Week 2 - Charette - Future Visions and Scenarios

In todays tutorial, we were separated into groups of 4 to brainstorm future scenarios of a given context. The various themes are separated below.

suburban theme

One of the issues related to virtual shopping in the suburban theme - is the loss of physical social connection. How will public spaces such as shopping centres now function? Essentially they currently act as a meeting point a place for social activity. If we confine everything to small space, ie online shops, small virtual shops - experience is lost. We are making our world smaller in the physical and bigger in the virtual.

urban theme

One of our first questions was if the car tax was implemented on the city would it have a large effect on the demographic within the CBD. ie only the rich can afford to travel into the city more freely. In this case, it would be ideal that the CBD considered better public transportation to cover for this issue - and perhaps a newer method to make ease for travel (ie. underground metro or an above ground rail). What would the streets now become, pedestrian? bike and pedestrian? and which streets would still be open to buses and/or trucks for loading? Thinks to consider for the future city functionality.

One of the biggest questions however, is why do we introduce the car tax? Brisbane is such a small city, in comparison to large cities such as London (who would have had traffic issues, and now have already introduced the tax) - so why would Brisbane face this? This obviously links into the future scenario research.

virtual theme

In this theme of virtuality we talked on the disconnected qualities to virtual networking in relation to the physical. We questioned what the possibilities are in future scenario when society is so used to "quick information" on demand, how could this translated into architecture? We questioned if virtual can be brought into the phsyical. Architecture is just a framework but the virtual is continuously changing to meet our needs, how we want the architecture to look, function. We also looked at invasion of privacy, networks such as google who have power to see everything we do in the virtual world. More to look into...

video looks at the power online corporations can have (ie. GOOGLE)

regional theme

One of the key ideas from the regional themes charette was the idea to create a centre of services that accommodate for activities for relatively short peroids of time (ie conferences and workshops).