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Kinetic architecture, responsive environments, intelligent environments, soft spaces, smart architecture, Ubiquitous computing, Internet of things, Internet of everything: a constellation of terms that depict an evolution of our relationship with space and artifacts.

We are dealing with a new feature that invests objects and environments. Until now we have been used to to attribute this feature to animated beings, that is the ability to interact with us. Objects come conferred characteristics that natural evolution had provided for living beings, ability to be influenced by the environment, the ability to move in the environment as well as the faculty to preserve and further elaborate the traces of these vital functions (Giovanni Anceschi).

Thanks to the variety of connected objects that make up the Internet of things, our inhabited space and our house turnes from a closed bubble to a soft shell, an osmotic membrane, a node in an open network. Crossing boundaries between art, architecture and computation the study analizes most iconic steps of this process: from Gianni Colombo analogic experimentations to Daan Roosegaarde interactive sculptures, from Gordon Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles to Tangible Media Group achievement, from Archigram utopias to DS+R multimedia environments, Nicholas Negroponte eassys and Mark Weiser ubicomp vision. Encompassing most relevant interaction studies the research tries to define the main parameters to analize interactive spaces and artifacts.