Shelter

The social aspect of living ,problems and discuss for solutions

Today we had to imagine and design the social aspecof a human sheltert and the interactions that occour in a neighbour.The goup consists of four persons Rita,Felipe,jesus and Panagiotis. First of all we draw a steet and started putting the human presence on it.Furthermore we put houses and two blocks of appartments.Then we continued with public spaces where people meet.So we create a market , a school, a bus stop,some parking lots , a park with sport facilities, a church some more shops.We focused on what kind of persons and what time they use each facility and move in the street.How they interact in the presence of the others. We also put a pub that creates problems in the neighbour for which the citizens have to find a solution.

What kind of problems can we have in the neighborhood?

What kind of problems can we have in the neighborhood? The main problem that we have focused on is the noise, because it is an essential matter relating to well-being. Noise can be really disturbing and disrupts the activity and balance of human life. In this specific case we have predicted the noise levels throughout the day and concluded that there is a peak in the morning, from when everyone leaves home to go to work, either by car or by bus. This noise level is also due to the trucks that brings the goods to the market, which leads to another problem that is the fact that the truck blocks the street to evacuate the goods, causing a lot of traffic and, therefore, increasing the noise and people’s dissatisfaction. The noise also increases during the lunch time because of the school canteen and the coffee shop. When people are coming back home there’s another peak due to the traffic, less intense than in the morning as people return home at a larger range of day time. The main issue is the noise that starts at night due to the pub, which disturbs a lot the residents who cannot sleep until about 4h in the morning. Even alter the pub closes, there are drunk people yelling, breaking glass bottles, spilling the garbage on the floor. This is a serious problem for the neighborhood, causing not only sleep disturbing, but also creating an non secure environment where people don’t feel well. So it is essential to solve this issue creating trust and presence.

In the research of the scenario we have notices that the distribution of movement varies during the 24 hours of the day in different grades

As I say above there is a different distribution of activity along the day. From 6 in the morning to 10 in the morning there is an increase of activity in the neighborhood because of the start of the day. People gets up and leaves to work, children go to school, shops are opened, there are traffic jums,etc. Then, there is a peaceful period in which the traffic decreases and there is little movement in the church and the market. Afterwards there is a little peak of noise caused by the lunch time. From 6 PM to 9 PM the level of movement rises again considerably. People return from their jobs, pick up their children at school and start their spare time. They go to the park, go jogging or shopping...After the return at home arround 9PM, activity reduces while people are having dinner or watching TV. The last peak of noise of the day is related with the pub. It's open from midnigt to 4 AM and this is a problematic hour because people are sleeping and disturbs them. Finally, when pub get closed, peace return to the neighborhood.

As all you know, the biggest problem here is the drunk people and the noisy coming from the PUB in the night period.

All neighbors who have a family who needs to take care about themselves feel troubled and insecured. They need to take some providence concerning this problem.
So, the solutions presented by the group are:
1- First of all, one representing of the neighborhood can talk to the owner of the PUB concerning about the time of closing. Why doesn’t close it at 21:00? That’s a pacific solution for everyone about this problem.
2- Installing automatic light in the street. Maybe people don’t feel very comfortable with the light in the street and just leave the neighbor.
3- Reinforcing the Security, the association of the neighbors could also hire a private security for the street. Keeping the silence and the harmony in the street, also the security of all, and maybe why not the owner of the PUB pays him?
4- Location, concerning the location, why not the PUB moves out? That’s a drastic measure, but if the pacific ways were all disrespected the neighbors could make a decision and talk to someone superior that have this power to close the PUB obligating it to move out.

