminality and harshness of the outer space that is the Internet, a vast interconnected architecture accessible only through interfaces. The architecture of those interfaces is no longer being constructed by traditional architects, but rather by programmers, interaction designers, software architects, salespeople, and even those who inhabit the space.

In this way, Twitter functions as an equipotential space, in that it can be modulated at will for any purpose, often more powerfully or far-reachingly than analog space, because it has empty containers, constraints, places for meaning, hypertextual capabilities, and broadcasting capabilities.

Frame Components and Function Objects

Severino developed the terms "frame units" and "function units" to describe activity volume and functional capabilities. On Twitter, we can define both frame units and function units, the function being the buttons pressed, and the frame units being what constrains the data to predictable flows and familiar structures.

When the activity value is defined by the frame components and the basic supplying functions are supplied by function objects, the flexibility inherent in Equipotential Space is achieved.

Twitter works well because function objects and frame components are in balance. What occurs when the function objects outweigh the frame components?

In 2007, users began to see a glut of applications available to them on Facebook. These apps increasingly flooded their ability to interact with the interface, because they buried all real communication with repeated requests for user attention. The crisis lasted for some time before Facebook compressed the requests and hid them behind a dialog box.

When too many apps entered the ecosystem, the frame components became strained because they had not been structured to withstand such force. In order to keep the system from collapsing under an almost cancerous bloat of function objects, the frame components had to be restructured.

In short, the architecture of the system had to be altered.

The Facebook team rebalanced the ratio of function objects to frame components by compressing like actions into like categories. Many function objects were grouped into few, and thus became manageable once more. Facebook's ratio of frame components, its system architectural boundaries, to its function objects was once again restored.

Consider the converse case. What happens when frame components outweigh function objects? In the case of traditional networks, too many frame components can take the shape of heavy information architectures. This results in systems with excessive clicks to get to data, or information buried behind many walls, compartmentalized and difficult to understand.

This is also the case with web systems built entirely on empty social networking structures. A user enters a system, and after setting up a lengthy string of social input, realizes that there is no data to act on and nothing to do in the system. These systems usually fail because of this.

What are some examples of systems that have excellent function object to frame component ratios? Flickr is one. It allows simple user upload, streamlined function objects, and an extremely lightweight set of frame components. This allows the user data in the system to have extreme prominence, and that user data has very transparent boundaries around it. Relations are clearly defined: tags, categories, sets, groups, descriptions, titles, copyrights, owners, and contributors are all clearly defined and clickable. Metadata is easily added to, and tags are easily created.

The frame components in Flickr are the function objects.

From this, we can surmise that, in an architectural system, the delineation between frame components and function objects has an impact on the usability and transparency of that system.

The only major difference among these function objects is their scale relative to the number of people who will use each simultaneously.

Basically, there are two scales: those where functions are performed by no more than two or three people at the same time, and those in which many more people must be provided for.

On Flickr, there are function objects specifically intended for use by many people and those intended for use by only a few. Additionally, spaces, meaning frame components, are created by permission boundaries for friends and family, as well as "only viewable by me" and the public.

These delineations of volume change the number of function objects and the scale and interchange rules of frame components.

Compactness, an intrinsic characteristic of function objects, facilitates mobility and efficiency.

Set Theory of Spaces

The set of all things, with category as a subset, the image as a subset of category, and individual comments as a subset of an image. Profile as a subset of comments, images as a subset of profiles.

The online space is the most flexible form of space because it may be rewritten. It may be divided according to how one divides things in an auditorium. It is a shape of space characterized by its capability to be used for one of the largest varieties of needs. This permutational quality in the offline area holds only a fraction of the ability compared to an online space's capability to be repurposed. An efficient space has a theme or purpose. The rest is left empty.

FriendFeed gathers content feeds and social streams from different services and formats them in a consumable fashion. A non-fluid space is static and solid, and it cannot be easily changed or spread by the user.

Equipotential Space offers the possibility of real freedom. This is not freedom just to be different, but freedom to participate as fully as possible, given social, economic and technical reality.

The most successful online sites have shown us a full realization of Severino's equipotential space. It is freedom to shape responsive solutions to immediate needs, and when these needs change, to have a new solution.

The relative availability of options is a measure of the control man can exercise over his environment and therefore a measure of his relative freedom.

In equipotential space, this sort of freedom can be available from the personal and familial levels all the way through to the sociopolitical level, political elections, and Twitter, through the flexibility in shaping the space and controlling the environment.

Use Studies

Severino proposes a real-life experiment similar to one we might see used in companies today to determine analytic use of internal company resources: a test for understanding what the efficiencies are. It would then be interesting to hypothesize the same events occupying the same time spans and relationships in equipotential space, and to calculate the total value required as a percentage of present supposed needs.

As an exercise, it would be interesting to take an existing unit, such as a large urban university, that included almost all types of social activities on all varieties of scale, and conduct a use-study of all the separate inflexibly defined spaces now existing, to find out what percentage of the time each space was being used. Even with a finite, limited number of components within each subsystem, Equipotential Space can provide almost any variety of relationships, for example space, required at any time.

In the online perspective this would be equivalent to testing the space to determine wasted function objects and frame components.

If only we applied this process to our lived spaces now. We can, with the use of stop motion, time lapse, and cameras, or with the ethnographic queries of a seasoned anthropologist. But we can most easily do this on websites. Any company that is not doing this is missing the opportunity to understand which parts of their virtual architectures are useless to their users.

Equipotential Space develops a time dimension by relating objects in a volume over a period of time as needs change.

In this way, digital spaces also morph in volume over time. Time creates space, and volume is created by use. Time can also streamline space.

Source

Severino, Renato. Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture. New York and London: Praeger Publishers, 1970.