Spatial Interaction 22: Metabolic perspective on/in space
The module «Spatial Interaction» challenges students to deepen their practical and conceptual knowledge of human interactions in their immediate surroundings. Starting from a location in Zurich where public life and „tamed nature“ overlap, students will develop spatio-technical frameworks for situated interactions. The student projects will connect people and environmental processes with the aim of investigating local impacts of urban (or everyday?) behaviour as well as long-distance effects of individual actions. They will learn how to interface the present mesocosm (collecting environmental data, identifying relationships) and how to anticipate/experiment with advanced techniques like remote sensing or machine vision. Designing in such situations requires the development of strategies for public outreach and communication as well as basic knowledge of intervening in complex systems. Students will work in groups and in a form of self-governed organization.
Student projects:
The organisms that are part of an ecosystem are constantly interacting with each other and their environment. Everyone is part of the system, contributing to its form, but nobody is in control. Organic matter is exchanged, transformed, and stored, but it never reaches a dead end, always adapting, always flowing. CYCOAL aims to convey this intrinsic feeling of kinship to your surroundings.
SENSORY FEEDBACK is a series of shoe-like objects. The project’s aim is one of sensory displacement. Vision, smell and hearing are refocused, shifting the conciseness down towards the ground and connecting the wearer with experiences of childhood, evolutionary ancestry and interspecies empathy. Meant to be used out in nature, it allows the world close to the ground, to be felt with an unfamiliar intimacy.
SEEDR is a Kit to create habitats for wild bees and butterflies in an urban environment through the natural forces of the wind. The kit is part of an ecosystem which connects the data streams of each Seedr and let you track your efforts in making the urban space a truly shared entity.
INBETWEEN reveals the hidden beauty of the root systems with AR technology.
Sense the people, who have stepped where you are stepping right now. The paths you take will be tracked for the ones coming after you.
PATHS.LOCAL is a shoe add-on that lets you feel the accumulated human density over time of where you are walking through. Through vibrations on the feet you can experience different intensities according to the amount of people who have walked the exact path as you.
Moss stores information such as air quality, soil pollution and information about plants. With MOSS MINIMA we investigate moss as the identity of ecosystems.
