M.Arch 1 Options Studio AY 2019/20 Semester 1
WE ARE MILLENNIALS, MOBILISED

… imagine our digital connectedness in terms of bodies extending across space, but we might also suggest that the spaces between us have collapsed, that, in virtual terms, we’re crawling all over one another.

 Laurence Scott, The Four-Dimensional Human (2015)

This mission, should you choose to accept it, is to embrace the mindset and practices of a technologically-adept multi-mobile millennial, and gain insights into new subjectivities arising from the merging of technologies that have blurred the physical and virtual divide. An added complexity is attributed to the simultaneous corporeal and digital presences that we now seamlessly maintain in everyday life. Most, if not all millennials, are assuredly digital nomads: this is characterised by the dexterous adoption of their online and offline selves in personal as well as professional exchanges that negate geographical distances and socio-cultural differences.

A crucial aspect of the studio’s investigations is to scrutinise the ways in which the current generation optimise digital affordance, social media connections and online resources to augment their peripatetic lifestyle, work style and relationships, redrawing a new everyday spatial rhetoric. At a time when hybrid reality is becoming the norm, where the virtual is increasingly overlapping with the real, incorporation of new research tools and interpretive media is essential in order to produce a multifaceted, and nuanced, reading on the millennials’ global transversality from a spatial-experiential standpoint.

Over the semester, we will undertake three discrete projects progressively:

(1)  Devise a strategy/application/apparatus to acutely capture the impact of techno-digital integration in the everyday milieu (W1-3)

(2)  Conduct an autoethnographic study and critically reflect on your brief nomadic sojourn and navigations across your host city during the overseas studio trip (W2-4)

(3)  Complete a cross-technology design project in response to this tacit condition as hypostasis of an imminent future, employing AR and VR tools to conceptualise and visualise an interactive 3D environment of how the envisioned intervention or provocation will be implemented and experienced (W4-13)

IMPORTANT: Students registered for this studio must commit to a 3-day immersive environment workshop in Week 1 led by Vouse, a 6-day studio trip to Seoul* in Week 2 including a two-day joint workshop with Yonsei University’s Department of Architecture and an exhibition at NLB in the first half of December in conjunction with an international symposium.

* The overseas studio trip is self-funded. Students who are eligible for NASA funding are advised to apply ahead of time.

References
Chung, S.S-Y., Ng, M.A. and Song, D.H. 2019. Millennial Nomad Space <https://millennialnomadspace.com>
Scott, L. 2015. The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World
Jerald, Jason. 2016. The VR Book: Human-Centred Design for Virtual Reality
One Way Ticket: The Rise of the Digital Nomad (dir. Youjin Do, 2017)