Group 1
IS.1 – Introductory Studio
Machinic Protocols
-Active Public Space-

Senior Faculty: Edouard Cabay
Faculty: Rodrigo Aguirre
Guest Faculty: Stuart Maggs
Faculty Assistant: Mehmet Berk Bostanci

Machinic Protocols continues its exploration on the car-less city by articulating time-based urban and architectural solutions for the reclaimed public space in Barcelona.
We live in an era in which rapid technological advancement impacts the city on all of its levels. To tackle a context under constant change, urban planning for the future can not follow deterministic strategies, but has to incorporate an ability to morph or adapt according to emerging needs, may this be in the field of infrastructure, social, technology, energy, communication… Furthermore, top down design methods tend to show their limitations when it comes to the integration of the user as a potential actor to participate in the design and the making of its context as public space.
The studio works with a combination of digital and analogue analytical and design tools that let us operate in the public space itself, defining ways to capture characteristics of the place with electronic sensing means, remotely collecting data that will serve to create time-based operative cartographical drawings. Throughout the course of the studio, these drawings will progressively become physical: paper leading to dynamic experimental models animated by video mapping and physical computing mechanical devises simulating the evolution or transformation of the public space.

The studio concludes its investigation with a narrative short film, shot within a performative model that presents the project as an urban fiction, featuring the changes in the urban public space over the period of one or several decades.