PAD. Pages on Arts and Design

20-37

Authors: Jacopo Leveratto

Although the term habitat represents one of the most crucial ecological concepts for describing the relationship between some species and their environment, it is also one of the vaguest. This is why, in the past few years, it has often been replaced by more specific ones, which could clearly identify the relationships at stake. This is the case, for instance, of the term biotope, which recently, with the increasing awareness of ecosystem interconnectivity, has taken more and more relevance in comparison to the previous one. Whereas a habitat, in fact, is the sum of the physical and biotic resources of a place that allows the survival and reproduction of a particular species, a biotope represents the habitat not of a specific population, but of a whole biotic and sympoietic community. A feature that perfectly describes the characteristics of a new design approach, generally called more-than-human, here analyzed from both a theoretical and methodological standpoint, which today, to tackle major environmental challenges, focuses on building architectures in which multiple species can find some terms for cohabitation. And which, therefore, not only entails addressing a new class of subjects but also challenges the role of architects and other practitioners in this field by requiring new ways of designing that enhance interspecies coexistence and collaboration.

51-72

Authors: Silvana Donatiello, Mariarita Gagliardi

The aim of the paper is to examine how the advancement of technology is radically transforming the way we interact with the domestic sphere. The evolution of digital devices has brought new perspectives for redefining living spaces, raising crucial topics about the traditional function-based model. In this context, design plays a key role in shaping the technological revolution of Post-Domestic habitat. This model was challenged by several designer architects, including Joe Colombo and Superstudio. The integration of Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows the creation of heterotopic spaces, inspired by Foucault’s theory. In this perspective, the home environment is transforming into a fluid and mutable space where users can experience new forms of interaction and space relationship. This radical change raises important questions about the future of living.

98-120

Authors: Nicolas Bailleul

This paper is part of a research-creation project entitled RGB tour, which aims to contextualize the evolution and preservation of the bedroom space within the landscape of videos on the YouTube platform. Through a specific analysis of the room tour practice, we will explore how content creators maintain the usages traditionally associated with the bedroom space while transforming it into a technological entity evolving in parallel with emerging technologies and practices within the domestic environment.

149-168

Authors: Raffaella Fagnoni, Davide Crippa, Annapaola Vacanti

The article discusses the transformation of the Italian domestic environments in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of digital technology. It highlights two key trends: the hybridization of domestic spaces due to remote work, study, training, and socialising facilitated by digital tools, and the increasingly dynamic lifestyles of young people, particularly millennials and Generation Z, who tend to live in rented spaces and embrace remote work. It is then arguable that the identitarian value of domestic spaces is changing, as physical objects and furniture become more interchangeable due to the fast-paced and unpredictable lives of young individuals. This shift must prompt a discussion about how interior design is adapting to such sociological changes. Various options are available for designers to create value through sharing and renting services, drawing inspiration from similar models in the office furniture sector. The primary aim of the paper is to present novel scenarios for the design of domestic spaces, as the servitization of business models offers opportunities to reconsider how products and furniture are acquired and used, particularly as more adults don’t own the homes they live in and frequently change residences. Renting is proposed as an effective model for creating more agile and customizable spaces that align with contemporary lifestyle preferences.

193-208

Authors: Gerhard Bruyns, Daniel Elkin, Andrea Navarrete, Veronica Ching Lee

The desire to live vicariously, mirroring behavioural conditions external to one’s own home, gives each home multiple lives in a hyper-functional world. Technology’s fusion with the home produces two outcomes. First, the ability to capture comprehensive, three-dimensional records of a home’s physical conditions and traces using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, connects functional layout more concretely to behavioural scripts. Second, virtual mirroring converts transferable information about the home from generalities to hyper-specific singularities. A home’s digital twin can contribute to archives of domestic conditions disseminated as assets for access, download, and manipulation in other media. Behavioural simulation and gaming can simulate exact domestic conditions from throughout the world, rather than interpreted approximations. This paper draws on projects developing digital twins of homes in several locations in Hong Kong. Researchers are using 3D scanning technology to record homes in public housing flats and in the stilt house architecture of Tai O Village. The paper discusses technology and workflows employed, theorizing the technological and social impacts of domestic digital twins in data archives. The paper uses graphic precedents to demonstrate archiving protocols and speculate on influences the post-digital turn will have on domestic environments and behaviour.

227-253

Authors: Nicholas Thomas Lee

Through the development of a spatial installation entitled Vanity Chamber, this article reflects upon the role of specular devices within the home and asks how their increased use might affect boundaries between the domestic interior and the world outside. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns many activities previously reserved for the public domain suddenly had to take place in the home, via videotelephony platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime and Microsoft Teams. Cultivated by a pre-existing intrusion into the home of digital specular devices, such as PCs and smart phones, which supported the increased use of videotelephony software observed during the pandemic, many people experienced a breaching of established domestic boundaries. Facilitated by these leaky thresholds, a simultaneous scrutiny from the spectator and a concern by the voyeur for the public display of the private interior was observed during lockdown. An analysis of historical specular devices has shown that acts of voyeurism and vanity on the limits of the home are far from novel occurrences, and that these porous boundaries were often important liminal thresholds bridging the domestic with the public. Through the Research by Design method that led to Vanity Chamber, this article argues that the domestic interior has once again become an essential part of its surrounding neighbourhood and that it is on this frontier, or rather, within this in-between realm that we must now establish home.

283-301

Authors: Anna Barbara, Elena Baharlouei

Mobility technologies, since the discovery of the uniaxial wheel, have strongly shaped the forms and times of cities and buildings and their interiors. The paper explores how newly developed flying transports, such as drones, may in the future reshape and alter the interiors of the buildings we inhabit. Utopias about cities with flying cars are a literature full of examples and theories, such as Andrea Branz/Archizoom’s No Stop City and Instant City and others, but also even more extensive cinematography such as Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, the flying vehicles, by which people as well as goods will soon move, introduce a fourth dimension (time) and will allow access to buildings from the roof and facades. They will recover the distributional logic of an iconic and historical typology of Milanese architecture, that of the edificio a ballatoio, in which the distribution of spaces followed a private/public logic that would lend itself perfectly to the buildings of the drone city. The article will explore the transformations in plans, materials, facades, ways of living, and relationships that, this coming revolution, will introduce into the interior spaces of buildings and our existences.