Project
PLAZA Pavilions
Explorations in Spacemaking
2023
Explorations in Spacemaking
2023
Insight (Abstract)
While there are a lot of end-game tools designed to create a final artifact — a film edit, a color grade, a designed image, or a director’s treatment — there are far fewer tools or spaces that facilitate idea generation and the inception stages of creative work. Of those that do exist, they are often task specific like creating moodboards or document sharing, which still operate in the realm of production and labor versus ideation. In a way, modern ideation tools often lack permission for the creator to daydream and wander.
Provocation
What might a new space for zero-to-one creative work — specifically idea generation and its inherent pluralistic (convergent and divergent) contexts — look like?
Behavioral Contexts
One of the difficulties of modeling early stage creative work are the variety of surfaces and contexts in which ideas are generated. Sometimes it is the result of a conversation, a walk outside, a song or image remembered or captured, or the actual process of making. It involves the senses, memory, intuition, reflection, and interaction — all operating both synchronously and asynchronously, privately and publicly. When clustered, qualitative UXR data collected from five global workshops (London, New York, Shanghai, San Francisco, Moscow) yielded eight groupings that, though not exhaustive, allowed for broad coverage of a majority of behaviors, contexts, and conditions where idea generation occurred. More importantly, the insights informed that most of these contexts were intersectional.
![]()
Structures
Pavilions, Workspaces and Warehouses
Of the eight behavioral contexts, a prevailing theme emerged: temporary and liminal spaces often served as ground zero for ideation. From an art historical view, this immediately brought up Gertrude Stein’s salon, Donald Judd’s warehouse spaces in Marfa, the exhibition pavilions of Documenta and the Venice Biennele, the 300 sq. in. gallery-in-pocket of Hans Ulrich Obrist, and many more. But creative work is not limited to institutional art - the same model is valid in the outdoor work shed, the nomadic yurt, taking a walk, or Rousseau’s idea of reverie when gazing into the sky. In other words, creative work often begins as a basic human activity - whether it is, as Hannah Arendt would suggest, contemplative or active. With the behavioral contexts in mind, possible territories were suggested and mapped against an axis of contemplation and activation:
![]()
These territories offered insight into the structures that might be useful towards activating the behavioral contexts and intersections that give rise to ideation. In other words, can creative work be conatined within a simple set of easily understandable spaces? We suggested three possible structures:
(3)
Like any architecture, there are features that form an overall vernacular. For example, all rooms have an entrance and exit, or all rooms should have a window, and so forth. In the case of Pavilions, Workspaces and Warehouses, common features that were proposed was the (1) the possiblity to control access to the space in question - or private vs. public, and (2) the presence of an on demand, willing and knowledgable collaborator. While the first is commonplace, it required a more nuanced evolution. Specifically, how might we make the private and public not so binary (open or closed), but more garden-like? Ancient residential architecture often blurred the lines between public and private and invited people, and created spaces that allowed for a gradation of intimacy. For the latter, the emergence of LLMs opens the door to new expressions of what an ever-present and available docent, librarian, curator and collaborator could look like.
Of the eight behavioral contexts, a prevailing theme emerged: temporary and liminal spaces often served as ground zero for ideation. From an art historical view, this immediately brought up Gertrude Stein’s salon, Donald Judd’s warehouse spaces in Marfa, the exhibition pavilions of Documenta and the Venice Biennele, the 300 sq. in. gallery-in-pocket of Hans Ulrich Obrist, and many more. But creative work is not limited to institutional art - the same model is valid in the outdoor work shed, the nomadic yurt, taking a walk, or Rousseau’s idea of reverie when gazing into the sky. In other words, creative work often begins as a basic human activity - whether it is, as Hannah Arendt would suggest, contemplative or active. With the behavioral contexts in mind, possible territories were suggested and mapped against an axis of contemplation and activation:
These territories offered insight into the structures that might be useful towards activating the behavioral contexts and intersections that give rise to ideation. In other words, can creative work be conatined within a simple set of easily understandable spaces? We suggested three possible structures:
(3)
Like any architecture, there are features that form an overall vernacular. For example, all rooms have an entrance and exit, or all rooms should have a window, and so forth. In the case of Pavilions, Workspaces and Warehouses, common features that were proposed was the (1) the possiblity to control access to the space in question - or private vs. public, and (2) the presence of an on demand, willing and knowledgable collaborator. While the first is commonplace, it required a more nuanced evolution. Specifically, how might we make the private and public not so binary (open or closed), but more garden-like? Ancient residential architecture often blurred the lines between public and private and invited people, and created spaces that allowed for a gradation of intimacy. For the latter, the emergence of LLMs opens the door to new expressions of what an ever-present and available docent, librarian, curator and collaborator could look like.
Concept and Prototypes
Spacemaking
Cut-and-Paste
Spaces are designed around cut-and-paste as a default action, allowing for rapid, frictionless addition of objects from a variety of sources, online and offline. Objects added to the space are rendered natively and allow for concurrent playback:
Conversational Input
A secondary input is conversation-based (a la GPT) for specificity:
Metadata Fetch
Objects added to the space will have their meta-data automatically “fetched.”
Shared Space
Visualizers
Cut-and-Paste
Spaces are designed around cut-and-paste as a default action, allowing for rapid, frictionless addition of objects from a variety of sources, online and offline. Objects added to the space are rendered natively and allow for concurrent playback:
Conversational Input
A secondary input is conversation-based (a la GPT) for specificity:
Metadata Fetch
Objects added to the space will have their meta-data automatically “fetched.”
Shared Space
Visualizers
MVP
Pre-AI MVP