Imagining and Reimagining
Innovating for Student Success and Opportunity on Campus: Design Concept to Engage Students, Provide Access and Opportunity, and Reflect Unique Community Values View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amy Kern
The proposed design plan recently presented to university senior leadership was developed after rigorous needs finding, ethnographic research and diverse stakeholder input to balance targets for increased enrollment/ retention, educational programing and professional/ community development with commitment to the 3P’s of sustainability: people, planet, and prosperity. The purposeful place-making plan takes into consideration what the community has been historically, what stakeholders are saying and doing today, and where the university sees itself going forward to help adapt to changing needs of students and the economy. The “Pop-Up Blocks” design concept is centered around a 10,000 sq ft. mixed use common area, formally the campus swimming pool, with multidisciplinary programming and student initiated and run business incubators providing services, products, and events to the campus and surrounding downtown urban community. These entrepreneurial modules are to be selected by annual campuswide vote following an open pitch competition with a rubric prioritizing alignment with university values, needs, accessibility, wellness, and multi-department collaboration. The university not only provides start-up fees, designed space and fixtures but also matches students with local business professionals for mentoring before launching and while growing their unique vision. The dynamic spatial design’s key factors include flexibility and expansion opportunities, maximizing round-the-clock activity and traffic patterns, and being a model for best practices in sustainability.
A Human-centric Transformative Design: Data-driven Decision Making and Immersive Virtual Reality Design Participation Approaches for Reimagining Architectural Spaces View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mahzerin Sultana, Shuva Chowdhury
This research embarks on a transformative journey, reimagining architectural space through a powerful blend of data-driven decision-making and participatory design processes using immersive technologies. In many cases, conventional design neglects the needs and goals of the end-users leading to disengaged and ineffective spaces, which is investigated through this research by directly involving the end-users, architects, and community members to create more user-friendly and effective spaces. To achieve this goal, VR technology is introduced to emphasize visual interactions, and to bring the real world into digital space ensuring data is accessible, understandable, and actionable for a variety of users, enabling informed decision-making and collaborative design processes. By delving into thermal comfort indices, visualizing solar radiation and wind patterns, and tracking resource consumption, the gains are valuable insights to optimize building performance, promote energy efficiency, and finally use the visualized data into a transformative design by creating a scaled prototype of energy efficient user-friendly spaces, which could involve data-driven decision-making related to spatial layout, aesthetics, accessibility features, and overall user experience in an immersive world. By visualizing design solutions in real-time, the platform helps to optimize space usage, facilitates preventative maintenance, and empowers end users through data-driven decision-making as well as promoting social justice by ensuring inclusive design and encouraging community engagement. This research offers a comprehensive and specific framework for approaching architectural spaces, which is not only transformative but also deeply rooted in the needs and aspirations of its users.
Enhancing Facade Design with AI and Mixed Reality - an Integrated Approach: A Structure for a Living Architecture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Md Fahim Hasan Rezve, Shuva Chowdhury
Conventional static facades contribute significantly to environmental concerns, lacking adaptability to external factors and hindering occupant comfort and energy efficiency. The study explores an eco-expressive architectural approach that uses generative AI to create sustainable kinetic facade design. Through the utilization of AI platforms and simulation scripting, a collaborative framework that pushes the limits of traditional design methods is proposed. Buildings consume 40% of the world's energy and emit greenhouse gasses, which harms our planet. Static facades limit comfort and waste energy since they remain encased in rigidity. By investigating the underutilized application of generative AI in 3D form generation and MR visualization, this work fills a significant research void. This synergistic collaboration empowers architects to leverage AI's generative capabilities while retaining creative control through immersive real-time interaction. The proposed structure is a dynamic facade made of finely designed and optimized 3D-printed modules using generative AI algorithms. These modules react to sunlight in real time, adjusting for optimal solar heat gain and daylighting. This translates to enhanced occupant comfort, reduced reliance on mechanical systems, and significant energy savings, exceeding the limitations of static facades. MR communication facilitates swift design iterations by enabling architects to visualize and interact with AI-generated possibilities in an immersive environment. By using a dynamic design instead of a static facade, the framework increases energy efficiency, reduces mechanical dependency, and enhances comfort. Furthermore, MR provides quick design iterations for imaginative, context-aware solutions.
Complexity of Asocial Forms – Critical Examination Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Habitus View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katarzyna Dybała
Modern cities undergo complex transformations that cannot be analyse separately. Citizens are experienced by fast pace of life, multicultural reality, digitalisation, environmental and economic crisis and many other factors. Overall image of a city is a result of various social and spatial details. Therefore, we need an interdisciplinary theory that connects all these phenomena. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus seems to be the right tool. Habitus, a built-in set of dispositions, is capable of explaining asociality of urban spaces. My research covers scientific essays devoted to different ways of applying habitus in architecture. I collected one hundred publications and named five main categories of the application of the theory of habitus in architecture: taste, capital, identity, art and relationships. Four out of five categories refer to asocial aspect of modern cities. Taste is a perception and valuation of the surrounding space. Capital covers the architect’s habitus and architecture understood as a resource, the control of which is a form of domination in the built space. Identity refers to a sense of one’s place as a result of compatibility of habitus with the nature of the built environment. Relationships describe connotations between social and built environment – a general atmosphere of the city – at a time of significant cultural, economic or political changes. This paper proves that misunderstandings caused by different types of habitus result in asocial spaces that satisfy nobody. Implementing habitus theory into urban analysis enables more comprehensive understanding of the current condition of our cities.
