Mark your calendar for the upcoming ACADIA 2013: Adaptive Architecture conference that will be held at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada on Oct. 24-26.

Now in its 36th year, the international conference will present an array of current research and creative design happening in the ACADIA community, an international group of digital designers and researchers dedicated to supporting critical research in computational design. — bustler.net

Given current growth trends, the world's population is expected to reach 9 billion people by midcentury. That also means a quadrupling in the number of cars to 4 billion by 2050 -- and that, said Ford, is a recipe for global gridlock that he argues will become "a human rights issue, not just an inconvenience."

For Ford [...] the only answer is to create a future where pedestrians, bicycles, and cars become part of a connected network. — CNET

Arki is an Augmented Reality platform for real-time visualisation of architectural models. By incorporating AR technology within the architectural design process, ARki is able to visualise 3d models for both design and presentation purposes, helping to create an immersive visualisation technique with multiple layers of interactivity. ARki can be deployed on any ios/ android device which allows the user to explore 3d data with an added level of navigational freedom. — darfdesign.com

The breakthrough not only allows an object made up of many different materials to be printed, but also lets the user change the look and feel of a single material used to print an object. It's possible to print an object with hard and compressible sections out of a single material, even if the raw material isn't flexible in itself. — Gizmag

Elon Musk's Hyperloop announcement resulted in quite a bit of skepticism. We'd like to think that has less to do with the feasibility of Musk's concept and more to do with the massive mass transit failures of the past.

And there have been some doozies. — wired.com

How do you fancy living in a city with which you can interact? A city that acts more like a living organism, a city that can respond to your needs. [...]

But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?

And is it a future we even want? — bbc.co.uk

Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages. — technologyreview.com

What 4D printing offers is the opportunity for objects to change, to adapt to their environment, to respond.

Earlier this year, Skylar Tibbits, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Self-Assembly Lab, created a bit of a stir with his talk on 4D printing.

“We are looking at the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter,” Mr. Tibbits told the TED conference in February. — blogs.wsj.com

“I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning.

He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well. — forbes.com

As a revealing new exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture shows, ambivalence about digital architecture was characteristic of most of the architects who pioneered it, including Peter Eisenman, Chuck Hoberman and Shoei Yoh. “The computer has become an opportunistic gadget for most of the profession,” Gehry tells the architect-cum-curator Greg Lynn in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. — forbes.com

Trade organizations and builders of all stripes joined in the call for a tamping down of public expectations — especially those that might get cut out of the new modern style of construction. You see, plastic and glass and steel were the future. And since wood wasn't exactly presented as the building material of tomorrow, organizations like the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau were happy to contribute by advising the industry to tone it down... — paleofuture.gizmodo.com

This is the future!

And it is, in some respects — it’s going to open so many things up in the world. But that doesn’t mean to say that you will do it yourself or that it will decentralize manufacturing, like the hype seems to suggest.

So, no revolution?

The main issue lies with raised expectations, build quality, price and usability. So here we go, my list of reasons 3D printing isn’t all you think it’s cracked up to be. — gizmodo.com

The August Smart Lock is the secure, simple, and social way to manage your home’s lock. Now you can control who can enter and who can’t—without the need for keys or codes. And you can do it all from your smartphone or computer. — august.com