The Shyness - Social Interaction and Branding of the Multimod Apartment
Activities in Space
Component - Ecology of Components
The Mimosa 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.