A challenging and intressting workshop

How we can use Biomimicry to design? This design approach is not linear but cyclic it has three basic procedures scoping, creating , evaluating which are connecting with biology and to each other. So first of all the designing team has to figure out what is the real challenge and what are the top functions that they want their design to meet. In our case the challenge is to design a shelter which must protect the inhabitants from the elements, create a comfortable secure environment and provide a healthy place. The next step is to biologize the problem so we asked: How does nature protect from the elements? After that the team has to define the design in brief and state the non-negotiables. We chose to design a house in a Mediterranean coastal area where the climate is hot and dry especially in the summer. So although there is lots of water due to the see there is very few drinking water cause there is very few rainfall. The non-negotiables for our design taking into account the life’s principle. Our house must protect from the elements use multi-function design for example roof has to protect from elements but also collect rainwater and solar energy. We’ll have to use readily available materials. Then looked in books and the internet trying to find examples of plant and living spices that can be inspiration for our design. We find that shells construct their shell using silicon a material that is very stiff but at the same time requires very few resources proteins and energy. We found some plants called armirikia that can withstand the drought and can use salted water .To do so he has very thin and small leaves (another example more common here is cacti) and large roots. We also find that the lizard turns its face to the sun in order has the minimum surface exposed to sun light. The scorpion is hiding inside sand or between rocks during the day and comes out to hunt at the evening. Furthermore camel has large spaces to store water in its body so that it can withstand a large drought using its own reserves.

There are three steps in the process of the design creation based on Biomimicry: Scoping, Creating and Evaluating.

There are three steps in the process of the design creation based on Biomimicry: Scoping, Creating and Evaluating. Besides, in the center of these main parts there is the Biology, which is the knowledge basis that we have to consult throughout the whole process. Throughout the design process it is essential to incorporate the Life Principles of Biomimicry.
The first step is to define what we want our design to do, identify the more important functions we want our design to meet. As for the SHELTER, the subject I am working in, the top functions that we have defined are: protect from elements, create comfort, keep clean and provide healthy environment. Then, we have biologized our main function: How does Nature protect from the elements? This question will be answered in the Creating part. The next step is to contextualize the shelter, defining the parameters and operating conditions. So, we have established the location of our shelter and defined the climate conditions: location near the sea, humidity, heat, exposure to the sunlight, little rain. As for the shelter’s temporal condition, we have decided that it should be durable. Regarding the non-negotiables for our design, the shelter must protect from the elements, use multi-functional design, not only protecting from the environment but also collecting energy and water, being self-sustainable, use readily available materials and energy, as it should use abundant raw-materials from the area where the shelter is located as well as harnessing freely available energy.
Regarding the Creating part of the process, we tried to find the Best Nature Models that are adapted to the conditions that we have established for the shelter, searching in books and in Ask Nature. As the location chosen is an area where there is a lot of humidity and lack of rain we have found an organism, the tick, that has developed a mechanism to absorb water from humidity. “The mouths of ticks absorb water vapor from the atmosphere by secreting a hydrophilic solution” (in Ask Nature). Regarding the problem of the exposure to the sunlight, we have found that de lizard adopted a strategy to minimize its exposure. The lizard faces the sunlight in order to minimize the area of its body that is exposed to the sunlight. In addition, we have looked for organisms that carry their own shelter. For instance, the snail has a very resistant shell that protects him from heat. “The shell of some desert snails helps them survive extreme heat using light reflectance and architecturally-derived, insulating layers of air.” (in Ask Nature). Our aim is to inspire in these Natural Models to create a shelter with the non-negotiable conditions that we have initially established.

Yesterday I attend to a workshop about biomimicry and my group and I focused on the concept of shelter. I would like to show what we developed.

At first, we had to think about what we wanted to design and to determine the main functions. We decided to do something self-sustainable, that fit whit the enviorament, that creates cleanliness, durability, security and comfortablity. Morever it should protect from the elements, especially climatological ones. This last one is what connect directly with biology.

We locate the problem in a specific climate. Its characteristics were humidity, high temperatures, sun, lack of rain and proximity to the sea. Some little animals such as the snail, the lizard or the tick give us ideas. Also cactus give us "advise" to resolve the lack of rain.

