2022 Høst

‘Interaction Design 1: Exploring interaction design’ will expand, challenge and develop the student’s skills and knowledge in the field of interaction design. The course focuses on creativity and exploration in and through iterative design. Through a series of modules, students will explore tools and methods currently used in the design of digital experiences, systems and services - across complex contexts, technologies and user situations. The course embraces the creative possibilities and challenges of new technologies and new design methods. Through the course students will meet several different ways in which interaction design is being used to explore new opportunities in industry and research today. The course will include topics such as:

• Creativity and invention in interaction design through hands-on prototyping
• Exploring new technology through design
• Understanding the physical, spatial and temporal aspects of both the user situation and the technology one is designing for and with
• Evaluation and practical use of technological systems, design systems and conceptual frameworks
• Reflection on and communication of novel design approaches and outcomes

The course is module-based and will consist of several different projects where students work with, among other things, prototyping and experiences, creative exploration and methodology, and innovation and communication. The cases, tools and methods addressed and used will vary slightly from year to year, but may include topics such as experience prototyping, working with electronics, evidencing and visualization, video prototyping, Web experiments, and exploring new technology in context.

This course continues much of the content from the previous, well-established course ‘Interaction design 1: Tangible interaction’, but the themes, tools and scopes have been reworked and expanded.

The course contributes to overall learning objectives at the programme level by giving students a broader experience of creative exploration through interaction design, with the methods and tools this includes. 

THE IN TRANSIT STUDIO

The In Transit Studio aims at preparing students to conduct their architectural investigations through engaging in current, complex societal topics. Students will develop their design skills by studying and proposing site-specific solutions at a detailed architectonic and neighborhood scale. Through practice-based research, the In Transit Studio aims at developing a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of architecture and to (re-) discover the role of the architect as a societal agent of change.  

The Studio was created in 2016 in partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)/NORCAP, a global and independent humanitarian organization that helps people forced to flee. The aim of the studio is to contribute new thinking to the emerging field of displacement management and to educate future built environment professionals, who are ready to take on the challenges of our times. The NRC/NORCAP will be actively involved in the studio course.

INTRODUCTION

Millions of people are now displaced due to war in Europe. This is also a reminder that at least 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes (UNHCR). Similar to humanitarian response operations, the tasks and content of this studio course may change throughout the academic semester, according to current events and responding to the shifting situation and needs. First, we do not yet have a fixed site. Second, additional tasks may be added between and during announced project phases. Being flexible and willing to accommodate shifting priorities is a prerequisite for joining this studio. While the studio will be working with real-time challenges, potentially sensitive situations, and partner organizations with specific mandates, the studio will focus on the core of our profession: to provide dignified and safe living conditions for all human beings, including in reception situations. Contributing with our specific skills as built environment experts with well-founded ideas and caring for the ones we design for and with, is a valuable contribution to the situation we are in now, and sought-after skills for the future.

THE EVERYDAY

The topics of everyday life and emergency situations are central to this course. A so-called normal, everyday life is something that should not be taken for granted, especially in the context of contingency planning and displacement management, or in neighborhoods facing social challenges. Functions and places that constitute a high degree of livability depend on – among other things – how we design our surroundings. Livability is a central concept in this course, both in everyday situations and in emergencies.

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

Planning for emergencies is similar to urban planning as it attempts to provide capacities for unknown events. However, while emergency planning can steadily produce new strategies, some measures result in residual urban form, situated somewhere, and being present in people's everyday lives. While the type of crisis cannot be predicted with certainty, the consequences of some can to a certain extent be planned for. Displacement is foremost among these.  

Displacement can mean many different things. The In Transit Studio applies the term quite broadly and refers to internal and temporary displacement due to sudden events. But it can also refer to new arrivals in a new location after having fled conflict and persecution, which is the focus of this semester.

THE SEMESTER BRIEF AND SEMESTER STRUCTURE

The semester is divided into four parts. Each part is equally important and together constitute the semester brief.

