Mads Brath Jensen
Creative Design processes by Interactive Robotics
The PhD project investigates the unique opportunities that the implementation of adaptive robotics can have on the creative cognitive design processes in architecture. Taking departure in the integrative approach of Performance-Based Architecture, described by architect and professor Michael Hensel, the project seeks to study how architectural design ‘solutions’ and design ‘problem’ processes can be investigated in parallel (co-evolution) through developing adaptive robotic fabrication processes that interactively respond to human and material behaviour. The research question posed in this project will be investigated through the development of a series of cases/demonstrators constructed in both the digital and physical realm thereby seeking to gain the experience and knowledge needed to develop a new instrumental method(s) for integrating robotic fabrication into the creative architectural design process.
Jakob Borrits Sabra
Hybrid Cemetries: Dealing with Death – exploring the connections between people, places and social mobile media
Since the introduction of the mobile smart phone people now move differently around the city, their presence in space divided between the real, the virtual and the social. It challenges their simultaneous attention to context, themselves and other people offering new potentials of experience, social behaviour and reinvigorations of content and context, past and present. Researching the affordances of cemetery space and the potentials of social mobile media technologies might establish a new invigoration of the link between lived lives, immanent death and cemetery space. From these initial ponderings the main objective of the study emanate:
An in-depth investigation of present use of the Danish urban cemetery as both urban space and cultural phenomenon. This to inform the design of proposals for future experiences of the cemetery focusing on the use of Smartphone applications and changing behaviors in the Danish online and offline culture of mourning and remembrance.
The research questions in this regard are:
• What potentials does the cemetery hold, as architecture, as experience and as lived space?
• What are the differences and similarities between online mourning rituals and cemetery mourning rituals and what consequences does online mourning have on the use of the cemetery?
• How can smartphones enhance both the use and experience of the cemetery spaces?
Inquiry into the use of virtual/physical hybrid cemeteries in search of empirical data seeks to reveal how the purpose of the cemetery, its identity or cultural significance in the city. Furthermore it is an experiencebased design exploration of the cemetery’s present public and cultural roothold and a perspective towards future planning, design and experience.