PROTOTYPING FOR POST-NORMAL FUTURE'S
This year’s brief builds on the atelier's ongoing 5-year collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Estates team as a key stakeholder and de facto live client. The year commenced with students being asked to focus exploration on the area of Princess Road [A5103] in Hulme, from the Brewery/Asda to the Hulme Arch, and to investigate the University to quickly identify sites and issues to which they were instinctively drawn, through personal interest or curiosity, and then question why they were drawn to them.
The brief challenged students to speculate on current and possible short-, medium-, and long-term future trajectories in the context of the campus, the wider city, the city-region, and beyond. Initial stakeholder engagements and site visits helped develop their initial investigations into more focused, deeper/ alternative research into key sites and key issues. Critically, the students were encouraged to question the brief and the stakeholders’ aims, as the future scenario may not be the one currently being planned for.
With increasing insight, students identified key challenge(s) and began to identify design drivers from which their building proposal could potentially and justifiably emerge. This helped students focus on further data collection for analysis/synthesis within their iterative design experimentation & testing process, and to justify their design-moves. To aid this, students utilised [CPU]ai’s theoretical and methodological frameworks and engaged with computational design across both analogue, digital and hybrid methods. This was a starting point for developing their own personal positions/propositions as a lens for design decision-making, as well as for informing later communication & representation.
Rather than immediately engaging with the building proposal, the students had the opportunity to “play. To test ideas, explore curiosities and focus ambitions, develop skills, etc. via a short design exercise. Students were asked to design a small pavilion to house a small exhibition, essentially to tell the public what will be coming in terms of their building proposal. This exercise in creative and imaginative design experimentation utilised digital and analogue materials, along with hybrid-making methods, and afforded the opportunity to develop & explore parts of the subsequent building proposal in terms of programme and tectonics.
The cohort also had opportunities to engage with external specialists for structural & environmental engineering input into their proposals, and we thank them for their invaluable help and advice over this last academic year.
