Urban Hub for SEpa Presentation

Second year is over and we are getting ready for our summer holidays. It seems ages ago when we first got our project brief and it also seems unreal that it's over as it pretty much took everybodies life up towards the end...
Below are my presentation sheets for this project and some text explaining the process of the design.

Research and development

Final design

Model and perspectives

Our task for this project was to up cycle an existing warehouse in Dundee and design an innovative and sustainable Urban Hub for SEPA (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency). For my research I looked at various designers and architects who consider the environment and design in order to improve it. The fact that the offices are to be designed  in order to accommodate staff of SEPA who are responsible for protecting and improving  Scotland’s environment meant that the building had to be as sustainable as possible but also flexible in case of an increase of staff members. Other than new technology like solar/ photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, rain water harvesting, ventilation systems and a lot more, I looked into reclaimed materials for the remodel of the building but also was very interested in reclaiming furniture for the interior spaces too.  After a site visit I was able to consider the surrounding area and start developing ideas of how to use natural resources but also consider the noise from the busy street and football clubs and try and design a space suitable for offices.

In the final design, the layout and the shapes formed in the building are all taken from the shape of two triangles intersecting each other on the first floor.  The purpose of these two triangles is to make the building’s interior more interesting by creating interesting shapes and openings where people can look up or down from. It also takes the hardness of the rectangular exterior away. Starting from ground floor, there is the reception and waiting area as you enter the building, two meeting rooms, Labs (accommodating 4 staff), shower room, cafeteria and restrooms. The first floor has the main work stations (accommodating 24 staff), 4 managers offices and restrooms. The maisonette has the CEO office and a library. The floors are supported with timber joists and structures which are salvaged from demolishing buildings in Dundee but also the walls and furniture are all salvaged too. The southwest facade of the building is covered with CASE glass, a concentrating solar system whereas the northeast facade has small wind turbines integrated in the wall, inspired by architect and designer Alexander Pincus.

Assignment 5 A: Planning for the future

Research Proposal

Do social networks connect or isolate people?

Introduction

This question is often asked as people nowadays are not sure whether social networks bring them closer to other people or keep them away from everybody. In fact it could do both but by this research being carried out the results that are expected are of what social networks do most. Do they help people with their social skills or do they make people stick on their computers (Laptops etc.) and ignore the people around them in most cases?

Taking into consideration that people have got very contradictory opinions on this subject a result on what is thought the most is needed in order to come to a conclusion. In the book E-topia William Mitchell talks about how technology improvements have affected peoples’ way of socializing and he compares social networks with ways of socializing in areas before the internet and in fact before water distribution systems were even invented. He mentions that people used to have to gather around the well and socialize while also getting some water to take back to their homes but when water pipes were fitted in their homes they didn’t have a reason to go to the well therefore they didn’t socialize as much. According to him something similar is going on since the invention of social networks and the need of going out to socialize with people is minimized.

 On the other hand we have an article about how elderly people felt using social networks to socialize in a pilot project which was carried out in Australia. After strategies and researches it was proven that social networks were most needed in evenings and weekends when there was nothing else for the elderly people to do and it was most likely for them to feel lonely. The researches came to the conclusion that social networks were the most effective tools to prevent isolation.

Research method

In previous assignments we have tried out a lot of different methods of research some of which are interviews, visual analysis of images, experiments, observation, brainstorming etc. and all have been useful for certain subjects.

In this case though, I strongly believe that the most appropriate method for this research to be carried out is by interviews. One to one informal talks with people would help cover all areas and broaden the subject by long conversations. The need for a big range of people with different backgrounds is understandable, therefore there will be a list of people with different disciplines, ages and ‘class’ in order to have as accurate results as possible.

Before interviewing people, a brainstorm and a mind map are needed in order to come up with good questions that will help the interview be a lot easier by keeping the subject interested and willing to express themselves freely about what they think of social networks.

The limitation of this method is that there are only a certain number of people you can interview in a short period of time so a small selection of people has to be carefully chosen in order to achieve accurate results. The observation method is something I wouldn’t choose to use as it is really time consuming although of course some observation is always necessary and especially for this subject, as social networks are used by most people.  Observing people close to me and seeing how they use the internet will just be something that will help myself understand peoples needs and will not have any impact on the research results.

Plan

Considering there are no complications, this research is only expected to last a month and that is the aim. Preparation will be done at the start of semester 1 of third year, and soon as I’m going to carry it out alone I aim to have results by November.

After the interviews and the gathering and studying of the results, in case of any data lack, a back-up plan is necessary as the research is planned to be carried out in a short period of time. The aim is to have good results in four weeks, if that isn’t achieved, another method that will boost the results up is believed to be the Visual Analysis of images.