Part I In search of a site: Mapping

The location of arrival infrastructure facilities – such as reception centers, collective centers, and other functions related to displacement management – will have an impact on its surrounding community, for better or worse. It will also have a critical impact on the health, well-being, and protection of the displaced population, as well as on the ability to manage daily activities, ensure participation and develop relations with the host community. Furthermore, there is currently a discrepancy between solving immediate needs and developing sustainable solutions benefiting the ones fleeing and the communities and environments hosting them. An important part of displacement management is to identify suitable locations for the functions outlined above. In this part of the semester, the studio will be engaged – with partner organizations – in identifying and mapping potential locations for arrival infrastructure. While the areas, plots or structures are yet to be determined, we will work in the Norwegian context.

Part II Sketch project: The practice of everyday life / The common place

In this part, the focus is to transform existing buildings and other structures and activate the surrounding areas into a collection of outdoor and indoor meeting places that allow for cross-cultural encounters.

Through your or your team’s project proposals, you will address fundamental issues of social, spatial, and material justice embedded in the act of design of public spaces in urban contexts. The projects will focus on specific topics such as, but not limited to, gender, age-inclusivity, social visibility and safety. Influenced by notions and methods of ‘Performative Urbanism’ (Wolfrun, 2013), ‘Social Urbanism’ (Echeverri, 2003), ‘Polyvalence’ (Hertzberger, 1991) and ‘Elasticity’ (Hauderowicz & Serena, 2019), you will be expected to imagine innovative spatial interventions challenging the normative and prescriptive character of public spaces today.

Part III Sketch project: In case of emergency / The Collective center

In the third part, the focus is to plan for dignified reception of new arrivals, refugees, and other displaced persons. The brief is to transform existing buildings and other structures into a new type of Collective center that ensures safety and wellbeing of the inhabitants. In humanitarian contexts, collective centers are mostly existing buildings or structures used as temporary accommodation for displaced populations. Collective centers have highly variable life spans. While most collective centers are used only for a couple of days or weeks, in other contexts they may be used for a decade or more. In general, buildings spontaneously occupied or assigned as temporary accommodation are often unfinished, defunct or abandoned, meaning that the quality of the building may have deteriorated since they were last in use or because they were never completed. The program of this part shall include emergency accommodation of new arrivals, but any additional functions are to be determined by you or by each project team.

Part IV The detailed project: The hybrid / The Collective city

The detailed project will be a hybrid project of the two sketch projects, with both every day and emergency functions. But in this part, you will also include a third element: other emergency capacities, e.g. facilities ensuring food security, supply storage, or any other function that may be needed in case of an emergency as per preparedness scenarios identified by Norwegian contingency planning entities. The reason why collective centers are rarely purpose-built is in part because of the term idle capital. Few want to invest in buildings that might end up being empty for large parts of their life cycle, without generating income. Norwegian contingency planning agencies also distinguish between reception for new arrivals and for internally displaced persons in case of an emergency domestically - but why? In the detailed project you will explore all this, by combining the two sketch projects and this third element. A possible outcome can be described as follows:

To design a multifunctional neighborhood hub that is a crossover of the Common place and the Collective center program that serves the neighborhood also in case of other types of contingencies. This juxtaposition of constructed, but at times unused emergency structures, and spaces meant for everyday functions, is the output of this part. You will study, invent, and visualize the spatiality of these converging situations, ending up with a hub or center that has everyday programs and emergency accommodation, services, and other contingency planning capacities.

The first studio in the new international series focuses on the implementation of the techniques and approaches to design developed in the past six years, which allow students to address the design of remote locations by creatively working with constructed site surveys.

The techniques developed in the series “Island, Ocean, Mountain, Forest and Desert” are mature enough to confront site specific exercises in contexts and geographies far away from Norway.

As in the past, architecture and landscape architecture students are welcomed and encouraged to work together.

Tropical botanical garden

Botanical gardens have been spaces for advancement of science and education since the earliest examples were built in Europe around the 1500’s, paradigmatic examples such as the botanical garden at the university of Pisa, founded in 1544, or the botanical garden of Padova founded in 1545, were spaces that linked science with contemplation. These early botanical gardens differentiated themselves from old monastic gardens by been mainly focused on the production of new knowledge, not just cultivation and the curated display of plants, they served as the first open air classrooms for the nascent academic field of botany, where some of the earliest professors with full time dedication to botanical sciences required outdoor spaces for research.

