13 : Split Personality

Over the past few weeks I have been establishing a portfolio and I stumbled across an old project I did named 'split personality'.. which was a convertible hotel/office space which catered for students, as they usually hold the characteristic of having two personalities.. one for study and one when they relax.  I suppose this is true for other profession, namely politicians.  They have their public professional persona, and then they have their home personal life... I suppose these lines are beginning to blur with the increased use of social media (Twitter updates 24/7)... but the split will remain..

Here are some of my explorations about this idea:

12 : Tutorial

Here are my scans from the tutorial this week, very messy I know - trying to get whatever was in my head out onto the paper.  I quite like the diagram I finished with and I will use this as my base circulation pattern when organising my programs.

11 : Tutorial

During the Tutorial, I spoke to Jane about focusing on the Tuggeranong area as a regional place of interest to focus on.  Feedback was that realistically, it wouldn't be liable for a light rail system would extend that far.  So we decided that it would be best to focus on Woden instead, as it is the first major residential area outside of Canberra, as well as being central to the international embassies and government buildings.

10 : Tutorial

In the tutorial today, I spent most of my time chatting to my classmates about their ideas (hoping that deep down, it would inspire me somehow) but I ended up just feeling a bit behind, and a little overwhelmed.  Me and Jess were the last two people to talk to Jane, both of us a bit up in the air and were given the advice to think back to our original concept.  Think through the steps of how the ideas developed....

Jane, although she seemed a little bit disappointed, also understood the difficulty of me developing a construction system for this light rail, and suggested I focus on either the design of the light rail system itself OR at one of the stations.  

Tasks to be completed by next week include:

• A developed form for the design / imagery about our idea.
• Design Brief
• List of functions / relevant to our scale
• Justification about our idea and its relevance to a parliamentary system.

Honestly I left the tutorial more confused than ever... but with such little time left this semester I am determined not to dwell on it and will focus on working through my ideas this weekend, before the ideas leave my head.

08 : Tutorial

Chatting with Jane in the tutorial today definitely helped clear a few things up. 

I've decided to continue with the construction concept and will develop this further over the week ahead.  Points to consider this week include:

• figuring out where these 'temporary' stops will be (in terms of current events in Canberra)
• how will it connect with Jess's proposal. 
• I'd also like to make time for some quick sketching of some sort of 'vision' of how this proposal may actually work.

07 : Tutorial

The feedback we received from Jane about last week's presentation was fairly positive.  Obviously, the lack of consistency in paper sizes in the presentation was unfortunate, but in terms of the content she said that she liked the idea of defining the mobile theme as the 'mobility of people', in contrast to almost every other group presentation which was about getting people out of Canberra.  Jane did mention though that we need 'something' else (which is also mobile-related) to really push the idea into a built form.

With this, I looked into the various definitions of mobile.

mo·bile 

adjective

• capable of moving of being moved readily.

• Digital Technology.  pertaining to or noting a cell phone, usually one with computing ability or a portable, wireless computing device used which held in the hand, as in mobile tablet; mobile PDA; mobile app.

• utilising motor vehicles for ready movement: a mobile library.

• permanently equipped with vehicles for transport.

• flowing freely, as a liquid.

• changeable or changing easily in expression, mood, purpose.

• quickly responding to impulses, emotions, etc., as the mind.

• Sociology. characterized by or permitting the mixing of social groups.

• of or pertaining to a mobile.

noun

• a piece of sculpture having delicately balanced units constructed of rods and sheets of metal or other material suspended in midair by wire or twine so that the individual parts can move independently, as when stirred by a breeze.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Just before the end of class, Julian (who is the other mobile tutor) called me over and himself and Jane discussed possible ideas for the rest of the project.  He made a very good point by saying that our 'architectural entity' does not have to last forever - the reality is that it probably won't.  He said that if it was him doing the project, he would focus on the construction of the railway line.  How is it constructed, and is there a way for it to be constructed in certain places around Canberra temporarily / maybe it would become a cocoon or capsule like form that would engulf the train to become a station as well?

