0.0 Sci-Fi Vernaculars
MA Architecture // MA Interior Design 0.1 T hematic over vie w
Designers, we exist in a science fiction, we imagine a world where our dreams on paper are technically achieved. But what might the future feel like? Taste like? Often the future is post-apocalyptic, manically sublime or mono-aesthetically sterile, but where will the robots sleep, and could there be thatch on Mars? We are ever more motivated by the myth of technological connection, but how do we relate to tactile experience in this glassy world? How do we keep technology natural? Can we save the bees? Students are encouraged to progress and examine primary research through speculation and connection and go for a walk in the altered vernacular of a different climate. This is the principle of the year of design making and critical understanding you are embarking on, you will find a niche in which to flourish. Make this niche your home and adapt to it. Research develops expertise in a certain field, and the initial thinking is often identifying gaps in knowledge and practice which will enable you to make something new in a field of thought and making. You might start to think carefully about perception and future casting, how climates might might change and develop in the future, affecting our daily lives and determining how we adapt to our particular environments as individuals. You will start to question how our relationship to our environment might be mediated and augmented by technology. You might think about how spaces itself might go through a systemic, cybernetic cycle, adapting to external pressures to responsively change form, shape, colour or other physical attributes. You will engage with thinking in specialist fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics, robotics, interactive art and architecture, biochemistry, material science, behavioral science and particular aspects of engineering, ecology and sustainable design thinking. Your design work will slowly increase in scale and ambition as the year progresses in tandem with the independent nature of your studies, you will work from observation to drawing to model and to 1:1 immersive space, all the while challenging your own thinking to achieve the most ambitious outcome. Your greatest surprises and achievements may come in unexpected fields and create new and surprising phenomena, new habitats and ecologies of space, let us say. [continued...] UCA Canterbury School of Architecture // MA Architecture // MA Interior Design // 2017-18