Usman Haque

Usman Haque (born 1971)^[1] is an architect and artist who works with technology. He is known for designing large scale interactive installations and his contributions to Interactive architecture and the Internet of things.^[1][2][3][4]

Haque's interactive art has appeared at the Singapore Biennale (2006),^[5] London Fashion Week (2007)^[6] and has been exhibited at KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg,^[7] NTT InterCommunication Center,^[8] New York's Museum of Modern Art^[9] and Barbican Centre.^[10]

According to author Owen Hatherley, Haque’s work “defies conventional classification” and “is not what you would immediately think of as architecture”,^[11] often overlapping both digital art and interactive architecture.^[12][13]

Haque’s contribution to interactive architecture is to distinguish between ‘circular mutual reaction’ and ‘linear causal response’ in designing architectural structures and environments,^[14][15] building on Gordon Pask’s cybernetics theories in creating interactive spaces.^[16][17]

Haque studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture^[18] and was part of the Bartlett Interactive Architecture Workshop.^[19]

• Sky Ear, “a cloud of 1,000 helium balloons launched into the evening sky with a payload of mobile phones, sensor circuits and flashing LEDs”^[20][21][22]
• Open Burble, “an interactive structure that floated up 18 story’s(sic) high”^[23][24]
• Haunt, “a scientifically haunted room”^{[25] [26]}
• Evoke, “a riot of projected colours...on the imposing 60 metre-high front of York Minster”^{[27] [28]}
• Reconfigurable House, “an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors”^[29]
• Natural Fuse, “a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants”^{[30][31][32][33][34]}

Others include Another Life, one of Haque’s permanent interactive installations,^[35][36] located in Bradford, UK; Assemblance, which “lets visitors sculpt and shapes beams of lasers” [sic];^[37][38] Cinder, an “augmented reality creature [that] ‘lives in the school’”;^[39] and Starling Crossing, an “interactive road crossing that only appears when needed”.^[40][41][42]

In the internet of things he is known for founding Pachube in 2007,^[43][44] an IoT data platform that “enabled hundreds of Japanese civilians to quickly and easily share weather and radiation data in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster”,^[45] acquired by LogMeIn in 2011,^[46] renamed Xively and sold on to Google in 2018.^[47] He also founded Thingful, a search engine for the internet of things, in 2013.^{[48][49][50][51]}

Haque won a Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence Award in 2004^[52] and was a Brit Insurance Design Awards winner in 2008^[53]. He was appointed a Design Council Ambassador in 2021^[54] and in 2022 he joined the London Mayor's Data for London Advisory Board.^[55]

• What is Interaction - Are there different types? Interactions - January/February 2009, by Hugh Dubberly, Paul Pangaro and Usman Haque
• Urban computing in the wild: A survey on large scale participation and citizen engagement with ubiquitous computing, cyber physical systems, and Internet of Things by Flora Salim and Usman Haque
• Interview with Usman Haque in Programming Interactivity^[56]
• Designing Projects That Thrill And Empower: The Architect Who Taught A City To Fly