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DATA::DISTRICT THESIS GROUP
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ABSTRACTS




Data On the Edge:
As information is becoming more digital and subsequently more data is being produced, there is a greater need for more reliable data storage methods. Edge Computing, storing data locally rather than in large data centers, brings the data back to the people who generate it and provides the opportunity for a physical infrastructure. This infrastructure will act in a similar way to the historic newsstand, which is a place where information throughout the neighborhood is gathered and connections between people occur by chance. The newsstand becomes a situation for neighborhood residents, where gossip, current events, and information control the narratives and conversations that have resulted from the data itself and these chance encounters. This idea of an information hub in the city will be the focus of this design. A place where localised data collection and physical connections of people happen.

Focusing on the fabric of the neighborhood allows for the people to be involved, creating a sense of place and community for those within and around the neighborhood boundaries. With an emphasis on the neighborhood, Chicago becomes the main site for these stands. The distinct neighborhoods and communities in Chicago, each carry their own identity and therefore each have a different need for this type of infrastructure. This intervention will use different components that can be used based on the specific needs for each location.

–Nicholas Button

Polyphonic Assembly:
“If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices. Perhaps, like war survivors themselves, we need to tell and tell until all our stories of death, and near-death and gratuitous life are standing with us to face the challenges of the present. It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

This project is inspired by a word Tsing uses--Polyphony--to reference an emergent world. Polyphony which is a musical term, references non-linear composition, assembled from many equal and independent but complementary voices. Not an unorganized cacophony, but rather a non-hierarchical series of singular voices coalescing to create a harmony. A simple round is an example of this, as is a much more complicated fugue. The point here is to illustrate an ideal to which this project aspires.

This project explores what Tsing calls polyphony and Donna Haraway names entanglement as a way to imagine a city redefining itself through the co-creation and tangled kinship of its inhabitants.Using the lens of oral history and elevating personal experience over fixed historical devices, Polyphonic Assembly imagines a city-wide district of situated narratives. It is first and foremost curatorial intervention, redefining the social agreement between neighbors and city districts. Taking its inspiration from projects which imagine an interactive overlay to city districts, It operates through eccentric instruments which amplify context-specific oral histories, rituals of listening and perspective sharing in order to curate a dynamic and fluid series of social interactions that signify a culture of shared experience through a city.
 
–Christine Darragh

Water, Please:
Cities move many resources around as they seek to meet the needs of populations. Water is one of the most important. Many societies have developed unique relationships to water, but in the United States, that dynamic can be strained. While there are many reasons for this, this thesis is most interested in the issues of accessibility and the public conception of value created by separating public and private modes of engagement with water.

These issues are particularly pressing in Savannah, Georgia, where this work is situated. A historic port city in a critical marshlands ecosystem, the city and its people are deeply tied to the water. However, when it comes to the public face of water, Savannah faces the same challenges as other American cities; much of the infrastructure individuals interact with - toilets, sinks, showers, and drinking taps - has been largely privatized. This is, in effect, a tax on the dweller of public space to access necessary water infrastructure. In a city with high poverty rates and a robust tourism sector, this represents both a failure to provide services to residents in need, and a missed opportunity to engage with, educate, and make better tourists.

In response, this work seeks to reorient the public relationship with water by closing that gap and achieving three primary goals: providing a necessary utility in public places, educating populations about the local, regional, and national issues around water, and reclaiming civic spaces, whose water has been cut off by private interests, for public recreation. By shifting paradigms, we can change our perception of water from one of pure utility, invisibly provided by private markets to those who can afford it, to one that views water as a fundamental component of life, and seeks to celebrate that attitude in its infrastructure and distribution systems.

–Bates Hagood
Natural Dynamics in Learning System:
Natural resources and laws have an impact on the language of our physical setting and a direct relationship with human well-being. Early human age 3-10 is very significant to develop the sensory pattern and being close to nature plays a vital role in this sensitive phase of human development, as memory and imagination shape through the variables of nature. This thesis proposes the patterns of Biophilia as design principles for the early childhood learning spaces. For biophilic design, the place-based relation is equally important as children learn from nature and through the community. The integration of natural systems with built world systems can add playful moments in learning layouts.

