GRADUATION VINTER 2020
Mallory N. Buckner
GRADUATION PROJECT:
Empathetic Design: A Public Bath Centered Around User Experience Created with Layers of Information
PROGRAMME:
Studio 2B: Digital fabrikation og transformation
This project aims to design empathetically through designing a public bath. This thesis unfolds the fragments of experience that inform a process of design.
Empathy is relating to other people in a compassionate way. When considering how to design with empathy this project employs a method of focusing on users, understanding them, and creating a space that considers their thoughts, feelings, and bodily relationship to space as drivers in design. There is a focusing on the sensations of the body that enables space to exist and depicts its own potential to be inhabited. Research is conducted by visiting similar existing spaces and communicating by speaking, observing, and interacting with people as a designer.
Considering the body in space inspires this investigation into understanding the human form and the exchange between the body and architecture.
The start of design is with a reflection on the physical experience of being in a public bath. Eight public baths in Demark are visited for this project. Fragments of sensation from these encounters start every phase in the design process.
The intensity and fixation on wellness inspires the design of a set of hot and cold pools. The human body and experience define how space is measured and created, from jumping into a cold pool with a friend, to slowly heating your body. The sequence of experience allows people to move naturally between spaces. Surface comes into being because the human body will come into contact with it.
Danish pools have a variety of depths that allow for different sensations and interactions. This inspires the design of space that brings these together in one place. Space is created from being immersed in water from the neck, hip, knee, feet and nothing to the transitions between these.
Fragments from the experiences of visiting Danish baths inform an approach to site. Here the idea of thresholds in experience is employed. The mindsets of users transition into a relaxing state as they approach the bath.
Visiting the chosen site, Moesgaard forest, Denmark, added a new empathetic understanding to this project. Sensations and empathetic experiences from these visits further guide the bath building design, especially for how people relate to the pools. There is an opening and narrowing of space, inspired by Moesgaard forest, with a system of columns in the building that create a natural path through the building and offer different levels of intimacy.
Visualized here are sensuous moments in the design, where every part of the design process comes together for moments of human experience.
Interactions with people and similar spaces inform the design process. The building design is composed based on moments and potentials discovered in studying the human body and how we relate to space.
Empathetic Design is used as a guiding light in this project. Every choice made is based on asking oneself as a designer, how would this choice lead to the best possible relationship for people in experiencing this moment?
Below you can find close up views and further details into the design process.