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Position Paper

What is your craft? what is interior design?

What first pop up to my mind is "space". From my point of view, it shoul be called "Spatial Design". It is not limited to designing the interior of an existing place. Spatial design can be understood as a problem solving process. For example when we were tasked with designing an ephemeral structure in a square as a designer I have to research about what was the problem to solve there. I found that the problem to solve was to bring life to that square that was dead, in disuse and people did not interact in that space. Why? because it was not a designed space, nobody had intervened in any way to get involved in the open area. Here is the labour of the designer, through the space you design you are indirectly conditioning the behaviour of people and making them react. That is why I believe that spatial design is based on changing people's behaviour, causing a reaction or an emotion in them based on a need to cover, a problem to solve, a marketing strategy or for leisure. But each space has its problem to solve, its need, that's why I like to devote a lot of time to previous research. What needs do users have for which I am designing? What emotions/ reactions do I seek to create in them with my design? Each project is a different world, which is why I find it difficult to give a general definition of what my craft is.

Define your position of your practice in relation to newer technologies

It has been so hard for me to find the link between my craft and the practice. I think the practice it is helping me to think in a different way and open more my mind because nowadays everything is developing thanks to technology. I am trying to focus on the newer technologies about light, projections, new softwares like video mapping in order to introduce them in common spaces like for example an elevator. How could it will be to enter in an elevator and have an experience for 10 seconds with some projections inside depending on which floor you are going What are the borders of this practice? (what new media technologies have arisen I what is its future of the field)

New technologies allow us to design smarter, complex, radical, efficient, and integrated spaces and unlock new potential for the designers of today. However advancements in digital photography and realistic renderings, joined with popular social media and a public with an increasing interest and appetite for design, may lead to an architectural culture centred primarily around how design is photographed and shared. This surface level architecture negates other important aspects of a building or place; its 3-dimensional quality, its functionality, its textures, sounds and smell, the intricacies of its details and the complexities of its contextual relationships.

Connect to a historical discourse and give concrete examples of contemporary practitioners

I really think as the boundaries between different disciplines become more and more blurred, the crossovers become more interesting. Olafur Eliasson is an artist who is branching out: "I don't feel alien or excluded when working with digital art. I still ask the same questions: why and how." At his studio in Berlin, he surrounds himself with engineers, coders, technicians, architects and craftspeople - anyone who might help him to realise his vision for an ambitious new project. And for me thats the key for a project to success.

Critical Making exercise

We have choosen 3 random card and we came up with a "dating app for trees"

CONCEPT

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals. This system connects all trees via a fungi system embedded in all the roots of the trees. Because we felt sorry for all indoor trees who are cut of of this web, we wanted tot find a way how 2 or more indoor plants would be able to wirelessly connect with eachother and share information.

VIDEO : [1]

PROTOTYPE

Cybernetic Prosthetics

RE-COFFE _A new way to relate nature with machines and reduce waste

After indulging, we discovered the concept of blue economy, a concept invented by Gunter Pauli. We are going to compare it to the green economy so it is easier to understand. The green economy consist on the fact that buying eco-friendly products is way more expensive than other less healthy options. This healthy products are not affordable in a long-term consumption for most of us, so this is not effective and ends up damaging the planet. Instead, blue economy consists on turning waste into new resources. In this way, we turn poverty into abundance from our homes. When we were first looking for a concept to reduce waste, we thought of details we could improve or change in our daily routine. And, for us, coffee is part of this daily routine. So, we wanted to design something involving coffee but, how could it be related to nature?

At this point, Gunter Pauli also mentions the example related to coffee that we are going to use in order to design our concept.

• What can we do with the rest? We discovered that with wasted coffee we can grow mushrooms.
• And then feed the leftovers to animals
• Animals make manure and bacteria make biogas
• At the end we get jobs, energy and food

We did some research to find out how funghi is produced from coffee?

• Break it up and spread it out throughout the coffee.
• Put the mixture into your cultivation bag and close it up tight, ensuring you have cut air holes
• Place your bag in a warm and dark place. During the next three weeks,water this area twice daily with water, you will see the micelios come to life and grow across the coffee grounds - turning the whole mixture white so it has fully colonized the mixture.
• Place it in a spot with plenty of fresh air and a little light
• After a week or so, you will start to see tiny little mushrooms bursting into life

The coffee machine has a department in the lower part where coffee residue is stored where the mycelia grow thanks to an automatic irrigation system incorporated in the coffee machine.

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Black Boxing

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Boiling Art We chose an egg boiler as the starting point. In this image you can see the model it is and how the product looks.

What we needed to do first was to open it, so we could know how it works and what components it has.

-The heating system has a circular shape so it can cover the whole surface.

-A device that is programmed to make a noise when the eggs are cooked.

-The rest are wires that connect everything with the on/off button.

File:POL.jpg

In the end, we decided to regard this project from another perspective. What if instead of controlling the cooking time of the machine, we let it act by itself? By adding pigment into the boiling water and placing small canvas inside, the machine could create small pieces of art. Every artpiece would be different from another. Thus, this way of painting is not controlled by humans, but controlled by the machine itself. This fact makes this art completely unpredictable; only the machine "decides" what's about to happen.

What we wanted to aim was to represent the concept of controlled randomness in art. Our project was just controlled by a machine, but we also want the human to interact somehow, but not completely. That's why we came up with the idea of turning this device into a painting tool. The human would use it as a brush to paint a surface. The role of the machine is to paint in an unpredicted way to the surface the human places it. The human would control where the machine paints, so he/she would share the control with the machine.

This is materialised in the trial canvas you can see in the pictures below. To make the brown one we used coffee as pigment and to make the pink one we used pink watercolor as pigment.