Individual Project One Statement

I believe our group project was successful in imagining a logical evolution of society and graphically representing the complex ideas and circumstances of this future scenario. 

Representing the scenario with the analogy of evolution helped to categorise the range of different changes we had imagined. It was not as simple as ‘people and lifestyles’, ‘future scenarios’, ‘architectural opportunities’ and ‘sustainable futures’ because these all have cause and effect on each other. If we imagined future changes in policies for example, this would affect all four categories, and those affects would have a reciprocal flow on affect and so on.

So instead we recognized the major pressure points that would initiate these changes and called them our ‘ages’ (Jurassic Age etc). From here we separated our ideas into ‘species’ – Politics, Culture, Education, Transport, Agriculture, Built Environment and Technology. We looked at how these would evolve differently throughout the different ‘ages’ – where we decided they would evolve more rapidly was represented with greater splitting of branches. The semi-circular form of the diagram allowed us to cross reference easily between ‘species’ for example when there was a change in cultural attitudes we could easily place the flow on effects of that within the evolution of other species for example new policy implementation, implications of policy implementation etc.

The changes we predicted were graphically represented with pictograms to allow a more visually appealing and diagrammatic exploration. Some of the pictograms represent quite complex ideas however, were able to be explained within the timeline above.

The future scenario of cultural change, the shift towards individualism and the potential of new social order will play a huge role in guiding my individual project. The resource crisis, and its affect on all the ‘species’, in particular its evolutionary affects to the exploration of retrofitting and parasitic architecture will also be a main focus for my architectural proposal.

As a group we worked well together, however, we had to work around one of our group members experiencing a personal tragedy in the week before the due date. We were able to manage the workload and complete the desired outcome regardless.