The learning spaces have been changed over time according to the change of learning patterns, from tree places to open-air pavilion to multi-story school buildings. In this transition, somehow the connection with nature and surrounding has been lost. The modes of learning are getting virtual every day toward delocalization despite our localized existence. According to Stephen Kellert, humans are biologically programmed to feel self-sufficient in close contact with nature and thus they incorporate nature's imagery to build their surroundings. A strong presence of natural dynamics influences the learning system and school as a hyperlocal institution plays a larger role in the community's cultural fabric. Revealing tangible materials explicitly in the geographic organization of urban life, both in physical and visual settings supports childhood activity for cognitive development. Biophilic principles register the inclusion of nature in the design of the learning environment to create these values by providing an atmosphere of care, comfort, security and safety. The shared spatial freedom in natural settings is envisioned to create a hyperlocal domain with an active engagement in a larger network to support vibrant learning through community stewardship.

–Mukshatu Khanam

Urban (Re)Wilding:
This proposal engages the rewilding of Washington D.C. by human provisions in response to the hostile architecture of the city and the re-emergence of wildlife in cities as amplified by the pandemic. The aim is to create small installations that form networks of species systems throughout the city to serve as a visual marker of the presence and agency of nonhuman actors. In order to shift the paradigm of the public’s perception of the role of nonhumans in urban systems, urban wildlife species must be designed for with the same care and consideration as architecture for human users.

A set of user species vital to the D.C. ecosystem are considered in the design of species-specific installations that are connected via an interspecies mobility network that engages existing human mobility infrastructure and the grid of D.C. The intent of the installations is to highlight the contrast between human perception and nonhuman experience. These systems are abstract and bright markers of animal agency, but to the user these spaces are experiential and shaped by instinctual habitat needs and tendencies. By designing small moments that are graphic and high-res to the people inhabiting D.C., the city is populated with markers of nonhuman agency and vibrancy that is often overlooked. These markers make larger ecological systems more knowable while facilitating interspecies cohabitation of urban environments.
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–Carley Leckie

FoodThink:
FoodThink is a food intermediary hub that provides resources and connections that allow small farmers to reach multiple new outlets, customers and markets. In response to Eastern Market’s acknowledgement that Detroit’s food economy is shifting towards greater variety and scale, the thesis connects to Detroit’s need for expansion in the food sector by capitalizing on its diversity of local economy and food businesses. A small local farmer who grows kale and sells them at a farmer's market might sell only a portion of his or her crop. Be it whether the food hub makes a sale of crops to institutions or to food entrepreneurs who turn it into products for the market shelves, the food enables wholesale connections that farmers often either struggle with or do not have time to connect. By aggregating produce from growers, arranging distribution channels, handling paperwork, making the sale and marketing their stories, FoodThink supports growers in their food growing endeavours through its infrastructure, while gaining access to larger volume markets by coordinating a local supply chain through a network of local wholesale partnerships.

The proposal perceives the aggregation as an opportunity for a hybridized type of food hub that not only focuses on the supply chain, but accommodates a broader range of functions as an urban aggregator, assisting in food literacy and resources for farmers, supporting small businesses through retail and incubator kitchens. From a regional economic and public health perspective, it strengthens the local food economy by building relationships with growers, consumers and businesses, while bringing sustainably produced local food to a wider community of residents. While the core idea of this food hub responds to the local food supply chain, it seeks to address issues that go well beyond food, in providing pathways of change for a broader range of social, economic and ecological concerns. Using food as a cultural connector with networks of grassroots, community-based organizations and Detroit’s residents, the integration of local data and technology and a distribution model fosters consumer transparency, circular economy, and an ecologically sound food systems that connect farmers with consumers.

