RETHINK 2025: Design for life after Covid-19
Pati Santos
Aug 01, 2020
"When we emerge from the coronavirus pandemic a new sort of design will be needed. How would you design the new world we will find ourselves in?"
This was the brief of the
RIBA design competition 'RETHINK 2025'
in which we have been longlisted with our proposal 'PODding the city'.
©The Good Thing
©The Good Thing
PODding
the city
LIVING SPACES: THE ANSWER TO TAKE UP A CHANGED WORLD
How will we adapt to the current situation? There is no other way to do it than adapting our homes. Design flexibility can allow a building to evolve over time as the user needs change. However, many of the old (and not that old) buildings were not thought from that perspective.
This rigidity along with the current restrictive and old-fashioned planning and building control systems are making the city and its dwellings to become obsolete. Promoted by the current Covid-19 situation, we propose to challenge the rules and adapt a new system to make even the most ‘inflexible’ dwellings to expand in an economic, fast and sustainable way.
To extend existing dwellings that were not thought to incorporate strategies for flexibility when designed, we propose an addition system called ‘Podding’, in which we can extend spaces by plugging these pods* to facades or roofs or courtyard. This means we can add extra rooms for new activities, enlarge existing spaces or adding green boxes or terraces. This is really important in pandemic times when you are not allowed to be on the streets.
Contact with the outdoors is a key factor for our health and well-being, as it is having the control and being able to decide between choices, configurations, and customisations (aka micro-politics).
Welcome to the future.
I am a designer and I have been doing research in behavioural neurosciences using qualitative methods/ interviews, with prominent figures in Neuroscience, and Psychology.
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