I think it was the lizard who gave me more inspiration. The lizards in the desert have multicolor scales that defend them from the sunlight and the heat. They also changes their position depending on the sun direction. So we can apply this to a shelter by putting something similar to these scales in the walls. These scales could be pannels which were able to repel the sunlight. We can imitate the changes of positions by facing the shelter to the north where is supposed to suffer less solar radiations or making the shelter rotating.

After a quick presentation that we did yesterday, we received a feedback with suggestions of all groups. Thank you all very much. I'm sharing with you all yours opinions, so we can't lose the ideas, so they will "being" here:

1-Different atmosphere social network freedom;

2-Each neighborhood should be a different, but not to create rich and poor classes;

3-find ways to make people get interested in working for the group (TV);

4-Punishment if someone doesn't;

5-People's agency ?;

6-Sharing groups of experts in a task (E.G. some people liking gardening are called to help in other neighborhoods);

7-Use maybe facebook - like means to ask;

8-Offer expertize and maybe organize training session "for dummes";

9-Create different atmosferes;

10-How do I acces the smartgrid?;

11-Organize comunity trough network;

12- Don't regulate who will live where;

13-Put people tpgether with same views and make trade important;

14-Inserting some kind of counsil in each neighborhood wouldn't nake the relations much complex?In this way, even if someone doesn`t want to take part in the`process, he loses his freedom.
Maybe the forms should be built near neighborhoods which have declared somehow that they want to occupy;

15-Why don't you distbrute the house in a more separated way?
I think this distribution can help people to have more privacy, you can install walls around the houser or trees or vegetation. A part from, this new distribution will allow transport to have nore freedom to reach the destination;

16-Create an incentive to interact more;

17- The farm produces bad smell near the houses;

18- A community as big as yours, needs authorities;

19-Separation of spaces: e.g. farms smell badly near the houses, people allergic to gardens,etc;

20-Different houses for different people.Include diversity.

There is very popular videogame that can help us to think how to organize our neghborhood. You'll probably will know about this game because it's the most played in Facebook.It's Farmville!

The goal of Farmville game is to drive a virtual farm in which you can plant tree and crops or raising animals. Yoir friends are your "neighbors". The neighbors can help and visit the other farms. For example, when someone goes on holiday somewhere he has no internet he could ask some "neighbor" to take care of his farm.Moreover you're also able to give presents to your friends. So,there is an important feeling of communty in this game, what is quite important in our project.

When hardworkers farmers complete some task, they rewarded with ribbons of different colours. The colour depend on the task done(help a number of neighbors, a determined amount of harvest, etc). Therefore, we can also take into account the idea of reward our neighbors in same way.

In the Farmville community exist money, but it's only valid in Farmville. We have the Farm coins and the Farm cash and it's obtained by getting ribbons or doing tasks. Also you can get Farm cash by using your credit card!!Perhaps we can think about a particular money in our shelter!

It's funny how the Internet and a simple and innocent game can inspire us!

The whole group made an interesting exercise which promoted the interaction between the fields present in a city.

The whole group made an interesting exercise which promoted the interaction between the fields present in a city. The aim of the exercise was to demand what we needed from the other fields, creating problems for them to solve. In our case, shelter, we demanded from the Transport group “Transport on demand. No noise. Accessibility for disabled people and children”. Regarding the water field, shelter needs “Pure, fresh water. Emergency stock. Distribution system”. As for the Play group we would like the playground to be “Safe, hygienic, innovative. No disturbing noise. Play area in the shelter”. The food group should provide us “Healthy, biological, trustful food. Emergency stock of food”. Finally, we asked the Waste group “Elimination of bad smell. How to reuse all kind of waste?”.
On the other hand, the other groups have demanded from Shelter the following:
- Water: “Can you shelter and collect our water in a way that it doesn’t get polluted”
- Play: “Space (indoors and outdoors) where to make a lot of noise.”
- Transport: “We need uniformly allocated people”
- Food: “Can you obtain energy from solar painels?”
- Waste: “Place to build a dump and a recycling plant”

