LOD Uses Big Data to Inform Architectural Design Decisions

The installation collects on-site data including people duration of stay, activities, density and movement, which will be analysed and represented as image projections. The data analysis will help inform architectural design and community planning decisions with AI technology.

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“LOD | Laliving and Opr Design: QUANTIFIED COMMUNITY: Using big data to inform architectural design decisions and create multi-sensory experience” is the title of the exhibit presented by multidisciplinary firm LOD | Laliving and Opr Design, in collaboration with media production studio Cacao Cinema. The installation, currently exhibited at Palazzo Mora as a part of ECC Architecture Biennial in VeniceTime Space Existence, collects on-site data including people duration of stay, activities, density and movement, which will be analysed and represented as image projections. The data analysis will help inform architectural design and community planning decisions with AI technology.

The ECC Team caught up with LOD Design Principal and Partner Yimei Chan to find out more about the approach and ideas behind their project.

LOD project exhibited at Palazzo Mora. Photo credits: Federico Vespignani

Could you tell us more about your firm and your approach to architecture?

LOD is a multidisciplinary firm based on concept design emotions for enhanced user experiences. The firm was founded as an architectural experimental laboratory dedicated to exploring the relationship between form and function, architecture and urbanism, economics and sustainability.

We are a research based creative studio aiming to create an open platform for developing new ideas and designs through innovations and collaborations across different disciplines.

Committed to the culture inheritance and technology innovation, our team is made up of diverse local designers and overseas architects, who together develop our design methodology – user journey space mapping. Diversified backgrounds give us open mindset and inclusive approach with insight of local culture. We also include branding concept and design thinking in our approach to architecture.

User Journey by LOD

Graphic by LOD

How does your design relate to the concepts of time, space and existence?

The exhibition TIME SPACE EXISTENCE investigates the relationship between people, space and time. Different cultures and communities may react with different behaviors and emotions in the same space. Through the User Journey Map Installations, we will collect on-site data including people’s duration of stay, activities, density and movement. Collected data will then be analyzed and represented as image projections. The data analysis will help inform architectural design and community planning decisions with AI technology.

Using AI and big data, behavior scenarios can be measured and space can be quantified with activities and experience modules. We can better understand the four-dimensional interactions between People / Time / Space / Activity, thus providing blueprints for architectural design and community planning in the rapidly changing world. Taking community space facilities as an example, different genders and age groups such as the elderly, adults, young people and children, have their own unique behavioral patterns. Within same space setting, people may choose to act alone, as couple or group. Their behavior patterns can be defined and related to the spatial module setup: active vs. passive; quiet vs. busy; bright vs. dark, etc. Besides, furniture setup, modular functions and flexibility also influence how users inhabit the space. This design research explores how to use the concept of community utopia (communitopia), through big data and cross-dimensional virtual / real space, to rethink the interactive scenarios and designs of future communities.

LOD project exhibited at Palazzo Mora. Photo credits: Federico Vespignani

Why did you decide to incorporate virtual reality in your exhibit at Palazzo Mora? 

It is part of our research to explore the role and usage of virtual reality in spatial design. In this exhibition, the space through a sensor assumes a human role validating its own existence by knowing where we are in relation to itself. A dialogue in multiple dimensions is then opened between the place and its visitors. In this interactive mixed experience, the real space captures and interprets the user’s actions and encodes them as data, which is used to reconfigure itself in a virtual space. An exciting journey through a virtual reality experience, which offers another point of view of reality, accompanied by an artificial intelligence where the humanity of the data invites the user to recognize themselves once again.

By using the data of sensory community experience which would be receiving from different space modules as a blueprint, design of an interactive system that can monitor people’s emotional behaviors in a dynamic feedback loop. The VR space also connects different people from different community through time and space and forms a dialogue in multiple dimensions between the place and its visitors.

LOD project exhibited at Palazzo Mora. Photo credits: Federico Vespignani

How does your research respond to major current challenges in big cities, such as access to resources, shortage of affordable housing, through the ideas of Co-living and communitopia?

While there is always a shortage of affordable housing in big cities, by creating community-based co-living as a utopian response to our rapidly changing society, can embrace a more sustainable way of living, create a more caring community by integrating different user and age groups and promote social interactions within community.

Our design research explores the concept of urban living, social and spatial gaps through the lens of different people, stakeholders and communities. To boldly imagine and transform our daily community living space which should not be just a container of accommodation, but in terms of a continuous life practice together. All of this can be created by community rather than architects or governmental agencies, we can have more imaginations and opportunities for the public spaces and to live differently and sustainably.

How would COVID affect your design thinking and approach?

In COVID times when difference between physical and virtual connections become increasingly equivocal, the sensory interactive installation explores how the emotional experience can extend beyond time and space dimensions to connect people in a multi-dimensional user journey. And rethink how community shall be built for the mobile and technology driven generation.

 

Interview by Rachele De Stefano, ECC Team

LOD Uses Big Data to Inform Architectural Design Decisions

The installation collects on-site data including people duration of stay, activities, density and movement, which will be analysed and represented as image projections. The data analysis will help inform architectural design and community planning decisions with AI technology.

  • Published: 21.10.2021
  • Category: In Focus
  • Subject: Participants
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