PORTFOLIO STELLA TAOUSIANI MA_ID CSM & Dipl. Arch Eng UCY
/CONTENTS [MA
[BSC
INDUSTRIAL 2016-2018
ARCHITECTURE 2009-2014
DESIGN
ENG
CSM]
UCY]
1/ CONNECTIONS
2/ URBIE
3/ TWINKLE’S
4/ MYSTORY
6/ THE EATING POD
7/ RESEARCH CENTRE
8/ THINK TANKS
9/ DIGITAL FABRICATION
5/ZAOPROIFRUH
Granary square, London
1/CONNECTIONS Project 1.1 MA Industrial Design ‘The connections, the connections, the connections.’ When Charles Eames said the above, he was alluding to the relationship between elements of design detailing in a piece of office furniture. On a bigger scale, he meant this as a metaphor for the process of design as a whole. The concept of ‘Connections’ is closely related to common theories of ‘creativity,’ and is fundamental to the production of design work in particular.
2016
Individual project/ Part team work publication: http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/csm/2016/11/02/ making-connections-with-ma-industrial-design/
We were given a number. Number 1 had to initiate a chain reaction by creating a mechanism that would trigger a second device created by 2, then 3 and so on until the final member. As I like to explore and gather information from my surrounding urban environment, the initial idea was informed by a new environment for me: Granary square. I found the playfulness of the fountain in the square related to the concept of connections and very engaging to the people. Therefore, I started exploring the idea of how this could be translated into a smaller scale. The final outcome is a mechanism that consists of hundreds of nails adjusted to a double wooden surface. The machine has no specific shape when deactivated (like when the fountains in granary square are off). When the previous machine activates it, the machine falls on an arrow shape that is placed at the base and the nails shape the arrow on the top part, pointing to the next machine. When the part with the nails falls on the base, the trigger at the end of the mechanism activates the next machine. The concept was developed by making quick sketches to communicate the idea. As the idea was highly related to the material and the reaction between different elements I started working with models in an early stage. The final outcome was presented at Heath Robinson’s museum in London.
photo taken at the exhibition in Heath Robinson’s museum
working model 1
INPUT
DESIGN
MODEL A
OUTPUT
MODEL B
INPUT
OUTPUT
FINAL MODEL C
the final machine
the final machine connected with input and output
28
3
22
3
2/URBIE: SMARTPHONE ACCESSORY
2017
group project Giorgia Rossi, Stella Taousiani, Jiayi Li, Xiaonan Zhang
video:https://youtu.be/IR3p_pVqGAA
Project 1.2 MA Industrial Design/ Client Project/ Huawei. This project is about the interrelationships between the body, mobile technology and how consumption affords social capital Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in developed markets1. They enable people to act, interact and manage their lives in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. But beyond their utilitarian benefits, smartphones have emerged as a key semiotic device: a communicator of our personal tastes, values, and social status2. Arguably, the smartphone is our most intimate companion. It lives with us more closely than any other category of product. We keep them close to our bodies like clothing. We wear smartphone accessories like jewellery – we even devolve our consciousness in part, to them too. To this extent, the smartphone can be seen as an extension of minds, a surrogate, companion; a magical avatar; and ultimately a simulacrum - an idealised representation of the self.As the brief was very open and the client did not define more specifically, we had to re-brief all the information gathered throughout the visits of the client. The term luxury was examined at the beginning of the process and led to various design proposals that were adjusted to the needs of the clients
URBIE BADGE Urbie is an engaging urban game, a reflection of its user's activity in the city. Urbie is for the artistic minded new cosmopolitan and it’s building up a community entirely devoted to culture. Urbie is a badge for culture seekers and, combined with UrbieApp, provides to the Huawei user a unique experience. If you are a culture keeper, you can now easily share your work through the app and Huawei will provide you with a sticker that identifies you as part of its growing community. That’s also how the culture seeker is going to find you: through the app he finds new spots all over the world and the more he explores the city, the more he’s rewarded. In fact, as soon as he gets less than 10 metres to the UrbieSpot, he can check-in with the badge, collecting points to unlock amazing prizes.
