11 : Brainstorm

Last night I was feeling quite overwhelmed, so I called my amazing urban designer, who has become quite the mentor these days, for some direction.

Together we went over some ideas.. some crazy, some boring... some completely unrealistic...

I know that creating a trainline itself is not an 'architectural entity' - but I like that idea for some reason.. so perhaps it can still be utilised somehow... After the chat I decided that maybe instead of focusing on a station... I could focus on where these trains go afterhours...

so during the day the interiors are movable... adapatable so people bring their bicycles on board for longer distances.. and then during the day, seating can be provided for shoppers / seniors / general recreation activities... and then at night time all the carriages can retreat to a 'depot' in Woden Valley for a open public arena, like a public forum, concert hall, night club..... Here are few sketches which eventually led to this point.

In one of the lecture Yasu said that our 'architectural entity needs to assist people to:
-debate political/social/cultural issues
-take actions
-do so through mobile means
-assist the constitutes of A.C.T.

10 : Development : Concepts

A few days ago I was chatting with a good friend of mine about my project.  He understood my frustration, so he started just putting forward some crazy ideas which may actually be applicable to the project.  After we spoke I began sketching a few of the concepts and to begin 'testing' some of these ideas.  I'm scared it's too late for me to change my direction, but I think in this way I will be able to develop a better concept.

As with all of this, my justification as to its relevance towards a parliamentary issue still needs to be addressed.

05 : Interim : Country

This is the base version of my 3D Australian graphic:

Analysis about reasons and future predictions in each state / country :

04 : Research : Exemplars

Our group meeting failed today, and so because I had a few hours to kill and I was already at uni I decided to bit more research in the library on urban design and future cities... and what other designers are envisioning and also to get some ideas on presentation and urban design diagramming techniques.

One pretty cool website I found was called "Megacities on the Move" which "sets out to find solutions sets out to find solutions to one of the biggest challenges – how billions of city-dwellers can access what they need without putting intolerable strains on the planet. It focuses on how to achieve sustainable urban mobility, looking at all the ways in which people will access goods, services and information and make contact with each other."

They created four scenarios which are displayed and summarised briefly below:

1) Planned-opolis
In a world of fossil fuels and expensive energy, the only solution is tightly planned and controlled urban transport.


2) Communi-city:
The world has turned to alternative energy, and transport is highly personalised with a huge variety of transport modes competing for road space.


3) Renew-abad:
The world has turned to alternative energy and high-tech, clean, well-planned transport helps everyone get around.


4) Sprawl-ville:
The city is dominated by fossil fuel-powered cars.The elite still gets around, but most urban dwellers face poor transport infrastructure.

04 : Tutorial

In tutorial we finally got allocated to our groups... I'm with Jess http://jess-hammond.blogspot.com/ and Dee http://gnel-datie.blogspot.com/

The diagram below shows a bit of a process of the types of things discussed in the tutorial.

We also began to figure out what is actually required for the panels.... not sure if we are on the right track yet, but this is a vague outline of our 'plan of attack' for the presentation in less than two weeks!!

Some of the references and websites we used throughout our discussions this week:
"Imagining a world without flight"
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.07-travel-grounded-travel-by-air-david-beers/

Site for diagramming techniques:
http://infranetlab.org/blog/

"A Mobile Utopian House"
http://archinect.com/news/article/17081468/a-mobile-utopian-house

03 : Tutorial : Flexible

Create stories that describe your ideas with specific contexts, users, situations and strategies.
We will call them architectural fictions.

Building on what was previously discussed with the other themes, our group discussed if everyone worked from home,  What if children were schooled from home over the internet as well?  How would someones house be flexible enough to accommodate all of these different functions? This happens already in rural areas...  What would happen to our need to our need for social interaction?

03 : Tutorial : Mobile + Distributed

Create stories that describe your ideas with specific contexts, users, situations and strategies.
We will call them architectural fictions.











































As the two themes were joined for our discussions our topics were vast and resulted in a complicated web of ideas.  One of the standout ideas that stood in the distributed theme was the question "how will the population be distributed in the future?"  The ease at which people can migrate internationally is increasing (for example many young Irish people are moving to Australia, mostly due to economic downfall and lack of employment) - but will this result in people being trained in a variety of areas, multi-skilled so that they can move between boom industries - and how will the education system be able to cope with this?

This lead into the mobile theme that with more international travel, perhaps people won't physically move for work and instead work for an international company from home.  How will this lack of social interaction, change the role of the 'home'.  This was discussed further in the next theme group...

03 : Tutorial : Virtual

Create stories that describe your ideas with specific contexts, users, situations and strategies. We will call them architectural fictions.

Within the 'Virtual' theme, my group discussed a lot about how a virtual layer can impact different areas of society.  As one of our group members was from Singapore, she explained how important and well organised the public transport system is within the city.  One of the reasons for this is that there is a high level of accessibility to public transport, with a station located approximately every 400m. Access to infrastructure is often a key component on how 'livable' a city is (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2011), so how can a 'virtual' layer improve a situation a capital city in Australia?

This whole discussion started when a group member posed the question "what if the government was to ban private transport?" I think that if people were more reliant on public options, there would have to be a variety of different types of transport options available.  Future cities will have to coordinate this type of network successfully by suggesting that there is a type of service dependent on the type of journey required.

References:
Economist Intelligence Unit. (2011). The Liveability Ranking and Overview February 2011 accessed 15 August 2011 from http://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=Liveability2011