Ádám Somlai-Fischer born 1976 in Budapest is an architect and interaction designer. He is also the Co-founder and Principal Artist of Prezi and creates installations and experiments that blend spaces, technologies and interactivity. In 2007 Somlai-Fischer co-founded "Kitchen Budapest medialab" where he worked as the program director until 2009, since then he remained a key advisor of the lab. Somlai-Fischer lectures and kconducts workshops in architecture and design schools across Europe. He graduated from the Architecture + Urban Research Laboratory, KTH, Stockholm, taught at the Architecture and Media technology departments at KTH, working as a guest researcher at the Smart p studio. He was guest researcher at the MOKK Media Research and held workshops in design schools such as Domus Academy, Milan and Goldsmith College, London. He is directing "aether architecture", an office for mediated environments based in Budapest.
One of his main principle is that the idea, the project is the center of the action. Therefore there is not one author, nor authority and novelty is not a major preoccupation even if every project, in its practical existence requires a lot of creativity and invention: not creating technologies but inventing creative usages of recent technologies, often through hacking and hybridization. The product of the collaborative process in the architecture realm is therefore more oriented toward the culture quality, embodying technology as culture. When authorship is involved with identified individuals, Bengt Sjölén, Usman Haque, Tamas Szakal, Massimo Banzi, Peter Halacsy, Peter Hudini, Andras Kangyal, Attila Nemes, Anita Pozna can be picked as recurrent collaborators. Peer production ". The work of Adam Somlai-Fischer in the Kitchen Budapest is more than to identify areas of interest and organise the dynamics as groups of work : "Mobile expression", "Networked things", "DIY media, intergang", "Toy hack space", "wireless city"... In every project he admits everyone has his/her own goals and satisfaction factors. For him the individual identity can be blurred in the community, but it is precisely the belonging to a community, even as a part of a loose network, that individual identity can emerge stronger.
Sharing
In his lectures instead of presenting an ideology or methodology he presents projects and invites the audience to contribute. He organises hands-on workshops to lectures focusing on open hardware and interaction design, some texts, and unrealized concepts. On his website you can download samples of software, texts and ideas, but no manifesto.