 Plan B is rather easy and quick. All that has to be done is find an appropriate image that will be neutral and will be best interpreted by subjects. For example, an image of a person alone on a laptop might make some people think that the person in the image feels lonely so tries to connect with people through social networks, and some will think that the person is isolated because he/she has been driven into being obsessed by the web and spends a lot of time alone in a room on the computer rather than using their socializing skills. After a while if you don’t socialize with people around you, you become lonely and forget the importance of face to face contact with people.

Is he lonely because of social networks or is he connecting with friends back home?

 It will be different from the experiment in Assignment 1 as the subjects will not have to be manipulated into thinking of a specific scenario, it’s clearly up to them whether they think it shows an isolated person or a person that is connecting with people. This plan is pretty straight forward and does not need any prior preparation for it to be carried out although also for this, the people have to be from different backgrounds and age. With their answers, it will be possible to know what they think about technology improvement and social networks.   

Assignment 5B: TO DO List for the summer holidays!

TO DO:
Five books I want to read over the summer-




-'' Alone together'' : lonely in a world with 1,000 virtual distractions, is a book written by Sherry Turkle. I came across this book in my research about Social networks and if they connect or isolate people. I'm interested in reading it because of all the negative reviews on it and the way people seem to totally disagree with what Turkle says about technology.  





-''In the bubble'' by John Thackara, this book was mentioned in one of our Design Studies lectures ( talks) by Lauren Currie aka Red jotter. She said that she had read it and thinks it's something everybody should read at some point.








 

-The next book I aim to read is: ''The back of the Napkin'' by Dan Roam as it was highly recommended by our lecturer Jonathan Baldwin and unfortunately I haven't got round to reading it yet.

-Another book I would like to read is ''Ways of seeing '' by John Berger, as I  remember reading a review about it when I was doing the first assignment of this semester which was about what images mean.










-The fifth book I'm going to read is ''The Eco-Design Handbook'' by Alastair Fuad-Luke as I think making life more sustainable is mostly down to designers to do. it introduces you to eco-friendly materials and alternative ways of using them and being innovative.








Five changes to my blog- 

-First of all I want to get a wordpress blog.
-Organize and separate my blog posts to : Assignments, Portfolio and Projects.
-Choose an image I like and that I will use everywhere in order for people to recognize me like Red Jotter has done.
-Get a Flickr account and upload photographs of my work.
-Organize my tags so that they are easy for people to find.




People I want to connect with-  

Over the summer holidays, I also want to get a Twitter account in order to connect with more people.
-To start off, there are some people I would like to keep in touch with and follow on Twitter or by blog because it is always useful to be able to see what other people might be doing currently, e.g projects they are working on, research they are carrying out or even a book they found interesting. Some of these people are :

-Lauren Curry which gave us a talk  in one of our lectures and is really inspiring by the way she has connected with a lot of people through Twitter, Blogs and Skype. 
-Linsey Mcintosh that has graduated in interior and environmental design and is currently completing her Masters degree in Design, she also gives us interesting materials talks every Thursday afternoon.  
-I would like to follow sites like Design* Sponge ( on Twitter)
-People that have recently graduated from design courses, it will be interesting to find out what they went through and done after University.
-Finally, following designers and companies will help me connect and have a change to show my work to possible future employers.

Urban Hub for SEPA

Our current project is to remodel (up-cycle) an existing warehouse which is located opposite Dundee United football club. The warehouse is to be turned into an innovative, dynamic but most importantly sustainable Urban Hub for SEPA ( Scottish Environmental Protection Agency) http://www.sepa.org.uk/.
We are free to do anything to the building as long as we stay within the supporting columns and of course for structural reasons because the building isn't new we have to keep the support frame for the roof. Other than that and the fact that we have to take UK public building regulations into consideration, there is no other boundaries.

 This is the warehouse on Tannadice Street :

At the start of this project we were split into groups of four in order to help each other research about : Eco, Green, Sustainable and Natural Design we then presented our findings to the rest of the class. I found this method really interesting and useful as when you research by yourself you tend to keep a lot of information to yourself when it is good to share things you find interesting with others and vice versa. Doing this you end up having a broader knowledge which helps you become more creative. I was amazed at how different every groups presentation was despite the fact that our topics were very similar.
 Here are some websites I came across during my research.

