Could our daily interactions and social scenarios with in the city be enabled to restructure our environments through collective interaction? 

What if our everyday local interactions and behaviors were allowed to construct communities and social fabric as living environments that would operate through a collective intelligence that is adaptive and can evolve?

By MINIMAFORMS*

Emotive City is a framework to explore a mobile and self-organizing model for our contemporary city. Models of the past have proven limited and should not operate, as blueprints for our urban future, a new generation of design enquiry by necessity must address the challenges of today. The fixed and finite tendencies that once served architecture and urbanism have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life, machines and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges with an environment of accelerated urbanization.

We propose a framework that participates and engages with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives through a model of living that we call an adaptive ecology. Interaction within this project enables communication and real-time reorganization on multiple scales of engagement. Our interactive model is scenario based and asks what if our living environments were durational, mobile and energy producing could we conceive of a model of city organization that is not tied to infrastructural but would be governed locally through neighborhood relations.

The model proposed is an alternative experiment to planning that acknowledges the limited capacity of systems that segregate architecture, infrastructure, urbanism and the inhabitants. Our prototype examines a model structure through engagement and social interaction that within mobile and flexible infrastructure can dynamically address issues of latency and the unknown. As a response to Nesta’s Future of Machines theme -at FutureFest, where the installation was first presented- we felt that our living environments by necessity should be part of the conversation as we actively move towards an understanding of the human machine ecologies that are forming around us. The emotive city uses interaction as a fundamental communication model to create ecologies of mobile and self structuring habitual environments, a new nature of human machine interactions that are structured through behaviors.

Towards a human machine ecology
Our architecture will enable.
Our architecture will play.
Our architecture will sense.
Our architecture will self-structure.
Our architecture will learn.
Our architecture will be self-aware.
Our architecture will stimulate.
Our architecture will get bored.
Our architecture will anticipate.
Our architecture will interact.
Our architecture will be emotive.

*
Minimaforms: Theodore and Stephen Spyropoulos
Team: Ilya Pereyaslavtsev, María Paula Velásquez, Fanos Katsaris, Octavian Gheorghiu, Hitesh Katiyar, Flavia Ghirotto Santos, Mostafa El Sayed , Iris Jiang, Pavlina Vardoulaki and Houzhe Xu.

 

ANIMAL: The Other Side of Evolution* by Ana Rajcevic is a collection of pieces of personal adornment that introduces ‘a new breed’ of precious objects. Stepping out of the traditional jewellery/ accessories context, Rajcevic offers a collection that can exist and be exhibited both on their own and attached to the human body.

ANIMAL pieces are inspired by the anatomy of animals, in particular, by skeleton structures. Attached to the human body these pieces ‘appear as natural properties of the body, suggesting strength, power and sensuality’, says Ana Rajcevic. Merging the human and animal anatomies, Rajcevic presents us with a new body, one that -through this manipulation- appears to be more directly immersed within the context of natural life.

‘All the objects –of the collection- were handcrafted creating multi-part master holds, using gelcoat, fibreglass, resin and silicone rubber’, explains Rajcevic. The materiality and fluid morphology of ANIMAL collection present similarities with some of the most contemporary architectural and design propositions of our times. An example of these propositions being the Chanel pavilion by Zaha Hadid Architects, showcasing a skin manufactured from Fibre Reinforced Polymer.

Making use of contemporary material technologies and exploring fluid natural forms as means to re-define the way in which the human body is presented, Rajcevic’s work certainly joins the avant-garde section of contemporary designers that operate trans-disciplinary towards the re-definition of our the cultural and physical environments.

*ANIMAL: The Other Side of Evolution was awarded MA Best Design Award 2012, University of the Arts London and Accessories Collection of the Year, International Talent Support 2012 Italy

The complete ANIMAL collection is available on: www.anarajcevic.com