The project

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Corderie dell'Arsenale is curated by Carlo Ratti and designed by sub, under the leadership of Niklas Bildstein Zaar. The exhibition is organized according to three intelligences—Natural, Artificial, and Collective—but it’s how visitors experienced the projects that unlocks a fourth.

The experience of the mobile application at intelligens.labiennale.org begins with a simple photo of the exhibition. Using computer vision, Spatial Intelligens recognizes what is being seen, where it is in space, and what that means within the broader curatorial frame. From there, you enter into dialogue with a conversational AI trained on the full depth of the exhibition.

As the exhibition looks back, your visit is unlocks in multiple dimensions—mapping how you relate to space, the projects that you have visited and revealing how your pathway overlaps, diverges, or uniquely expresses your interests relative to the anonymized pathways of previous visitors.

Our Role

A truism of architecture is that we shape our spaces and thereafter they shape us. Our research focused on how AI could mediate and guide this dialogue, so that visitors could learn about the space and themselves simultaneously.

Drawing from the psychology of learning and primal world beliefs, we informed the design of a novel AI interface that infers personality and disposition based on how visitors navigate the exhibition, what they take interest in and why.

These insights about the visitor are expressed in four dimensions of a unique profile:

Curiosity Type (Precise ←→ Broad)
Energy Mode (Calm ←→ Intense)
Mental Style (Analytical ←→ Intuitive)
Inquiring Attitude (Critical ←→ Appreciative)