Cybernetic Future of Amazon Go: A Tangible Autonomous Reality

Contributors

Jialiang Huang (M.Arch. '24)
Jun Hu (M.Arch. '24)
Shuqi Liu (M.Arch. '24)

Class

ARCH 5112

Instructors

Farzin Lotfi-Jam
Christopher Battaglia

The privacy of data is unavoidably an alerting topic today while data surveillance mechanisms are the black box. This doubt about the technological black box drives us to find a way to decipher the mechanism, thus leading us to study Amazon Go’s ties with data surveillance. Amazon Go opens up an opportunity for the mega tech corp to execute surveillance capitalism when the concept of personal privacy and the public is violated and reconstructed by the capitalism created by the algorithm.

As the first people to be digitized, our attitude towards privacy directly determines what kind of future we will have the choice lies with us, and we need to form a binding force on the group. Thus, this study of Amazon Go leads us to create a responsive architecture design that gives an open opportunity for the user, the people, to realize and watch what is inside the black box, enabling us to perceive the hidden dimension.

The design is a public architectural space inside a megastructure owned by Amazon and functions as a museum to show these hidden processes of data surveillance to the people. The composited megastructure was generated y Amazon’s envision as inputs. For instance, Amazon patents and announcements. These inputs will be translated into program spaces and then put into a sequence of viewing orders that we designed for the users. The sequence is transformed into serial connect space syntax, in which they would ascend, descend, jump cuts, and loop back. The whole navigating experience inside the space is theatrical, as the staging is what the Amazon patent could be and how the facility works.