2084: The Fantasy Compact

Abstract

For the last two decades, social media has increasingly dominated our day to day interactions. We have evolved into digitized creatures able to communicate on a daily basis to a broad and varied audience, comprised of people we know, people we hardly know, and people we have never met. Through images, tweets, status updates and posts, everyone has an ability to view and harness a variety of opinions, emotions, stories and ideas at a moment’s notice. It’s in those instances when a person resonates with a certain moment or place they are in, that they create a narrative through a caption or a hashtag that’s attached to an image which allows everyone who views it to read a story of someone’s experience. This digital/virtual age poses new questions for interior architecture, a practice that generally orients itself in the realm of physical, built space. It is the intent of this research to offer a new kind of design approach, more relevant to our current digitized lives, to see what it might offer for urban interior speculations.

Through exploring ways of tapping into this narrative and ‘flipping the script’, we can explore a new kind of design tactic that brings forward the power that social media narratives can have on the built environment and interior strategies. The city of Los Angeles will be used as a testing grounds for narrative urban interior tactics, to see how it could offer the city whimsical and outlandish interventions that respond to the people currently interacting with certain sites in it. As a nod to George Orwell’s 1984 future speculations, this project is a counterpoint that offers an optimistic, open and free speculation tool by providing a constant dialogue between the public and designer through the forum of Instagram.

This project teases out the ideas that narrative can create instinctual, intuitive and thought-provoking designs that can be spectacles, attractors, events or counterparts that open up a potential to talk about interior in a new realm, where it can contribute on larger scales like the urban setting. Urban interior tactics provide outcomes that even in an exterior setting can still create moments of interiority around them as well as within them that bring together two conditions in a propositional manner as opposed to being opposites.

In order to translate the narratives into conceptual design outcomes, drawing and model making will be used as the primary exploratory tools. This offers the audience different means of perception to be gauged through putting it back out into the forum it was derived from, allowing for three final outcomes that respond more accurately to how people react to open narrative as a design tool.