Well, what have I done since my last committee meeting?
What I have done since my last committee meeting
By Archigeek
The last time we saw Archigeek's thesis committee, they commented that her site research seemed premature, and that she think about her definition of ambiguity. Her notes suggest she create a 24hr flow diagram of the site and look at scales of occupations, linear propogation and exponential growth.
Well, since my last committee meeting, I have been thinking about definitions of ambiguity. I realized that the microarchitectural articulations (MA's) were not covering enough potential uses, and the way they were derived was unsystematic. I decided that if I was going to seriously consider MA's as a process, I should investigate all the different surface possibilities inherent in the 16 MA's I had created.
Part of the reason I did this was that the MA's were still program driven. Because they came from Architectural Graphic Standards (AGS), they still appeared to be very linked to the uses keyed to different positions of the body. I was also very aware that when I had been putting the MA's together I had been thinking of different programs that they could be applied to.
I then created a matrix that could explore some other possible MA's. I took each of the initial drawings from AGS: ramp, stair, sitting reach, standing reach, reclining angles, facing table, high work counter, and stage and added envelope as it had appeared numerous times in the MA's. I 'bred' each of these 9 sections together: this significantly increased the MA's. As some of the original MA's had three antecedents, I did this a second time to derive second generation MA's.
I now have a full tool kit of sectional moments. Because I bred together all possibilities, some uses work better than others and in some cases the original uses are impossible (or as Team pointed out, extremely dangerous). This is not a problem: in fact, it may even be desireable because it removes program from the sections and reduces them to an investigation of coincidences in surface variation keyed to the human body.
The matrix opens up my definition of ambiguity by allowing each moment to do more than the 2 or 3 AGS that spawned it. They are no longer designed to be ambiguous because the user needs to choose from 2 or 3 possible uses, but because they appear so strange there is no clear use and so the user need to choose from an infinite amount of habitations.
While the matrix has been tremendously useful, the MA's are still stuck as sectional moments. This is where the study of proxemics starts to come into play. While all the AGS have mimum widths (for example, a seat must be 16" or wider to be used as a seat) most do not have maximums. Those that do are linked to material -- they need to be narrow enough for users to slide their legs into the leg space. This is the case for the facing table and the desk.
So what criteria should be used for giving the MA's depth? I don't think that they can be given depth without beginning to program them. Instead, I looked at human spatial bubbles to find what kind of options I have for width. I'm still looking small, so I decided that a group of two people would be appropriate (something that I should also note is that in a study of 7,405 informal groups and 1,458 people working, 71% of all groups were two people). I took three MA's as examples and applied human bubble distances to them to see what happens. It becomes clear that planning for two people who want to be in each others' intimate or personal space is fine, when they wish to remain at a social or public space, density is too low to design for a public space.
This is when I began to look at the strategies people use to withdraw when people are in the wrong zone of their space. Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of the elevator: users look at the moving light panel because they do not wish to make eye contact with people who are standing closer than they would prefer. On buses, riders tense muscles that come into contact with others, don't make eye contact and do not speak when they might otherswise apologize in order to dehumanize (and aid others to dehumanize) other riders. Shutting out people in your bubble of personal space is a lot of effort and quite tiring.
Because the UBC bus loop will accomodate fluctuations in the number of people that will be using the plaza and adjacent spaces, it is inevitable that at some point people will be crowded closer to each other than they would prefer. In order to accomodate this, the space should be designed both sociofugally and sociopetally. In this way, people who wish to exclude others from their personal space could do so using less room than might otherwise be possible, but there would also be opportunities for groups to meet there comfortably. While sociofugal and sociopetal design is often seen as a matter of style, small moves can have an enormous effect.
People will chose adjacencies related to the different ways they are interacting. This can be broken down into three groups: people confront, consort, or coexist. When people are confronting each other, dominancy is unclear. These people will sit accross from each other to better judge facial expressions and body language. When people consort, it happens in two ways. When people collaborate by working on the same project, they will sit next to each other or around the corner of a table so they see the world from the same perspective. When people converse, they wish to see each other's facial expressions and so will face each other.
Most important is when people are coexisting. Most often people who are coexsting will seat themselves in a reciprocal arrangement that is diagonally separated to minimize eye contact. When trains or buses fill up, people who are coexisting will distribute themselves evenly throughout to minimize contact. In the case of a train, territories can be marked by a coat or briefcase.
This information is particularly useful to me because it begins to suggest ways in which MA's could be assembled to permit different kinds of interaction. The UBC bus loop should have space for confrontation, consorting and coexisting. Since there is not enough space for people to avoid entering each other's personal space, MA's should be arranged to allow people to coexist comfortably. One of the ways this can happen is by designing in sociopetal and sociopetal ways. This will allow spaces to remain ambiguous because the ways that people interact are not prescribed, but will be articulated by the combinations of MA's.
Thesis Advisor M remarked that while she liked the MA matrix, it was time to start thinking about making design decisions for specific reasons, instead of trying to find a program that would solve the problem itself (that's program in the computer sense, not the architectural sense). Arranging the MA's sociopetally and sociofugally would be a step towards doing this.
There are pros and cons to this. I'm arguing that the matrix increases ambiguity by combining surfaces while disregarding program and so creates infinite use opportunities rather than two or three use opportunities derived from the AGS. They are so weird it is not a choice of two or three, but a question of if it should be inhabited at all. If this is the case, I don't want to make assumptions about how people will be sitting because it starts to imply that I'm designing for the one or two programs. How can I mediate this problem?
I might just have to bite the bullet and say I'm designing for two or three uses.
Archigeek leaves for a short time for a consult
Team was out getting coffee, but Short Bus thinks that I should use both definitions of ambiguity. While I'm going to design for the uses specified in AGS, it's with the understanding that there are probably many other uses produced by the conjunction of surfaces that I can't control and don't want to. So, ambiguous is defined as 2+ or 3+ forms of occupation.
Also, there are some AGS's I combined that can't have sociopetal or sociofugal design applied to them. The envelope, ramp and stair do not allow inhabitation. In fact, I'm pretty sure the envelope shouldn't even be included, but it's too late now. The ramp and stair are about movement. You can sit on a stair, but you can't sit on the stair portion of a stair/seat, because the seat is defined as the part you sit on. As soon as you sit, the stair becomes a seat.
There are some AGS that already have relationships built in. The stage is designed for public space (near or far). The high work counter and the facing table allow for competing or consorting: while the distance is considered far-personal, I think the table/counter mitigates that relationship and changes it to close-social.
I think I'm going to take a look at the different relationships inherent in the AGS and see if that gets me anywhere.