 Sustainability:
http://www.environmentteam.com/list/top-10-trends-in-green-building-industry-2010-by-jerry-yudelson/
http://www.consultfes.co.uk/?gclid=CJHy5fXSuaYCFVBO4QodFxouIQ
http://www.sustainablebuild.co.uk/ReclaimedMaterials.html
http://pinc.us/featured-work/ecco-eco-la/
http://www.sproutdesign.co.uk/what_is_sustainable_design.htm

Offices etc:
http://www.officesnapshots.com/
http://www.thecoolhunter.co.uk/offices
http://www.home-designing.com/2009/03/an-office-made-from-cardboard
 http://www.saracenoffice.com/fit-out/decoration


Designing offices for SEPA means that not only we need to provide the basic accommodation or zones that every other ordinary office would have but we also need to include research Labs and showers because part of the staffs job is to go out to sites if somebody reports something suspicious like polluted rivers and take samples so they need somewhere to get cleaned up and somewhere to analyze and test the samples. The Hub has to be able to accommodate 24 staff (workstations), 4 deputy Managers and a Chief Executive Officer. Having in mind that the offices have to be flexible in case of increase of staff I have decided that open plan work station are the best solution to that which means that the desk have to be flexible, detachable( if even attached to each other) allowing the number of spaces to increase easily too. In this building I will also be providing a waiting area ( by the reception), a cafeteria, 2 meeting rooms and WC's all of which will be on the ground floor making the areas easily accessed by visitors ( the public). On the top floor there will be the 24 open planned work stations, 4 managers offices, another set of WC's for staff, storage room, CEO office, and a quiet space/ Library where staff can chill out but also get information if they need it.

Quick sketches and some initial ideas:

Meeting room/Cafe

Library/Quiet space

managers office

meeting room

Partition/meeting room

Meeting rooms

1st floor/stations

This is a sketch of the exterior
and an idea of creating an interesting
facade by using wind turbines and incorporating
then into the design. Inspired by Alexander Pincus.

Ake Dil ( One Heart )

Ake Dil is what we named the chair we made for our furniture project! All four of us had been looking at curved shapes and furniture for inspiration as soon as we got the project brief so we decide to look at the female body because of the curves. After looking at the Kamasutra Temple ( Lakshman Temple)http://www.shunya.net/Pictures/NorthIndia/Khajuraho/Khajuraho.htm we noticed how the female and male figures were intersecting each other and you can hardly figure out the different parts of bodies because the sculptures are very complicated.  This was an ideal concept for our chair so we then came up with all different ideas and sketches , mostly curvy shapes but some also with both curves and straight lines ( representing the male body ). Having the title '' One Body, One Heart'' in mind we tried to bring both curves and boldness into our design combining both got really interesting as each one of us had different ideas.

After some more research and looking at other designers works and being inspired by many other pieces of furniture we came across Richard Deacon who was our main inspiration! http://www.richarddeacon.net/ . All of his sculptures consist of curves and a lot of them are continuous curvy shapes.
. 

We realized that in order to achieve something similar we would have to learn how to steam bend and laminate wood. You can only learn these techniques by practicing so before we knew it we were in the workshop steam bending and doing things we never imagined we would be doing. But before you can do either of these, you have to make a jig which you will then use to bend the steamed wood over and hold the two with clamps. This is what it looks like when it is left in the jig to cool down and form a curve.

Steam bending is not an easy process as you have to work extremely fast and with care because if the wood cools down in the process of bending it round the jig it is most likely to snap, leaving you with a piece of timber you cannot use again which is a waste but also loss of time as you have to keep each piece of wood in the steamer for nearly 2 hours which only allowed us to bend one piece a day. We also had a limited amount of wood we could use so we couldn't really afford making mistakes.




Here is one of our initial tests (failure)
before we started making our chair :




After a lot of hard work and many little problems we managed to overcome we had our beautiful final outcome which we were all proud of and thankful of each other for our great team work and coordination because it is impossible to achieve something like this alone. Sometimes even all four of us weren't enough as each of us had there own job, e.g I was clamping the wood with Fawn while Duncan was forcing the wood round the jig with Malcolm ( our tutor) and Christina was making sure there were no snaps or gaps formed between the timber and jig.

Nearly done! (not)

Once all the components are made and finally put together you suddenly feel so relieved and happy it's finally over although there is still a lot to do..... We also changed our design slightly because our initialy design had a back support decorated with Hindu designs which we used the laser cutter to etch it on then laminated strips of ply together in order to curve it. When the chair was put together we decided to keep it simple is it were already a very dynamic shape and we felt like the decoration took the beauty of the structure away. We didn't feel like it was incomplete and we actually made it in such way that you can attach the back piece if you want to.
Here are some images of it being made and being tried on the chair :

Sanding the final piece down and making it look smooth took ages and it got very messy at one point but it was worth all the work. After it has been sanded down it needs to be waxed so that the wood keeps in good condition and doesn't rot.

Below are our presentation sheets and our finished chair. :-)

Research

Development/ Sketches

Making/ In spaces

CAD drawings/Photos

Set up and ready to present our final design:

Photos of Ake Dil chair by Fawn Russell, Yasemin Memis, Duncan Perkins and Christina Davis :