URBIE APP
USER A: THE CULTURE KEEPER The culture keepers can share their work through the app and Huawei will provide them with a sticker that identifies you as part of its growing community. That’s also how the culture seeker is going to find them: through the app he finds new spots all over the world and the more he explores the city, the more he’s rewarded. In fact, as soon as he gets less than 10 metres to the UrbieSpot, he can check-in with the badge, collecting points to unlock amazing prizes.
The culture keepers create a profile on the urbie app sharing the location of the work they want to promote as well as a few words and other examples of their work. After the Huawei urbie community accepts them, they become a part of the community and their spot is appeared on the urbie map.
the badge
the core charging base
THE DESIGN As the culture seekers join the community they receive Urbie in its box, which also functions as a charger. Urbie consists in two main parts, the core and the brooch: the core controls all the digital functions, while the badge shows the reflection of your cultural activity in the city.
THE CORE The core functions as the key that gives life to Urbie. It is essential for the check-in and Bluetooth paired with the Huawei phone. The core comes with the pistive whereas the badge comes with the negative part. The connection to the clothes or accessories of the user happens with the metallic pin in the back of it
Everything is mechanically jointed with the brooch. Thanks to its modular nature, its design in interchangeable. According to the seasons, the user can both win or purchase a new version of the badge. The first design has been committed by Huawei to CSM, which proposed two possibilities: a transformable and a static one. The changing badge will grow as you collect points checking in in the locations and its shape is the reflection of your activity. It consists of a metallic rod construction, over which a flexible textile outer skin has been stretched. The material reacts directly to the forces acting on it, enabling new shapes to come. The static one is a frozen image of the last step of the transformation. The textile membrane is replaced with the same metal Huawei uses for its phones.
tex tile membrane
steel rods
set
core
T H E CO L L ECTION OF 2017
winter CSM
W IN T E R
spring
Takash i Mu rakam i
SP R I N G
Our concept was that for the next seasons Huawei is going to collaborate with widely known artists and designers. Takashi Murakami has designed the spring badge, while Cai Guo-Qiang did the summer one. Autumn’s badge will be an artwork by Thomas Heatherwick’s. But in the end, is the Urbie user itself who will define the new aesthetic, redefines luxury promoting and absorbing culture in all of its shades.
summer
Ca i Guo-Qia ng
SUMMER
autumn
Thomas Heat herw i c k ’s
AUT U MN
3/TWINKLE’S DRESS ME UP I’M COLD Critical Interrogation of Practice 1: Hack the City. Experiencing an unexpected place in an unpredictable way. After receiving the area around Piccadilly Circus and Oxford street in London through a dice game our group had to build an interpretation of the ‘dérive’, a drifting through the city which enables the extraordinary to come to light, by suspending normal expectations and filtering devices. It is like being a child, a creature that has arrived from another planet, or someone in a foreign city who has lost their passport and their mobile phone. In practice it is very difficult to suppress norms and expectations- they exist to protect us, and help us to survive. All members of the team had been quite familiar with the area and had a similar perception about it: a busy commercial centre. We decided to play a game to “ hack the city” to create our own dérive, to act in a way that is normally inefficient, illogical, or even dangerous. We walked in the city using the methods of being : blindfolded, walking backwards and looking up in the sky. The street artists, the manequins in the showcases, the beggers, the christmas decorations, the huge screens were all different types of performances with the same audience: the visitors of the area. THE IDEA The basic idea was to create a new type of performance, an interactive performance which functions as a reflection of all the incomes and key ideas we got from the analysis of the area. The manequin becomes a performer, comes out of the showcases, into the urban environment and lets people interact with it and become performers too. In order to attract the attention from the audience, the manequin is a vulnerable persona that asks for help/ sympathy by using the phrase “Dress me Up, I’m cold”. The persona of the manequin is named after Twinkles: A children’s game where children are invited to dress their doll up with cut-out clothes. In the same way Mr Twinkle’s asks the audience to dress him up using wasted plastic bags.
