2015 Høst

Interaction Design 1 - Tangible Interactions - launches students into the world of interaction design by focusing on core skills and materials used in designing physical and digital interactions.
The course embraces and explores the creative opportunities made possible by recent developments in physical computing, sensor technologies and mobile devices, to consider physical everyday objects (embedded with switches, sensors and microcontrollers) as augmented interfaces for controlling digitally mediated experiences.
We focus on how humans interact with such objects and materials, and how their functionality, meaning and usage can be extended. The course provides students with the possibility to take part in an exploration of new social interaction patterns, to conceptualise and design demonstrators and working prototypes that address a unique set of design problems.
This is a practice-led course, and will also provide students with a broad toolset of skills and techniques relevant across the board in interaction design, starting with a series of short workshops dealing with a range of physical interaction technologies and approaches that lead into larger projects.
The practical aspects of the course will be complemented by a series of lectures and talks by a range of practitioners and specialists in the field. Course tasks will focus on specific areas of application for tangible interaction; in previous years this has included museum exhibits, toys and musical installations.
Most students will then proceed to Interaction Design 2, where the skills learnt here will be applied to information and data analysis and presentation, using other interactive and audiovisual platforms – for example public multitouch screens, ubiquitous and mobile devices.

The Arctic is changing, not only in terms of climate and environment, but also in terms of demography and urbanism. These changes have lead to intense debates and extensive research. Through the research project Future North (www.futurenorth.no) along with a series of studios, the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape has investigated the urban landscapes and the development in a variety of Arctic cities, demonstrating that there is not one standard model for Arctic Urbanism. The studio stresses the fact that contemporary changes in Arctic cities are not necessarily connected to resource exploration and exploitation, but also to a general socital change. The studio challenges conceptions of Arctic communities as non-urban, and concepts of urbanity in the Arctic as largely imported from other regions. Most recent attempts to develop specific approaches to Urban Design have essentialized landscape relations in design, focused narrowly on mitigation of local climate or reduced urbanity to an engineering issue.

This studio will explore the specific urban landscape of Longyearbyen in the archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. The community have undergone a rapid development, possibly facing even more dramatic changes in years ahead. A main issue for the arctic communities is the development of social, economic and environmental sustainability, so also Longyearbyen. This studio focuses on a wide range of issues, however, not to separate them, but rather to capture the complexity of the real and site-specific, treating them as complementary and entangled. What kind of urban design strategies, projects and landscape interventions will benefit Longyearbyen in order for it to become a more liveable, sustainable and enjoyable artic city?

The studios will develop sets of strong, but complementary logics of urban design that focus on a wide range of issues: social, cultural, infrastructural, ecological, etc. It is the complementarity of these approaches that first and foremost promises sustainability in the future thinking of cities in the arctic.
A mapping of potentials and ressources but also of the challenges and needs in Longyearbyen will form the basis for programming the design exercise.
Specific issues to be addressed may include: the development of a new port, the phase out of coal mining, the location and design of new residences, strategies for long-term sustainable urban development with a focus on inclusive (universally designed) urban social space, the development of tourism infrastructure, as well as the facilitation and redevelopment of new social, commercial and retail services.

In collaboration with local actors, students from AHO and the Tromsø Academy of Landscape and Territorial Studies will propose projects, strategic urban designs, and landscape interventions in and around the city of Longyearbyen. Students will have the opportunity to individually develop their own project, based on the collective mapping conducted by the two studios. This open process includes a step-by-step development of ideas, programmes, strategies and designs, guided by the studio teachers.
Teachers and researchers in the Future North research project and researchers at the University of Tromsø will contribute to the studio.

Course Program

The studio offers exciting and future oriented design assignments with emphasis on computational design. The aim is to address societal and environmental dynamics through the medium of architectural design.

The studio seeks to address locally specific conditions and circumstances, and societal and environmental changes that require architectural responses that are not part of the current canon and that go beyond current practice.

The fall 2015 semester will focus on locally specific spatial qualities, programmatic (use-related) and environmental criteria as the primary inputs into the design process. Students will be working individually or in small teams.

Phase 01:

Phase 01 will commence with the design of a small building in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The design requires an integrated approach to spatial organization, structural articulation and environmental performance in which the building envelope is the primary element. Phase 01 consists of a six-week design phase for the small building. This phase is integrated with the studios intensive elective course in which students learn and further develop computational design skills.

Phase 02:

Phase 02 consists of two tracks from which students can choose.

Track 01 (recommended for first time takers of the studio) will focus on the detailed development of the small-scale building designed in phase 01 and the preparation of the fabrication and construction documents with emphasis on computer-aided manufacturing.

Track 02 (recommended for returners to the studio) will focus on adapting and developing the design approach towards performative envelopes to a mid- to large size building scheme in Oslo, with the aim to organize an entire building based on the element that divides exterior from interior.

The studio does not pursue a preconceived artistic approach based on a given aesthetic or fixed set of processes. Instead students are encouraged and supported to develop their own artistic approach and position. In so doing the studio pursues design processes from which expression emerges and evolves and foregrounds the design of processes from which individual artistic positions can arise.
Avoiding a preconceived artistic approach is related to the thematic agenda of the studio to develop locally specific and architectures that are embedded in their context based on de-emphasizing the idiosyncratic object and instead complex field relations and architecture / environment interactions.

In order to ensure its practice-oriented emphasis the studio will continue to collaborate with leading architectural and engineering practices, industries, seminal expert groups and research environments, and outstanding schools of architecture.

Studio B3 continues with its search towards an architectural awareness that seeks to establish sustainable relationships between Nature and Culture and where the experience, discoveries and inventive thinking from the earlier "The New Collective" courses actively will be used and/or further developed.
The new relationship between nature and culture that studio B3 in the next courses investigates is utilized through the futher understanding, development and discovery of architectures elemtary properties and architectural space.
In order to approach this new correlation, the courses will at the start of the semester seek to dig deeper into the social/cultural changes and challenges that mark our time and discuss how these changes in different ways have influenced our relationship to the architectural space and how we use it.
Sets of living and the threshold between private and public, as well as the local and the global, will be debated in order to create a content in which the individual again compiles a consciousness towards architecture and hence attitude towards nature.

The New Collective: Garden (autumn 2015)
Each student shall define and argue for their own program intentions.
The Task is to make a desired relationship between; a social construct, a built construct, and an environment/milieu.
The challenge this semester is to release GARDEN as a unique spatial connector between nature and culture, a ROOM that inside its dualistic properties - mental and physical activity and rest - offers a “creative will”, The New Collective. The essential question that remains: where do we find GARDEN today?