–Jamie Lee

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Freedom (from) Trade Zones:
As the city of Mississauga begins to feel the pressures of rapid and poorly proportioned growth they have begun to raise taxes on working class citizens to meet demands of public programs and critical infrastructures. These increased tax rates force greater distress on middle and lower class Canadians already suffering from ballooning costs of living while current planning trends place development emphasis on higher class neighborhoods. In the background of this urban struggle, the catalysts of the massive population and economic growth in the region enjoy egregious tax breaks as holdovers from a past, much less globalized, Greater Toronto Region. These actors are transnational corporations and the outdated tax breaks live under the title of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Under Current federal regulations the SEZ that lives partially in Mississauga, surrounding the YYZ airport, is not held by predetermined boundaries but one that can grow and be added to with newly permitted Sufferance and Bonded Warehouses. This means that not only do massive corporations operating in this space not evenly contribute to the local economy but that they also have full federal rights to directly compete for land and resources with bordering cities like Mississauga. These two eventualities of growth are directly incompatible with the city and its people with virtually no leverage if they continue to operate in their municipal paradigm. In order to find any agency in preparation for the land clash that will ensue the city of Mississauga must be willing to redefine themselves to play by the same set of rules that the transnationals have been abusing for decades. The region has steady economic growth and will continue to once the playing field is leveled, the absurdity of local exploitation must be made known now.

By establishing a city owned corporation headed by elected council members, Mississauga becomes eligible to participate in the zones economic loopholes and by subsequently establishing a permitted sufferance warehouse on the current borderlands, the city stakes a claim to the no mans land of barren, clear cut corridors that would soon be consumed by the growing SEZ. Acting in a manner both familiar and revolutionary to the SEZs current operating structure, the new city backed institution capitalizes on trade flows by using them, along with novel hyper local trade flows and labor, as a generative process for a commoned new architectural framework. Combining city funds that have already been earmarked for municipal projects such as: spaces for trades based educational programs and guilds, community college spaces, library expansions, and infrastructure water management the total costs plummet allowing for more efficient and equitable investment. The resulting institution becomes a test bed for local crafts, trades people, and learners in which they have freedom to populate and fit out spaces within the initially constructed warehouse and its "zone limiting wall" that follows vacant boundary lines. Local private community groups like faith communities and hobbyists also have the chance to become involved at this border and benefit from the zones tax programs by fitting out more topological interventions within the frame wall, utilizing the same methods and tectonics of pairing hyper local craft materials with components acquired through the zone from international sources. The result is an infrastructure for a quilted scheme made up of swatches and typologies that benefit from different regulations in different ways, whether lucrative and nuanced or small scale and delicate.

Finally, this intervention is intended to not only hack the SEZ but also to form a buffer between the communities and zone. Attempting to mitigate sound pollution and industrial views into the zone the project pursues a future in which the airport and its global trade implications present an opportunity for hyperlocal growth versus global capital's dreams of disconnected, nodal aerotropolis.

–Brian Pekar

We Need To Talk: Agents of Thermal and Social Conduction
Are we aware if and when our attention and behavior is being manipulated? How do we flex power over unseen energy harvesters?

In the culmination of global capitalism, modern computational technology, and the harvesting of vast amounts of behavioral data, surveillance capitalism was born. Made of coded algorithms and fueled with personal data, these digital agents have succeeded in behavior manipulation based on identifying and triangulating moods, locations, and desires of their users. They reward their captive audience with shallow dopamine spurts that quickly crash and emotionally reverse, triggering addictive tendencies through revolutionary digital tools such as the smartphone.

As these digital forces steer the direction of culture and etiquette, a reciprocal force is applied for equilibrium. This thesis seeks to design counter-acting apparatuses to address these unchecked forces. These balancing forces mean not to extinguish the already integrated smartphone, but to raise opportunities towards the direction of awareness, collective truths, and the pursuit of equality.