2016
group project Cathryn Chang Yao Fu, Kiang Charmain, Lisa Stolz Stella Taousiani video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncIktdGm8ic
4/ REDESIGNING LONDON BREAKFAST EXPERIENCE Critical Interrogation of Practice 2,4: Could food become a common language? If yes, what would it say? Food is always a subject of discussion when people from different cultures meet in a common place. A conversation around the subject was developed between the team and various topics where introduced with the conversation heading to two basic directions: 1)The subject of how our breakfast habits change as people move to other countries. 2) The fact that most of the restaurants are named after the country of origin “Chinese”, “Greek”, “Japanese” while the city of London itself could create a totally new cuisine, reflecting all the different cultures that is constituted of? 3) The fact that the English breakfast does not reflect this variety of different countries. We decited to play a fast game between the group, drawing our breakfast in a plate and discussed how the “English breakfast” does not reflect the cosmopolitan character of London. That game was the trigger for the basic idea that followed which was mainly based on redesigning the London breakfast experience. Our intervention was based in Chinatown. The result was still satisfactory as we managed to take information of 30 participants (ourselves included), from 11 different countries. The “breakfast table” was installed in the middle of Chinatown, in front of the China Exchange building. The set of the ingredients where mainly based on our own breakfast habits. With the outcome we wanted to create the ideal or most common “London breakfast” by putting together the most popular ingredients, chosen by the participants. The basic idea was to create our own restaurant which focuses in redesigning the London breakfast experience. Zaoproifruh(combination of the words in the mother tonques of the group:Chinese, Greek and German) ues the 5 most popular ingredients gathered by the experiment and creates a whole new catalogue with 5 main dishes : Sweet, Minimal, Savoury, Weird, Minimal and International( the international breakfast is a combination of the ingredients mostly used in the breakfast in the countries of the group members. The names of the dishes were inspired by the names of the people we had interviewed during our visit in Chinatown.
2016
group project Cathryn Chang Yao Fu, Kiang Charmain, Lisa Stolz Stella Taousiani video: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=AR5mhjFsKOQ
CIP_02 was chosen for further development and video making for the needs of the last CIP_04.
IDEA
Our main idea was to create a type of short 2 minute video that would be used between the programs in a food channel. The film presents 5 food “specialists� who have one main goal: Redesign the London Breakfast. Each episode of this short series of videos would visit a different area in London, gather information about the breakfast habits of the visitors and redesign the breakfast which reflects the habits of the people around the area. The video we produced is the first episode of the series where the scientists visit Chinatown. After interviewing and exploring the area the food specialists create 5 totally new dishes ( the dishes introduced in CIP02) . The video has a humourous tone/mood.
5/ MYSTORY: DESIGN AS PLATFORM
2017
Individual project
Project 1.3 MA Industrial Design/ Design as Platform The conceptions and scope of Industrial Design is changing. Industrial designers no longer simply create static products, but are increasingly responsible for the design of interactions, the creation of platforms for open-innovation, and ever- evolving performative products. Working in this context, the industrial designer needs to develop an understanding of interaction design. This includes building understandings of the technologies and competencies required to facilitate and afford interactions between a network of objects and users. Our smartphone knows everything about us. Every day we use numerous applications that import different information about our daily activities on our phone. What time we woke up, the places we have been to, the duration of our activities, the people we have interacted with, our steps, our tastes, our likes, our dislikes. The more applications we use, the more our smartphone knows about us.
Mystory explores the idea of how all the information imported in our phone through apps can be used to create a scenario, a book, a story of the user’s life. The longer the user has the application and the more applications it is allowed to have access to, the more sufficient the story becomes. After allowing the app to run at the background of their smartphone for a period of time, the users can choose what type of book they would like to order: Comicbook, Diary/Autobiography, Novel. The application generates story and the images of the book according to the information it has gathered during that period and the book is delivered to the user’s home.
mystoryapp asks for permition to The user's applications. Once the access is given the application can start storing information and
my story acts like a shortcut to the applications it has access to. The user can then use the highlight button as shown below to highlight
As the time passes by the application starts to generate the habits of the user (e.g Uses the underground everyday at 08:50 from location a to location b) and generates a persona around him/her according to their social media profiles, likes, dislikes, conversations, photos etc
mystory stores all the highlighted stories in the database
After a certain period of time the users can choose to order their stories using the app. Parts of the story like protagonists, stories, conversations or highlights can be viewed and edited by the user .
