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]

Haque's interactive art has appeared at the Singapore Biennale (2006),^[3] London Fashion Week (2007)^[4] and has been exhibited at KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg,^[5] NTT InterCommunication Center,^[6] New York's Museum of Modern Art^[7] and Barbican Centre.^[8]

According to author Owen Hatherley, Haque’s work “defies conventional classification” and “is not what you would immediately think of as architecture”,^[9] often overlapping both digital art and interactive architecture.^[10][11]

Haque’s contribution to interactive architecture is to distinguish between ‘circular mutual reaction’ and ‘linear causal response’ in designing architectural structures and environments,^[12] building on Gordon Pask’s cybernetics theories in creating interactive spaces.^[13][14]

Haque studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture^[15] and was part of the Bartlett Interactive Architecture Workshop.^[16]

• 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”^[17][18][19]
• Open Burble, “an interactive structure that floated up 18 story’s(sic) high”^[20][21]
• Haunt, “a scientifically haunted room”^{[22] [23]}
• Evoke, “a riot of projected colours...on the imposing 60 metre-high front of York Minster”^[24]
• Reconfigurable House, “an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors”^[25]
• Natural Fuse, “a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants”^{[26][27][28][29][30]}

Others include Another Life, one of Haque’s permanent interactive installations,^[31][32] located in Bradford, UK; Assemblance, which “lets visitors sculpt and shapes beams of lasers” [sic];^[33][34] Cinder, an “augmented reality creature [that] ‘lives in the school’”;^[35] and Starling Crossing, an “interactive road crossing that only appears when needed”.^[36][37][38]

In the internet of things he is known for founding Pachube in 2007,^[39][40] 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”,^[41] acquired by LogMeIn in 2011,^[42] renamed Xively and sold on to Google in 2018.^[43] He also founded Thingful, a search engine for the internet of things, in 2013.^{[44][45][46][47]}

Haque won a Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence Award in 2004^[48] and was a Brit Insurance Design Awards winner in 2008.^[49] He was appointed a Design Council Ambassador in 2021^[50] and in 2022 he joined the London Mayor's Data for London Advisory Board.^[51]

• 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^[52]
• Designing Projects That Thrill And Empower: The Architect Who Taught A City To Fly
• ^[53][54]