LightBricks: a physical prototyping toolkit for do-it-yourself media architecture

Media architecture is a challenging novel research domain which demands a close partnership between human-computer interaction (HCI), the industry and architects. Using a design-process approach that involves early prototyping is especially in this discipline a mandatory task in order to get any design right. However, crafting early interactive prototypes and exploring low-res content, form variations and interaction concepts is still cumbersome, challenging and comes at high cost which is mainly feasible for larger studios. To enable smaller architectural practices start prototyping with media architecture from scratch we present our prototyping toolkit LightBricks. It is intended to build miniature models of media architectural designs and remove technical burdens with a playful approach. It further enables the rapid exploration of possible content applications for low-resolution media architecture in order to assist interdisciplinary design teams in early phases of the design process to envision, demonstrate and pre-test visual or interactive content when working on new projects involving low-resolution media architecture.