Design leads architecture into a new paradigm
Design is everywhere and is shaping everything. Design drives evolution. Design weaves the fabric of mankind in an increasingly complex world. Design is being used to address the great challenges for achieving sustainability, alleviating poverty, providing affordability and delivering resilience for our world.
It is playing a key role in balancing the conflicting forces of urbanisation and nature in how we can continue to design smarter cities in this age.
Design has had a quantum leap, driven by new methodologies and materials that go beyond the traditional. Computer-aided design, simulation by virtual reality, smart materials, nanotechnology – all have opened new repertoires for designers.
Design is opening up possibilities of how we see the world. This is the era of a new design paradigm. This is the era of cybertecture, a new realm of architecture.
In this future made out of design, from cities, to buildings, to transport, to information networks, cybertecture brings together the once-separate disciplines of architecture, engineering, information technology and science to become the single focus for a creativity that leads to big and affecting designs.
Urbanisation challenges us to design and redesign cities into resilient spaces that are more green and sustainable. This requires brave inventiveness in the form of “mega architecture”. Imagine a city that allows its citizens to have no waste of time, have unlimited water, powered by renewable sources and built to be resilient to global climate change.
A design prototype is the technosphere – a futuristically designed city that does away with the conventional sprawling planned grid city approach, but instead adopts a “planetary” approach by turning the city into a man-made planet, sustainable and resilient. Such mega architecture is symbolic of a new courage in design to think big for our future.
Smart architecture will be more akin to iPhones than conventional and dormant concrete structure.
The Pad, a smart building designed for Dubai based on the same philosophy as an iPod, can deliver technological lifestyle enhancements with virtual reality spaces and even smart mirrors in bathrooms to monitor the health of the inhabitants.
When enough smart buildings are built in a city, then the city becomes smarter by sharing information from building to building. In between these smart buildings, a new “sensory architecture” network may come about to monitor and gather big data in the urban environment.
Such networks include smart lampposts, recently installed in Hong Kong, that deliver real-time environmental and weather information at street level that protects citizens from pollution or provides data to smart buildings for their own environment-control systems.
Connecting people, buildings and cities has always been a major design challenge. New forms of transport architecture represent brave new designs that will deliver even more convenience, connectivity and connectedness for travellers.
The hyperloop is a future design that compresses distance and time by allowing for trains travelling at aircraft-like speeds in vacuum tubes to link cities over vast distances, yet make them feel near by.
Design can also influence the social fabric of future communities.
In an era of increasing poverty, it is essential that design focuses on creating affordable architecture to house the majority of citizens.
The OPod concrete tube housing in Hong Kong is a design that uses low-cost, mass-produced concrete water pipes to build micro-living housing that costs less than Dh50,000 a house. These can be produced using an industrial approach, built quickly.
Design is also making the construction industry far more efficient. Modular architecture is designed to be made rather than built. It can be created quickly in factories through automation and standardisation.
The result is lower cost and high-quality architecture. AlPod housing is such modular architecture, created from aluminium in automated factories. These AlPods can be stacked or plugged into conventional buildings to build faster and more effectively.
Design is opening new futures. With the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, almost every design will be able to think for itself and interact more autonomously.
The future of design is endless. In the history of man, our progress as humanity has always been marked by great design. This is will only continue and accelerate in our fast-changing world.
This is the era of design.