The recent outbreak of global pandemics has accelerated the virtualization of our everyday life and made humans realize how much they can do without leaving the confinements of their connected homes: participating in remote meetings, co-designing over distance, orchestrating a symphony over zoom, singing in a virtual choir, shopping for essentials and non-essentials, dancing and performing on social media.
The seminar UE X – Experience Design examines digitalization’s effects on architectural experiences in the contemporary city. The course questions traditional typologies by focusing on an understanding and redesigning social, geographic, spatial, temporal, and emotional experiences. We focus on the augmented home to respond to the inevitable changes catalyzed by Covid-19. How do architectural and urban conceptions of the home change with the infiltration of new elements of interactivity? Which new experiences become available in the home? We will critically examine existing, virtualized everyday life practices that occur from home confinements, analyze their physical and virtual, productive and subversive, happy and dark, functional and poetic moments, and propose alternative designs as experiential prototypes.
The seminar combined students from both IC and ENAC to work together in a real interdisciplinary process. The course was conducted through weekly mini-workshops that guided the students through the experience design workflow. The first half of the semester was focusing on the examination of the current home experience, and included a rigorous mapping and critical analysis of the actors involved, the spatial-temporal flows, and the key touchpoints of a chosen virtualized experience. The second half of the semester focused on the redesign of that experience. Digital interfaces and augmented domestic artefacts were considered as possible alternatives to reconfigure the senses of perception, redistribute time, and reorchestrate the configuration of social, emotional and spatial experiences.
https://augmentedhome2020.wordpress.com/
Keywords: Experience Design, Home, Mixed Reality,
Tutors: Christina Doumpioti, Christoph Holz, Mikhael Johanes, Frederick Kim, Gianna Ledermann
Professor: Jeffrey Huang