6/ THINK TANKS: RETHINKTOURISM Diploma thesis This diploma thesis simultaneously examines two basic issues. On the one hand it investigates the possibilities for the revival of an industrial wasteland (ex-refinery area in Larnaca, Cyprus); on the other hand it focuses in the meaning and the possibilities of concept of “tourism”. The area of study is of significant importance regarding to tourism, resulting to the opportunity for further investigation of the term. Starting from the smaller scale, it becomes clear that the area of study creates a strong spatial relationship with its future neighbor: the port terminal. This relationship has given motivation for discussion around the subject from the locals, resulting to proposals which aim to bring “touristic development” to the area. As we move to larger scales, other ways of connection between the area and the subject of tourism are being emerged. The site, as an important part of the city, has the opportunity of creating strong relationships with the city, thus with the biggest airport of the country and finally, with the whole island which is being self-promoted as an ideal “sea, sun, sand” destination. What do exactly to the terms “tourist” and “touristic development” mean? How can this abandoned, non-place, disconnected from the city area to become a livable part of the urban fabric all year round? Aiming to answer to these questions, this research also redefines the term “tourist”. The tourist and the local are reconceptualized as “visitors” who share and inhabit the same space in different periods of time. The general strategy of the project, is to make interventions on different scales (from the building scale to the city scale) in order to achieve the mixture of different types of users and break the division between the “local” and the “tourist” the “city and the “wasteland”.
2014 Individual project Third Prize
7/ RESEARCH CENTRE IN THE SALT LAKE Architectural Design VI & Architectural Technology. The purpose of the project is to examine the terms of Adaptability, for the use of a research centre in a very sensitive site: a salt lake. The main concept was to turn the building into a living organism by reflecting the changing conditions of the site’s environment, which rapidly changes appearance throughout the year. What is more, some basic designing goals were to leave the minimum footprint on the site and make the building self-sufficient. The basic structure is created by 12 pillars which are covered with “Etfe” Membrane to form a big opening in the centre of the building. This opening promotes the “venture effect”, the use of the wind pressure from the sit in order to activate wind turbine which is located at the top of the pillars and produce energy for the needs of the building. The 12 pillars support a circular-movement –ramp which starts as a natural path from the outside of the building and becomes its basic circulation. The ramp can be used as an interactive exhibition space throughout the year. Finally, different types of units are supported around the ramp, hosting the uses of labs, conference rooms and green spaces. This creates an interaction for the visitor (of the exhibition or the green spaces) with the scientists. The units are designed such as, to be place on and removed from the building.
2012 Team project Michael Marina, Taousiani Stella
8/ DIGITAL FABRICATION Advanced computer Aided Design. The use of software programs and computational methods as architectural design tools for both composition and communication is having a great impact to contemporary design. This project focuses on the understanding and use of the possibilities offered by digital mashines(like 3D printer) in prototyping, from the stage of design to the stage of final fabrication/implementation. Particularly, at first point a unit was designed with the use of Rhino software. The designing goal was to make this unit easy-to-connect with others but also structurally autonomous. The final unit was inspired by the scissors mechanism with 8 connection points. The connections between the units were designed as well and finally, the whole system of units was transformed around a specific surface. A part of the whole system was finally printed in 3D-printer at the last stage of fabrication and the final product was a 3D model which functions as a strong structural system.
2012 Team project Michael Marina, Taousiani Stella Kyrisavva Maria
9/ EATING POD:THE FUTURE OF THE EATING EXPERIENCE Create in Architecture though fine arts. 2113, the overpopulation of the earth, subsequently, the increasing need for food, led the human to the need of finding alternative ways to fulfil the needs of the human body. One of their only options of receiving protein is eating insects, since meat is now a luxury product. The above led to an era where eating is just an act of completing the needs of our body and nothing more. This project aims to bring back both the experience and the social meaning of eating, by the creation of individual pods. A natural liquid is produced in fields around the city and is being supplied by underground tubes. This liquid contains all the nutrients required for the human body to exist healthily. Once the liquid is transeferred to residences or public spaces, is stored in the “tables”. The eating pods can be pugged not only in the roofs of the buildings but also to the tables in order to be supplied with the liquid. In most of the cultures, a dinner has three main stages. Those stages can be followed by the user once he enters the eating pod. STAGE 1/THE DRINK: Once the pod is still open the user can socialize with the users in the other pods while having a drink STAGE 2/EATING: The user chooses the type of dinner plus the place he/she wants to be virtually transferred to(and interact with other users). The pod the produces the “eating experience”. STAGE3/ THE COFFEE: After experiencing food, the pod opens again the user can have a coffee with the rest of the users.
2013 Individual Project