Design Shifts
Oxford Brookes University (Gipsy Lane Campus)
Singlehood : The Quest for Significance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Darya Maoz
More people choose to live alone – as a phase in life or for good. Some from choice, others – reluctantly, and this phenomenon is expending worldwide. Our qualitative research study sheds light on the prevailing issue of singlehood and the experiences of this phenomenon for Jewish-Israeli men and women, who are not married and have no children. Israel is an extremely family oriented society, which sees family as its basic unit. It is also a pronatalist society, in which fertility levels are very high relative to other developed countries. As a result, single men and especially single women may face stigmatization because of their relationship status. Single women struggle with images of defected and incomplete and experience heavy pressure from their family and society. Through snowball and purposeful sampling, 23 participants at the ages of 33 to 61 were interviewed to find the reasons the singles suggest for their status. The results from the data analysis indicate four primary themes: (1) High sense of self-efficacy and of significance; (2) Willingness to be free and perceiving romantic relations as restrictive; (3) Fear from closeness, attachment issues and separation anxiety; (4) Lack of experience with long-term relationships. Those singles, especially the older ones, feel need for control over their life and believe it can be obtained alone only. Their quest for significance, their desire to matter, to have dignity and merit respect led them to believe in themselves while seeing an intimate partner as an obstacle.
The Conflict between the Identity of the Built Environment and the Rise of Idiopathic Architecture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott Sworts
A fundamental shift has occurred in the 21 st Century, where facts are no longer (or possibly again not) considered to be the foundation of what is “true.” In an era of Deepfakes, image manipulation, and normalized lies, Identity and Truth (with a capital T) have formed the foundation of an emerging global discourse. Identity, in this context, is the story we tell ourselves ABOUT ourselves. Truth is the emotional weight we put behind that story. In this emerging world, Truth has become disconnected from fact and relies on the emotional investment we layer onto our identity, leading to a situation where much of our identity is formed by what our aligned tribe holds to be True. Our cities and landscapes, long a tool for embedding social values and belief systems, in some ways becomes reflection of our Identities and our Truths, where the places we chose to live come to define us as a member of a tribe, or possibly as a rebel against it. Further, in a polarized world, the design of environments becomes weaponized. We see this in attitudes towards social housing, the creation of hostile architecture, and the re-emergence of spatial segregation. What is the response? How do we as environmental designers re-embed identity into what we create without feeding into divisive culture wars? To respond to this, we must begin to tell the Truth, not simply facts and knowledge, but broad Truths that speak of connections, human to self, human to human, and human to world.
Live Projects as a Bridge between Architecture and Social Sciences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ruth Cuenca
Within the current climate and biodiversity emergency, architectural education needs to provide graduates with the relevant skills needed in order to shape the future of our built environment. These skills are not only creative or technical, there is a social component to architecture for which social sciences could support architectural education. Lefebvre’s 1 thinking shifted the notion of space adding a social dimension to it, however, architects are not typically prepared to deal with the social aspects of design and most times this results in object-based proposals rather than people centred solutions. This qualitative research is based on the case study of Unit A (2022-23), an undergraduate design studio at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture. The Unit’s approach is to aim for radical change through a series of incremental steps. The teaching method is through Live Projects and this year students collaborated with a community organization based in Plymouth and the brief called for radical interventions to address the impact of climate change in the locality and community. The concept of Social Innovation was introduced in the Unit as new ideas that meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations enhancing society’s capacity to act 2 . Social innovation starts with innovative and creative ideas in a similar way to architectural design. This study aims to understand the relationship between Live Projects and Social Innovation in order to leverage the creative potential of students’ ideas into bringing value and benefiting the communities they collaborate with.