Here is a quick sketch I did right after we spoke:

This week I think I will research a little more into the construction of railway lines and see if anything sparks my interest.  This technical approach to the project is usually not my strong area, but last design proposal, maybe I'm up for the challenge??

05 : Tutorial

I was too sick to come into the tutorial today, so I decided to a bit more research into the history of Canberra as a city - probably should have done this weeks ago, but it seems more relevant now.

I'm interested to hear what Jane's feedback on the material Jess and Dee had in the tutorial, and where we should go from here..

I did a bit of brainstorming about different types of mobility, and whether or not it would be better to focus on just one part - and what would be the best to implement into Canberra.. These ideas are pretty much just an extension / refinement of previous tutorials

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

02 : Tutorial : Mobile

This weeks tutorial allowed for exploration in groups about of the four different themes (Virtual / Flexible / Mobile / Distributed) and how they benefit an Australian Capital and its agents.  Naturally, some were easier to explore than others.

In this tutorial, I felt that the tutors gave us much more direction.  Questions raised were about what are the benefits of the forum? How will decisions be made? Will parliament exist as it does now?  As mobile is defined as something with the capability of moving or being moved, I think this will relate to how information is store and recorded.  People have a wider, and easier, access to information in a variety of formats, and so the way in which parliament will exist has to adapt to these changes.

This reminds me of a speech by ABC journalist Kevin O'Brien about 'Politics and Journalism'.  He says that "in an age that desperately needs enlightened leadership, the disproportionate size of today’s public relations industry is causing an alarming decline in the quality of public discourse."  In O’Brien’s view, as a result the combination of the problems on either side, there are so many issues that are not given the time and space they need, to be adequately debated. O’Brien maintains that people who are time-poor and preoccupied with their own struggles must, obviously, rely on the mainstream media to find out what’s going on. “If they’re not being well served by that part of the media they go to, either they will not trust it, end up poorly informed or worse, mislead.”

Although it is not architecturally related, it's interesting to see how the future of politics and increasing technologies are so closely related.  The full speech can be found here: http://tv.unsw.edu.au/video/wallace-wurth-memorial-lecture-2011-kerry-o-brien

02 : Tutorial : Distributed

This weeks tutorial allowed for exploration in groups about of the four different themes (Virtual / Flexible / Mobile / Distributed) and how they benefit an Australian Capital and its agents.  Naturally, some were easier to explore than others.

Distributed can pretty much be split in two ways.  Firstly, it can be the same element, but distributed in different places.  Or can be one 'centre', which many tangents each adapted to suit many different areas.  I think these tangents, could be places which are self-sustainable, similar to the notion of satellite cities, places which people can work/live/play - yet still maintaining the feeling of being 'connected' to the rest of the country.  I think it is also important to consider the possibility of accumulating the best of each multi-culture in the centre.  The sum of all parts.

02 : Tutorial : Flexible

This weeks tutorial allowed for exploration in groups about of the four different themes (Virtual / Flexible / Mobile / Distributed) and how they benefit an Australian Capital and its agents.  Naturally, some were easier to explore than others.

A lot of the groups discussions regarding flexibility, lead to the discussion of transparency of information.  How do you decide what is hidden and what is revealed?  There was also a discussion about removing elements which are not flexible (such as services) and positioning them on the exterior.  How flexible can these elements be?  Such as it is measured in a time-scale, something which becomes more or less flexible over time; or is it measured by how often it can be 'flexed'?

02 : Tutorial : Virtual

This weeks tutorial allowed for exploration in groups about of the four different themes (Virtual / Flexible / Mobile / Distributed) and how they benefit an Australian Capital and its agents.  Naturally, some were easier to explore than others.

Virtual was the most difficult, as there are so many connotations with the Information Technology world.  I'm not naive enough to think that virtual technology won't increase in the future.  Instead I believe that there is a place for both physical and virtual areas to interact.  I'm particularly interested in how places can be designed so that they can have a psychological effect such as trigger memories.  This may be useful in places where you are adding a new layer on something that is not used anymore?  In this way virtual is defined as an unidentifiable and untouchable place, and rather in the mind.