The thesis will be prototyped through public apparatuses on a neighborhood scale. Designed apparatuses come in the form of physical objects with associated social cues. Rather than tapping into our vulnerable reactive intelligence, as the manipulative algorithms do, these designs seek to promote our reflective and deep intelligences, instilling curiosity through interaction, and elevating wisdom over efficiency. The designs aim to exploit pressure points of emotionally addictive design using participation, space, and a rediscovery of reductions. Apparatuses have the ability to grow into the fabric of the neighborhood, influencing social routines and fostering a neighborhood commons. The prototypes reference technologies used prior to the information age that offer intimate analog, closed loop energy-transfer processes through water, steam, heat and electricity. The weather resistant material pallet consists of various cast forms of reinforced concrete and aluminum, volcanic rock, polyethylene tubing, and copper pipe.
–Waylon Richmond
The New Boricua Energy Authority:
The New Boricua of a hurricane-disrupted Puerto Rico seeks community in energy democracy. Amid conditions of radical decentralization, the design of a  Resilience Zone invites architectural intervention. As cleaner local energy becomes more practical, it raises competing utopias. This thesis explores ways in which architectural expression, hyper-local guidance, and decentralized energy systems can help counter neo-colonial development models that have led the recent wave of privatization, into an elite autonomous “Puertopia”. By introducing participatory design approach and vacant space reclamation, districts will explore the possibility of transforming into a Resilience Zone composed of hubs that promote and teach residents of the community how to prosper by using renewable-decentralized energy. The architecture of a Resilience Zone represents not only cleaner energy but also a  new dimension of civic education. In evoking what was a formerly invisible resource, The New Boricua Energy  Authority finds a new genre for design. The architectural proposal serves as an archetype that would adapt to zones throughout the island where communities could benefit from a built and social network in the spirit of resilience.
–Karina Tirado


The Hackable Box:
The local economic effects of the recent pandemic, coupled with the mass abandonment of large retail space due to sheer scale and larger economic trends, have left shells of buildings across America. Reappropriating big box stores provokes the need to rethink the anchor organization beyond the prototypical methods of retail planning and create a new activity center. This thesis sets forth a community membership organization and a new system for the aggregation of small to mid-scale business entities as a startup incubator.

A system of architectural components establishes a prideful aesthetic appeal and a bundle of service infrastructures as a framework for engagement and spatial adjacencies.  Outside this systematized component architecture, the infrastructures provide a decentralized network of collaborative place-making, or hacking, for the community to infill collective civic resources and amenity common spaces. This hacking system allows for local residents to investigate other integrative social projects by combining pluralistic uses of big boxes that benefit the community. Furthermore, it creates a situation that provides access to a social hack where the results are unpredictable and malleable.

–Michael Werkmeister



Hybrid A(Re)Assembly: Common Spaces Overlaid:
Up in the sky, a mirrored world (Data world) is growing. Formless, boundaryless, timeless, emotionless... With the help of modern technologies, things, ideas, people are all hyper-linked together, and we’re experiencing a high level of convenience that no other decades can provide. However, there’s a price. A considerable part of our daily lives is and will be forever embedded into the virtual world we have, which seemed so alien to our traditional understandings as human beings. After COVID-19, people experienced the superpower of technologies to help them stay connected virtually and praise the value of authentic physical connections. Does virtual and physical mutual exclusive? Is there a place that allows us to meet both virtually and physically at the same time?

We live in a world full of systems interacting with each other. We can get some hints from other systems either in history or contemporary when we need a solution. Le Corbusier responds to his time, calling for hygiene houses; he fought the main trend of over-decorated Beaux-Arts Schoology by returning to the original concept of architecture and learning from other well-adapted disciplines industrial and engineering worlds. Inspired by him, we will look back to history to explore the different types of common spaces, bring in our sight the current Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality technologies, and examine inexpensive building materials. Finally, provide a possible suggestion for a cheap common space within the residential blocks that can combine the experience of virtual and physical connections between local and hyperlocal neighbors.

–Kun Zhang

(see also the previous semester’s Seminar Abstracts)