Coinciding with the invention of the botanical garden as institution, European nations with colonies used the botanical gardens as spaces to display, collect and test species brought from the new world.

As much as the origins of the typology is rooted in scientific discovery, and is linked to some of the earliest academic disciplines focused on botanic studies, it is undeniable that some of the most iconographic aspects of the design of botanical gardens are rooted in the need to exhibit botanical material from locations far away, from completely different climates and cultures, and as such, the evolution of its architecture and garden design has responded to need to display and intensify the perception of what is exotic.

Not much later important botanical gardens in Europe took a turn from science to become depositories for the botanic treasures brought from the colonies.

In Latin America many botanical gardens adopted architectural codes base on their European counterparts, particularly questions of ornamentation, style, layout and museographic identity.

Located at 2100 meters above the sea, at 6 degrees of latitude and in the middle of the Andean mountains, the Jardin Botanico of Rionegro will be rather special. First, it will be one of the highest altitude botanical gardens in the world, which together with a stable all year around tropical climate will make it ideal for locating collections outdoors that would normally require interior spaces. The botanical garden will also host the high altitude Andean seed bank, which is the current non public use of the plot occupied by the research branch of the ministry of agriculture. The transformation of this currently closed program into a public space and botanical garden will serve as departure point to a botanical garden close to the original renaissance gardens belonging to universities and the production and safeguarding of botanical knowledge.

Architecture and landscape architecture.

The botanical garden will contain multiple buildings of different scale and use, among them, the most interesting design tasks will be the partially open refrigerated seed banks, a scientific building with an educational program, small greenhouses for tropical plants that require higher temperatures, and other small support structures that will be determined over the development of the course. Architecture students will have the opportunity to focus on individual buildings and reach a sophisticated level of details in their development, while landscape architecture students will be expected to focus more attention on outdoor areas and the open air collections, equally reaching high levels of design details in their proposals.

Ultimately, it is expected that an environment of collaborations between landscape architects and architects will dilute the apparent boundaries between both fields of expertise, something that is particularly possible to aspire in a climate where hard thermal barriers between interiors and exterior areas are not expected nor really needed.

Field trip

There will be a trip to Colombia in October during the excursion week. The trip is not mandatory but it is highly recommended. In the trip the students will visit the site, get to know the scientist working on site, and the university and public entities sponsoring the project. We will also visit and stay in the area of El Retiro, twenty minutes from Medellin and close to the botanical garden site. In this area Luis Callejas is developing a small residential masterplan with small houses in the forest. The gardens and architecture will serve as models for the climatic logics of the project to develop in the botanical garden. The cross section of the large 80 hectare plot, ranging from 2100 m to 2500m above the sea will expose students to the species that we will be able to use in the design of the garden. Daily excursions to the mountain will expose students to the full range of plants that belongs to that specific elevation.

The course will be subdivided in three thematics:

1. Historical approaches on large-scale urban landscapes methods, knowledge about backgrounds, innovative thinking from the past and transferable approaches to design, 19th and 20th century approaches. Themes on physical and cultural properties for the urban and suburban.

1. Current theoretical and practical approaches in sustainable design for integrated development of ecologic systems, landscape structures, for our contemporary urban and rural landscapes. Notions as “Landscape urbanism”(Charles Waldheim), “Third landscape” ( G. Clement), Landscape as a prerequisite ( M.Desvigne),  as well as current policies as Nature in towns – “Preservation through development” ( D. Sijmons) … will be explored.

1. First approaches on past and current ephemeral gardens and co-design approaches - research oriented perspectives on participatory methods for public spaces and landscape long-term projects, role of the designers in this mode of doing. The social approach in Landscape Architecture is here the main topic.

Karin Helms will present a lecture at the start of each “chapter”. Hannes Zander will give three lectures on the historical aspects and landscape notions from the 19th and 20th century. All other lectures are given by teachers from AHO, some lectures will be given by guest lecturer from other schools/ NMBU/EMiLA partners. The students will be asked to give lectures of their understanding of their readings.