050 WǒWū - Future Living Space
1st prize in the Nova Design Award 2018 competition held in Shanghai, China. Project included in the collective exposition "UTOPIA" in Mexico City.
The competition brief asked for a design of the house of 2025. Instead, we proposed a digital platform that enables the final users to actively participate in the design of their living spaces and ultimately of the city. The goal of this project is exploring new ways of practicing architecture in the times of social media, artificial intelligence and hyper-personalization. The following is the proposal's description text:
The house of the future is flexible. Not in the terms from which modernism proposed spatial flexibility with the standardized free plan, but instead with a new understanding of the inhabitant, the program, the buildings, and the city. Our proposal arises from the need to accommodate different programs in cities that have already reached their maximum constructive density and where the use of these pre-existing structures must be rethought to create dynamic, diverse, and inclusive cities.
Diversifying the forms of access to housing is one of the greatest challenges for the coming years, but it can never be fully addressed if efforts are not focused on rethinking the economic dynamics around the house. Part of the success of the new mobility, lodging, and delivery services lies in the ability of their digital platforms to connect data points in an efficient infrastructure. Our project proposes a similar dynamic– to extract, verify, process, and connect a large number of information points when designing the house of the future.
This future does not need to be built from scratch. Housing must be able to adapt to pre-existing structures and apply self-design with the aid of artificial intelligence; WǒWū is an online digital platform that allows its users to program their living space. It is a new way of understanding real estate development and of building and inhabiting our cities. At an urban level, this new spatial flexibility results in cities for everyone.
WǒWū Design Engine® relies on machine learning algorithms to generate different spatial arrangements based on the program, age, budget, and preferences of the user. The platform then presents the resulting housing units, delivering a wide range of options with different characteristics. A final configuration filter allows the user to dynamically edit these results, ensuring a completely customized design.
The strength of this vision of city lies in operating with the singularity of each unit, as every inhabitant has a different set of spatial needs. In order for this new model of cities to work, all the pieces must fit together despite their differences, like a tangram puzzle.