Problems as an insiration for better solution

Shelter- Meeting the requests

The other groups made interesting and challenging requests which we had to take into account for our design. We start from the house and expand to the neighborhood and then make a plan of a whole city. Regarding the houses we focused mainly on the roof. There we were asked by the water group to collect the rainwater and take measures s that it won't be dirty. Also we had to produce energy from solar panels. Combining these demands we designed a "flat" roof without steep slopes around 3%. On the surface of the roof we placed photovoltaic systems that can turn independently to follow the sun circle. To keep the water clean we found inspiration in a plant which has hydrophobic layers and thus it is always very clean, because when it rains the dust is washed out. In the same way, a roof with a hydrophobic layer would first collect a more polluted water, from the washing of the roof, and, then, the system would start to collect the rest of the cleaner raining water to a different container.
So the water from the first minutes of a rainfall is not clean because it takes all the dust and mud from the roof, but after that we get relatively clean water which we can store. With pipes we transfer the water to a tank that is common for the whole neighborhood. We'd like to keep this water clean so we decided to put it in a closed tank and not in an open lake. To reinforce its shared use by the community we decided to put it in the basement of a public building, good choice may be the local school. Another demand from the transport group was to distribute the population uniformly throughought the region. So we designed four similar neighborhoods. Each one is an autonomous community with its own small center, a central park, a school and some markets. We put trees around the park not only to make it better but also to reduce the noise. There will be also a municipal center of the city in the central point of the four neighborhoods. There will be the mayor’s palace some larger stores a central square all these things so this area can act like as the “hurt” of the city. Also because neighborhood has both residential and commercial facilities reduces the demand of transport. Moreover we place some farms between the neighborhoods so that the citizens can grow their own food and also due to the small distance there will be easily available without the need of long transport. Finally we placed a recycling plant and a dump area for waste in an edge of the city so the disturbance that will be cause can be minimized.

Ideas coming!
Transport, food, playgrounds, stock of water, waste.
But also we need a connection with everything, everywhere. We need a center to converge our community, that’s one of the principles to live together!

Learning the skills to work with the material is a process of inducing in traditional artisan contexts. It is about learning the body language of approval and disapproval and finding the sense of one’s self to be able to relate to the environment. Centredness is an important concept in the daily physical practice of the artisan and it is also a quality of the products that are made.

Even more important is that it creates centred communities. A centred person creates a centred object, which will centre the users and as a result the community gets centred as well. In a technology context only reference to physical and sensorial qualities can be made. Up until today the sensorial experience of technology and the experiences one can share in online communities with others are still secondary to sensorial experiences one can share in real life contexts. A quality like centeredness may be approached in technological environments through knowing more and having more engagement, even though it is still very distant from the original experience of centeredness

The unique optical properties of glass induce witnessing and make public space alive and visual. Optical phenomena can make an area vibrant, give people a feeling of how to position themselves and, through its unique properties, transform empty space into public space.

Optical Phenomena as Architectonic Elements
In my work the main facets are light refraction, how it originates and its influence on the human eye. My foremost interest is how light diverts as it passes through glass. I combine my sculptural work with research on new uses of glass in structural design, focusing on the optical properties of glass, the phenomena of light and refraction of light and how it is transmitted through glass and its possible integration in architecture. It is my belief that public spaces need different visual disruptions without the loss of existing light for new types of experiences of space.

Presenting and learning from our mistakes

We gathered all the proposals and feedback made to us. They were really good and helpful. With all these things we manage to improve a lot of things in our first design, add new ideas and adjust our plans to those of the other teams. Then we have to make our thoughts clear produce a new drawing so one can get a quick easy and precise idea of how we imagine a city in 2050. Doing all this stuff was a tough but challenging work to accomplish. We discussed our ideas in the group and also consult Carolina and Jago. They were eager to help us and they provided us with lots of ideas and ways to snap out of confusion caused by the challenging project. We had to be really fast so that we can be ready to present our work after lunch. Then there were the presentations. Every group had prepared lots of interesting stuff: drawings, text and images. It was really interesting to watch their ideas developing through presentation and figure out what is the problem they are facing ,where do they find inspiration , what are the solution proposing and most important how all this are taking advantage of smart grid to create presence and trust. When they finish a warm applaud was given by all of us. Then we had to make our proposals in order to improve themselves. Then the professors say the weak and strong parts. Everyone's comments and especially those made by the professors where very precise and helpful. The most important thing is that they encouraged us even if we made mistakes, because I think they don’t want to be afraid of making mistakes but to use them to improve ourselves. Finally we went to explore the faculty of architecture where the infrastructure is great and inspiring for the students .Then we grab a beer at the student’s pub to relax and discuss about our thoughts of what we did and what are we going to do next day.

