LONELYTECH-NO-ZiyinGu + Xinyi Ma 2022ThesisGraduate
Graduate Thesis 2022 01 provocations .........................p.06 02 precedents.............................p.22 03 positions................................p.40 04 project...................................p.44
ThisStatementThesis4thesisaimstoexperimenthownewsocial interactions can be cultivated through the combination of an online digital platform and a physical space, specifically within an adult playground. This experiment lands itself in the open flexible play spaces of the proposed park being constructed beneath the new 6th street viaduct. The location of this site not only appeals to the younger generation as it is centrally located within the city of Los Angeles, but it also allows for cross-pollination between the neighborhoods of Arts District and Boyle Heights. This approach reimagines traditional settings for new social connections (bars, parks, community centers, playgrounds) which are completely conducted within a physical framework, and online platforms which are solely digital, into one that is simultaneously digital and physicala hybrid of the two worlds. How do we imagine an environment that can both activate physical spaces with the incorporation of technology that enhances the experience of its visitors and enables them to discover new social connections in the process? The allure of online connections and interactions stems from its accessibility, its
Graduate Thesis 2022 5 allowance for an alternative persona, its anonymity, and its abundance of choice, how can we play upon this psychology and reimagine it within a physical environment? Can this result in a typology that can reflect the individual expressions and cultures of the younger generation? By designing a maze-like environment with hidden programmatic follies nested within it, we wish to visualize how technology could help enhance the experience of a physical environment and how various social interactions can simultaneously occur within this environment. As our phones have become an integral part of our daily experience, almost a physical extension of our body, we propose a wholistic online platform that encompasses an AR navigational system, AR compatibility games to help its users navigate, discover, and explore new connections and experiences. Visitors of this playground will find themselves immersed in both the digital and the physical world as they explore these new grounds for social interaction. This project will also investigate and experiment with the sensory experiences that define and differentiate a physical interaction between a purely digital one through light, color, and tactility.
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Graduate Thesis 2022 7 01 Provocations
8 1. This graduate thesis concept is an extension of Xinyi Ma's Manferdini Vertical Studio with project - Particles, a new way to imagine a private social club. Among many urban societies, we have been witnessing an unprecedented level of the singles population, an Op-Ed in the LA times says that “we’re in the midst of a global loneliness crisis”, loneliness is not only detrimental to our mental health but also our physical health. Half of the surveyed Americans scored as felt alone or left out on the UCLA Loneliness Scale. The op-ed asks that we help reduce loneliness by providing goods and services designed to alleviate loneliness and deliver connection. The social club is reimagined to be a haven for the singles population within LA, the spaces in the club is entirely designed to facilitate a sense of security and comfort where one can enjoy their time alone or receive a meaningful in person connection.
Graduate Thesis 2022 9 1. Rendering of Social Interaction Within Particles Club 2. News Article: LA Times 3. New Article: Forbes 3.2.
10 The life and social needs of young generation?
Graduate Thesis 2022 11 1. Using Social Media as an emotional relliance and a social support 2. Connection between Reality and Virtual world 3. Social but not social 2.1. 3.
12 the paradox of technology and connectivity 1.
1. Rendering of Singles Dining in Particles Club
And we know that we are not going to get rid of the internet, we are not going to get rid of social networking. We will not go cold turkey or forbid cellphones to our children. These technologies are our current partners in the human adventure. The notion of addiction with this one solution that we know we won't take, makes us feel hopeless and passive. We sense something amiss and we're at a moment of opportunity. Every technology provides an opportunity to ask, does it serve our human purposes?"
"We are vulnerable to the constant feelings of connection that technology offers. We should focus on this vulnerability because we can work on getting less vulnerable. However apt, we can ill afford the metaphor of addiction. Because if you're addicted you have only one solution, you have to get rid of that substance.
-Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
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"mobile connectivity, that world of devices always on and always on us, would mean that we would be able basically to bail out of the physical real at anytime, to go to all of the other places and spaces that we have available to us and that we would want to. What I'm talking about are the perils of going from multitasking to multiliving, the perils of the life mix. Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. And these days there is no coyness about its aspiration to substitute on the screen for the other kind, technology is seductive when its affordances meet our human vulnerabilities and it turns out we are very vulnerable indeed, we are lonely but fearful of intimacy, connectivity offers for many of us, the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."
-Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
14 1. The prison-like office cubicle in 1980s 2. Lack of InteractionHuman CONS: 1.
Graduate Thesis 2022 15 1. Illustration showing different ways of protecting accounts through internet 3. Security and safety of the internet CONS: 1.
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1. Israels Plads Square, Copenhagen, Denmark, Cobe + Sweco Architects - To celebrate the significance and the history of the site and revitalize it, turning it into a vibrant, diverse plaza for all kinds of people - for leisure, culture, activity and public events.
2. Superblock of Sant Antoni, Barcelona, Spain, Leku Studio - To gain new public spaces by creating proximity squares in the chamfer corners and green-healthy streets where previously there were cars.
3. Domino Park Grass, New York City - Painted with white circles to encourage the public to stay safely apart during the pandemic.
2.1. 3.
The Important Role of A Social Space?
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Graduate Thesis 2022 19 02 Precedents
20 1. Various dating apps have also began experimenting with hosting in person events and creating physical spaces for its users to meet up. Bumble has found success in its pop up venues and have just opened up their first restaurant and café in New York.
Graduate Thesis 2022 21 2. 3. 1. Image of Bumble Pop up 2. Image of Thursday app in person event (NY Times) 3. Image of Bumble Brew (NY Eater)
22 2.1.
Graduate Thesis 2022 23 Different in person experiences have also been created to faciliate novel social interactions 3. 4. 1. Inde Company 2. Chromatic Dinner LA Design Week 3. Nesia Link Up in the Park Event 4. Mirrored Labyrinth Superblue Miami
Villette1.2.
24 No-Stop City, Italy, 1971 - Archizoom Associati
1. Model of Parc de la Villette 2. Illustration of Parc de la
No-Stop City is a urban planning project No-Stop City is based on the idea that advanced technology could eliminate the need for a centralized modern city. It is a place where individuals can build their dwelling space through their own free and personal involvement. Interior spaces, equipped with artificial lighting and air conditioning, enable inhabitants to set up new dwelling typologies that are open and continuous, and therefore likely to foster new ways of association and forms of community.
No-Stop City, Italy, 1971 - Archizoom Associati
How can we empower people to make more meaningful human connections?
26 2.1.
Graduate Thesis 2022 27 3. How willl our new values and attitudes toward living be reflected in our environment? 1. Illustration showing a shared living space - Illustrator Max Guther 2. Illustration showing a communal space - Illustrator Max Guther 3. Illustration showing a community with public plaza - Illustrator Max Guther
conditions to tweak
2. A new ratio of social self-isola tion - rethink the spaces of common living, reduce the boundary more be tween public and private spaces to allow spaces to increase the rela tionships between the inhabitants Ex. Visual accessibility at all times 3. A way to force people to maxi mises interaction and responds to today’s contradictory need for isolation and togetherness
Existing28
In a time where we are increasingly leaning towards the virtual world, we miss ‘real’ social interactions. Most of our memories are now forged indoors, in the same space, as if the world had collapsed into these small boxes we call our rooms. We work, eat, sleep, cry and laugh in the space. But the restrictions of this finite space can be freeing, and the notions of what constitute ‘real’ social interactions can be challenged. The public space can become more intimate, blurring the boundaries of personal and communal space. As a designer, what will be the most important tool of the new ways of 1.Commute?Asocial distance-friendly com munal experience, ex.Balcony, Corridor, Staircases - a new life waiting to happen in these spaces long considered accessory
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2. Titled ‘Sports without Broad Acres’ and drawn in 1933 in one of the cartoons of ‘An Ideal Home’ series by William Heath Robinson, the cartoon illustrates the possibility of modifying homes and especially balconies into spaces of public interaction and activity.
