The Shyness - Social Interaction and Branding of the Multimod Apartment
Activities in Space
As a group we determined that the most important part of this project and a factor for its success would be to define the methodology or otherwise, the working process. For someone, designing a 50sqm house could seem easy or simplistic. However we realized that the only way to be able to justify our design and reason our decisions would be by analyzing the needs and being observers of our everyday lives, both as the protagonists but also as an external sociologist. What we realized from this process is that we never actually think about they way we move or act inside our space, what affects our decision to move to another room of a house, or how many times a day we might do a specific activity. Another aspect that struck us was how we always think in terms of spaces and never based on the activity we do. We never think about the space we use and the space we need.
The first stage was to define our users: a mother, her son, the grandmother and a dog. Analyzing their characteristics, both physiological and psychological we got to develop four characters, all that play an important role in our story. We established their needs, habits, likes and dislikes, all based on people around us and from personal experience. By creating our clients we can design and have our target group set and defined.
The basic part of the analysis would be to define the daily routine of the characters, their daily calendar. From our observations we divided our research into weekdays and weekends, since normally there is a big difference between the two in relation to the use of the house, and collected the data for the members of the family, always focusing on the activities they do and when during the day does it takes place.
== EVA ==
== ENRICA ==
== JASPER ==
JAGGER
TRANSLATING ACTIVITIES
Component - Ecology of Components
The Mimosa House- A Shy House
G5 aims at defining and modelling the core of the Multimod apartment around activities and formalising these activities into a spatial core of the apartment, a spatial DNA of the house.
A relationship between the client and the developer has to be created. This relationship should be more personal in the sense that the user would keep in contact with the designer/developer throughout the use of the apartment, the way one does keep in touch with a legal representative firm, for instance.
The user should be able to develop a strong sense of ownership over the finalised product and during the design phase. This sense of ownership will be modelled around the valuable parameters that make up a living space. This includes material qualities, spatial considerations and personal user-data embedded in the design itself.
We see the design as a body capable of change, but change should manage needs. Change should operate at different speeds.
One speed of change should allow users/owners to make significant changes to the habitat. This will be achieved through interaction and kinetic solutions integrated in the designed components.
A different speed of change must be connected to the life-span of the appartment as habitat. This should be learned by the multimodal appartment's operating system.
The brief will be formalized by means of custom-built software applications accounting for immediate translation of user-profile scenarios and specific user needs, into relevant spatial setups.
Study of Precedents in Spatial Divisions
Spatial Activities and Patterns
Relationship between different activities in time (Time in the x-axis and spatial weight of activity in the y-axis )
BANG!! - Showing clash of activities which disturb each other.
Society and Interaction
What should be the character of the first encounter with a responsive or interactive piece of built environment be?
There are two ways of looking at this question. Our premise is that a piece of built environment (especially one containing implementation of IA) should become a locus for the user’s creative personality to manifest itself.
Our project aims at answering the question: is the locus of the interaction void?
The multimod apartment becomes a system of integrated elements designed around a character that is able to evolve. This embedded character, should be able to evolve, learn from and adapt to the needs of the users.
Shyness is seen less as a trait of character and more as a capacity of evolution. From a design point of view, the shy character is a planning decision, an input, evolvable parameter.
The reason why the team uses the term borrowed from psychology, is that it must formalize the added value of interaction as a measure of performance. As intended, the user should be able to play an integral part in evolving this design parameter to the point where a new house for the same user could embody the evolved personality.
The shyness of the built environment will operate on multiple levels, different degrees of the character need to be formalised as varied scenarios: owner-multimod apartment vs. guest-multimod apartment interactions or, given that the actuated component is part of a swarm, component-component interaction as mediation between user needs (input from outside the swarm) and the internal state of balance (internal coherency of the system).
A point of investigation is centered around ways of learning from bio-mechanically controlled movements in biology.
Overall form
Transformation of the bedroom area.
Transformation of the bathroom area.
Transformation of the kitchen area.
Component
G5 aims to explore, develop, optimise and successfully employ kinetic solutions during the design within Multimod. This is primarily a means of facilitating adaptability.
Our system should naturally provide deployability, connectivity. Above all, it should accomodate and respond to changing needs.
Mimosa pudica is a plant capable of rapid leaf movements. The plant’s leaves close and drop after being touched and reopen within a few minutes. Some of the plant’s cells have evolved into mechanoreceptors.
The movement in the position of the leaves is a result of a specialization of the plant’s vacuolar system. By means of rapid turgor pressure changes, the cells of the pulvinar motor tissue, which have two types of vacuoles, tannin-containing and tannin-less, are responsible for the movement. Actually, it is the large central tannin-less vacuole that contracts and expels the liquid. It is believed that the double vacuolar system may be a form of early motor system.
