Ambient Experience by Philips focuses on the values and needs of both patients and medical staff, addressing the total experience of the environment. They integrate architecture and technology (e.g. lighting, sound, vision, RFID) to create spaces that the patient can personalize, wrapping the patient in a relaxing ambience. This puts patients at ease and so it helps calming during  the procedures.

Researchers at the Human Media Laboratory, Queen’s University in Canada are developing prototypes of new “non-planar” devices, which are virtually computers that have a flexible shape. Computers are nifty, but too bulky to be carried around. Even a laptop is too big to put in your pocket, but imagine if your computer looked and worked like a magazine or a piece of paper to be tucked away into your pockets. Not only will they take on flexible forms we’ve never imagined – like pop cans with browsers displaying RSS feeds and movie trailers – computers of the future will respond to our direct touch and even change their own shape to better accommodate data. ”We want to reduce the computer’s stranglehold on cognitive processing by imbedding it and making it work more and more like the natural environment,” says Dr. Vertegaal  -Im thinking about the possibilities this can have on an architectural scale.

DJ Spooky/Paul D. Miller’s next large scale multimedia performance work will be an acoustic portrait of a rapidly changing continent. The Antarctic Suite transforms Miller’s first person encounter with the harsh, dynamic landscape into multimedia portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass. Miller’s field recordings from a portable studio, set up to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms, reflect a changing and even vanishing environment under duress. Coupled with visual material from Getty Images’ vast collection, The Antarctic Suite is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.

Project Page with a great explanatory video.

“The Sound of Melting Ice” on NPR