1. People sing and chat in their balconies during pandemic
1. 2. 1. Balcony
2. Hallways 1. 2.
1. 3/4 Table is a seat with an integrated table, designed to wrap around a corner, - Seray Ozdemir - Aims to transform the "archaic" corridors of shared properties into functional social spaces.
2. Standing Sofa - a group of cushions that use the walls as their habitat. By encouraging already existing different postures for leaning on the walls, they aim to prolong conversations and make people linger.
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Graduate Thesis 2022 31 1. As in Georges Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual, where the entire narrative takes place in the staircases of buildings.
3. Staircase 1. 2.
2. Homescape - Raya Shaban, Yasmina - By opening up the window of interaction –horizontally, vertically, and diagonally– the community gathers on these staircases and balconies that weave together an endless journey within a contained space.
“Being is alternately condensation that disperses with a burst, and dispersion that flows back to a center. Outside and inside are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
New ways of creating spaces of interaction
Routinary interactions with the architecture and the objects get em bedded in one’s subconscious. Ever since the pandemic, the way we work, socialise, and live has changed profoundly – each activity not necessarily occurring within a desig nated space, instead the boundaries between interiors and exteriors becoming far more diffused. Today, our conception of spaces is strongly influenced by the con stant permanence within our existing homes. Will it make any differences if we pulled out of one’s subcon scious routine associated with how it was once used? By questioning those specific elements as to their function and meaning, is it possible to create an boundaries?yondspace/socializingarchitecture/program/waythatgobestrictdefinitionsandblurthe
Graduate Thesis 2022 33 Home Competition 2021 Project - ‘MY’ HOME creates a vertical suburban system of housing with the aim to create each house with its own individual expression. The individual architectural language of each home is based on a personal object from the resident. The objects define the personality of each home and let the owners have a sense of belonging in the vertical community.
1. In between ad-hoc spaces of interaction
34 Home Competition 2020 Project - OUTRE - By Aditya Jagdale & Yuqing Ma 2. RecombinationofSpaces
Installations by Sofie Ramos_ Reveling in "Ordered Chaos", the installations (re)define and (re)configure empty or unused spaces, while still leaving boundaries open or ambiguous, or at least permeable. Ramos’ work explores the unstable balance between comfort and anxiety and between safety and confinement in intimate spaces. Aggregation of objects to create new spaces
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3.
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Graduate Thesis 2022 37 03 Positions
38 1. Hang the Dj, Black Mirror moviesretailbars 2. Hang the Dj, Black Mirror work
Graduate Thesis 2022 39 catalogue of social programs workbeachesplaceparks educationcafesspacesrestaurants musictransitgymvenues communityexhibitionscenteramusementparks
By creating an environment through thoughtful programming and strategic formal procedures that allows for natural and unexpected social interactions, this thesis will thus aim to visualize how physical interactions may still be facilitated in an age of excess online connections and how it can provide an alternative to those who are experiencing online fatigue.
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Graduate Thesis 2022 41 04 Project
42 BlvdSunset4301Motel""BatesSite 1. Yoro Park, Arakawa & Gins 3. Yoro Park, Arakawa & Gins2. Mirrored Labyrinth SuperBlue Miami 6. Transformations of
Graduate Thesis 2022 43 Gins 4. Kube House of Culture and Movement, MVDRV 5. 4301 Sunset Blvd, "Bates Motel" Site
44 strategiesorganizationalformal 2.1. 3.4.
Graduate Thesis 2022 45 1. Le Fresnoy, Bernard Tschumi 2. Parc de la Villette, Bernard Tschumi 3. Le Fresnoy, Bernard Tschumi 4. Le Fresnoy, Bernard Tschumi 5. 6th Street Viaduct Park as Site 6. VPS System 5.6.
1. Diagram of Simualtaneous Activities in Heterogenous Spaces (inspired by Le Fresnoy drawing)
Graduate Thesis 2022 47 2. Program Blocks 3. Digital Platform That Matches Visitors
