The Mound

Facilitating the Future of Communal Living & Working

OVERVIEW

This project is a work in progress that I am working on with Harvard University’s Responsive Environments & Artifacts Lab (REAL). In its final iteration, it will be exhibited in the 2020 Festival of Architecture this Fall in Italy.

This is a speculative project where my team and I are reimagining Olivetti’s industrial city of Ivrea (recently named a UNESCO Heritage Site) as a social utopia of the future. Olivetti’s Ivrea of the past embodied progressive principles of social living in a factory town. At its height in the 1960s, it offered full maternity leave, a school for the children of factory workers and ways of working that prioritized worker well-being over bottom-line productivity.

With access to Ivrea’s historic archive materials, we are grounding our vision in Olivetti’s ethos of creating self-sustainability of the individual unit to contribute to the harmony of the whole.

My team members include Elisa Ngan and Austin Lu.

Olivetti’s Principles at Scale

Project Prompt:

How might we imagine olivetti’s design ethos at different design scales…

..and reimagine ivrea, italy, a former industrial hub as a future site for communal living and working

DESIGN FICTION

”Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures.” (1) Through creating speculative, alternatives futures, narrated by artifacts from them, we can explore new ideas and have new discussions. “Design fiction as a communication and social object creates interactions and dialogues around futures that were missing before. It helps make it real enough for people that you can have a meaningful conversation with.” (2)

To create a speculative future, I examined trends that are evident now, and pushed them further. For instance, at the moment we are seeing a great shift towards remote work and dispersed living. Humans are being forced to reckon with one merged space for both working and living. Human mobility is restricted, with preferences towards hyperlocal living.

(1)Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona (2013). Speculative Everything.

(2)Smith, Scott (2016). "Insights: Scott Smith". Medium. Design Fiction.

The Mound is a strange artifact from the year 2050 that proposes a city that provides autonomous plant mounds to facilitate harmonious communal living and working. Rather than having humans go to places for food, food comes to humans. The human’s creative production and well-being is the most valued, and all other factors adjust themselves accordingly and defer to this hierarchy. By making the human self-sustainable in a hyperlocal environment, the harmony of the whole community is preserved.

The questions I want to provoke with this project are:

What if in the future, autonomous plant mounds can provide you with all the sustenance you need at home? We already see these trends today. What is the line between social utopia and social dystopia? In imagining a “perfect” social utopia, who benefits? and who is left out?