Decoi was founded in Paris in 1991 by Mark Goulthorpe. DECOi stands for research which is flexible and informal, exploring the changing psychology of creativity in the face of new technologies, and stretching the possibilities offered to architecture and built space. He collaborates with architects and specialists - robotics experts and mathematicians, programmers and choreographers, and has gained a reputation as an innovator within the field of architecture and new technologies. Without the communication possibilities offered by the internet, such international research would have been unthinkable several years ago - dECOi combines a coherent social vision with an emerging electronic society. "Aegis", a façade commissioned for a public building in Birmingham, is one of the projects which he will present within Urban Drift, and which is capable of rapid deformations in three dimensions, reacting to electro-magnetic impulses, and manipulated through a combination of pneumatic engineering, and computer-controlled mechanisms.

The shock engendered by the opening up of the aegis is linked by Goulthorpe to analyses of trauma, and a shift in the response to stimuli offered by the environment. 'In the new electronic environment, there is a reciprocal negotiation between self and environment' and interactive 'alloplasticity'.The reciprocal nature of alloplasticity is explored and expressed in the Pallas House, the Aegis project, and the Paramorph project, all of which are vehicles for foregrounding current operative design strategies, exploring dynamic and static aspects of open-ended transformative processes. - "The project is simple in its conception: one might even say that it is nothing or that it highlights the nothing - the everyday events which occur in the theatre around it. It is a simple surface - metallic and facetted - just one of the walls of the prow which penetrates from exterior to interior as a gently curving surface. Frequently the surface is inert - just a shimmering backdrop to events. But it is a surface of potential, carrying a latent charge which may suddenly be released. In response to stimuli captured from the theatre environment it can dissolve into movement - supple fluidity or complex patterning. It is therefore a translation surface, a sort of synaesthesic transfer device, a surface-effect as cross-wiring of the senses. It engenders its effect as a precise yet indeterminate strategy, a swell and fall of significance, playing on the margins of perception.”

Urban Drift 2001 / Panel 02