"The community organizer...must constantly examine life, including his own, to get some idea of what it is all about, and he must challenge and test his own findings. Irreverence, essential to questioning, is a requisite. Curiosity becomes compulsive. His most frequent word
is 'why'?"
- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971

Our subject is Shelter and we extended it to the design of a model city.

Our subject is Shelter and we extended it to the design of a model city.
In our city design, we want Smart Grid to be very present and connected to the shelter concept, creating a more sustainable shelter, with less resources requirements and infrastructures, by making a balance between supply and demand.
In our design, all the neighborhoods represented by circles are connected through a grid and each line represents the flow of information, people and transport. It’s important that you understand that this is a dynamic design, it is not static. This connection between neighborhoods is very important for the social mimicry, that is, if one community has solved a problem, then, thanks for this flow of information, the solution will be more easily adopted by the other neighborhoods that share the same problem.
Each neighborhood has its representative to discuss problems of the whole city in the central part, where it is the governance, an organization center but also a leisure center or a social laboratory to promote interaction between people from all the neighborhoods. This concept of center creates trust and confidence.
Concerning the problem of privacy vs sharing resources, we design this city in a way that the neighborhoods closer to the center share more resources and have a more active participation in the society. On the other hand, neighborhoods in the periphery are for people that prefer to have their privacy and autonomy. Besides, each neighborhood has a different environment from the others to create diversity, choice and individuality.
The green spaces represent farms that are spread all over the city near the neighborhoods that prefer to live close to the farms.
Biomimicry contributed a lot for this city/shelter design. This structure and distribution of neighborhoods was inspired by the star-fish. Besides, a city with this pattern would be easily rebuilt if there was, for example, a tsunami that destroyed part of the city, because it has this repeated pattern and as a smart structure it enables a better flowing of information, so it would be easier to rebuild part of the city as the star-fish is able to regenerate a new arm. So this kind of structure creates the sense of survival, presence and trust for the residents.
Besides the inspiration in the star-fish for the city structure, we also were inspired by a forest that is group of many trees that shelter a lot of different species. One tree can be the habitat, the shelter of many different species. So, doing a metaphor between a forest and our city, the more central circles would be a like big tree shared by more species representing the neighborhoods where people prefer to share things and the circles in the periphery would be bushes representing the smaller neighborhoods that prefer their privacy.
This is a dynamic structure where not only the transport system, but also information and people are constantly flowing. So imagine a bird that is living in a forest, in a tree and then migrates to another forest. The bird represents the traveler, a person that comes from outside the neighborhood, people that like to have a flexible house. So we thought of creating houses with a private space separated from the public space, creating a more private and individual space in each house. This could be made surrounding part of the house with more trees, using curtains, less windows or using reflective glass so that the inside space in the house could not be seen from the outside.
This smart city has to make use of a social network to manage the resources sharing and trade. For instance, if someone goes traveling he could ask someone to take care of his garden while his out, in exchange of something else like energy. This idea is similar with what happens in Farmville, a game in social network facebook. Through the social network people can find other with complementary needs and trade favors or resources. Besides, the social network could also be used to form groups of experts in different fields of application and spread knowledge.
In conclusion, we have design a city that can shelter different/diverse people in a way that they feel safe, present, trust, comfortable, having a space for their privacy and individuality while sharing space, knowledge and resources with the aid of a social network.